Essay on the Defense of Walls in Mending Wall :: Mending Wall Essays

Opposing the Unthinking defensive measure of protects in Mending Wall   The speaker unit in Mending Wall questions his neighbors stolid assumption that heartfelt fences make good neighbors. Perhaps, what he objects to is non so much the sentiment itself as the unwillingness or inability of the other to think for himself, to go beyond his fathers saying. Just so we mustiness try to get beyond the apophthegm-like opening line of Mending Wall, interrogatory carefully for gradations of tone as we proceed. Is it the proverb-like authority of something there is . . . that makes it so graphic to equate something with the speaker? Once this equation has been made, the reader joins the speaker in sympathizing with this mysterious something and hence in opposing the neighbors unthinking defense of walls. frost rings subtly drastic changes on the sound of a contrive like good fences make good neighbors. By the time the verse form ends, this line has acquired some of the pat st upidity of a slogan. Similar turns of the sack out affect the opening line, when to it is added the darker phrase that wants it down and again when the speaker refuses to make the antiwall something. Elves is the closest he gets, yet Its not elves exactly, and Id rather / He verbalise it for himself. Elves may mean not willowy things out of Tolkien but darker forces of the wood, for the side by side(p) image is one of darkness. The neighbor is viewed as subtly menacing, an old-stone savage armed. soon enough this piece of music has been the one to defend boundaries. The apparently relaxed and leisurely pace of the song has made us lower our own boundaries and forget who is on what side. At any rate, although the speakers ironic evasiveness undermines any confident interpretation, Poirier is surely in force(p) when he makes the following point . . . .it is not the neighbor . . . a man who can only dully repeat good fences make good neighbors-- . . .it is not he who initiates the fence-making. Rather it is the far more spirited, lively, and mischievous speaker of the poem. While admitting that they do not need the wall, it is he who each form lets my neighbor know beyond the hill that it is time to do the trick anyway, and who will go out alone to fill the gaps made in the wall by hunters.