Sometimes it's not a bad idea to look at a poem as a kind of mini-essay. In Frost's "Mending Wall," the narrator wants to make the point that the wall between himself and his neighbor benefits no one. This is his thesis. He presents a variety of points to support that thesis, and he even includes a counter-argument, the position his neighbor is taking on the matter. The narrator's first point is stated in the very first line and used again later in line 35, a kind of refrain and review. The "something" that does not love a wall is nature. Nature does not build walls, and when it encounters them, it seems to do its best to tear them down, with the cycles of freezing and thawing, "the frozen-ground spell under it" (line 2), which dislocates the bottom stones. He goes on to make the point that hunters are another problem, harming walls as they give chase to their prey, so it is pointless to maintain the wall. And he continues to make various points, arguing with his neighbor's position, which he provides for the reader, that walls are good, that "'Good fences make good neighbors'" (line 9). There is a great deal more to this poem, of course, than a rant against a wall. The wall represents to some degree our way of not letting nature take its course, to our detriment. The "mending" ritual represents the meaninglessness of so many of our interactions with one another. Nevertheless, whether one analyzes as an essay or a literary text, the point remains that nature is not fond of walls.
Saturday, August 11, 2018
In the poem, "Mending Wall," why does Frost say there is something that does not love a wall?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment