The Themes of Robert Frost's Mending Wall
One of the major themes of Frost's Mending Wall is the cycle of the seasons. Several phrases refer to the seasons, particularly in a repetitive, cyclic way: "spring mending-time," "frozen ground-swell," "once again," "spring is the mischief in me." Another theme is parallelism or the lack of it. Sometimes this parallelism takes a physical form, associated with the wall, as we imagine the two men walking parallel paths: "We meet to walk the line." "We keep the wall between us as we go." "One on a side." It is a mental wall, though, as well as a physical one, and I read the gaps as making possible a meeting of minds and attitudes as well as of lands and bodies. Closing the gaps in the wall means closing off points where the two men might meet physically or mentally. As the poet says, "If I could put a notion in his head," but he can't. The two men, the two minds, will remain parallel, on opposite sides of a wall.
I find parallelism in the language as well as in the central image of the two men walking along a wall. I find it in phrasings like "To each the boulders that have fallen to each." "And some are loaves and some so nearly balls." "Walling in or walling out." I find it most centrally in "Good fences make good neighbors," whose neat parallelism contrasts in my mind with the redundancy, the tangled, circling syntax of "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."
The parallelisms in phrasing lead me to think of speech and language themselves as themes. I find many phrases like, "'I tell him," "He only says," "I'd rather he said it," "his father's saying," "He says again." The neighbor speaks "his father's saying" twice. The poet also speaks twice, and both their repetition...
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...rresponds to the poet's wayward imaginings, the walls-up to the control of that imagination.
Works Cited Frye, Northrop. Northrop Frye on Twentieth-Century Literature University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division (February 13, 2010)
Holland, Norman Norwood. The Brain of Robert Frost: A Cognitive Approach to Literature. Routledge (October 1988) Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing Stanford University Press (April 1, 1990)
Charles Dickens born February 7th 1812 – 9th June 1870 is a highly remarkable novelist who had a vision to change wealthy people’s scrutiny on the underprivileged and by fulfilling the dream he writes novels. Furthermore, I think that Dickens wrote about poverty as he had experiences this awful incident in his upbringings.
Gilbert, Roger. "Robert Frost: The Walk as Parable." Poetry Criticism, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 173, Gale, 2016. Literature Resource Center, proxy.campbell.edu/login?url=http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=nclivecu&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CH1420120652&it=r&asid=ce43321a2e99d7cd8ccbc328976c3726.
Working Together in Robert Frost's Mending Wall. The air is cool and crisp. Roosters can be heard welcoming the sun to a new day and a woman is seen, wearing a clean colorful wrap around her body and head, her shadow casting a lone silhouette on the stone wall. The woman leans over to slide a piece of paper into one of the cracks, hoping her prayer will be heard in this city of Jerusalem.
“Some say the world will end in fire,/ Some say in ice./ From what I’ve tasted of desire/ I hold with those who favor fire./ But if it had to perish twice,/ I think I know enough of hate/ To say that for destruction ice/ Is also great/ And would suffice.” This poem by Robert Frost is an excellent example of how even though people tend to think that Frost’s poems are just fun easy to read poems, a lot of them actually have dark themes to them. The poem “Fire and Ice” quoted above is a poem all about death and his prefered way to die/ destroy the world. So, although the average reader will quote Robert Frost as being a poet of positivity, yet many of his poems actually point out the dark side of human existence.
Robert Frost deliberated a intention and was determined to get it across any way that he could. He verbalized his feelings through Walls and Blockages, Descriptive words, and Seasons and Nature. The aspiration of walls in this piece is to block neighbors and assemble a better relationship. Descriptive words are used to portray a improved visual of what is designed to see. Robert Frost speaks of seasons as if it were a human.
Traditions have always had a substantial effect on the lives of human beings, and always will. Robert Frost uses many unique poetic devices in his poem “Mending Wall,” as well as many shifts in the speaker’s tone to develop his thoughts on traditions. The three predominant tones used are those of questioning, irony and humor.
Robert Frost had a fascination towards loneliness and isolation and thus expressed these ideas in his poems through metaphors. The majority of the characters in Frost’s poems are isolated in one way or another. In some poems, such as “Acquainted with the Night” and “Mending Wall,” the speakers are lonely and isolated from their societies. On other occasions, Frost suggests that isolation can be avoided by interaction with other members of society, for example in “The Tuft of Flowers,” where the poem changes from a speaker all alone, to realizing that people are all connected in some way or another. In Robert Frost’s poems “Acquainted with the Night,” “Mending Wall,” and “The Tuft of Flowers,” the themes insinuate the idea of loneliness and isolation.
Robert Frost put a great deal of emotion, pain, devotion, nature and the aspects of life into his works. His works
Robert Frost was one of the most famous and important poets of the 20th century and his poem “Mending Wall” was published in 1914. It is one of his longer poems and it is written in blank verse. The poem was in Frost’s second collection of poetry. My reading process for this poem was over the course of a week and a half. My first reading was right after I had first seen the poem and then I waited three days until my next reading. Then I read the poem and wrote about it on a daily basis. In the beginning of my reading experience I thought the poem was literal in the sense of an actual wall. But after a few more readings I really starting looking at it in more of a metaphorical sense. By the end of my readings I had concluded that the poem was in a metaphorical sense.
Robert Lee Frost was a famous American poet who was always acknowledged for his vivid and unique writing style, which contributed tremendously into him becoming one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Throughout his life, Frost has written many amazing poems but like the majority of poets at that time, many of his poems from his early writings went unnoticed. He was known for following a very well organized structure for his writing, a great example for this would be: “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, which are two of Frost’s greatest pieces as they bring to the table all of his writing characteristics, ranging from the dominant figurative language that makes the poem vivid, to his flexible idealistic
Robert Frost, the celebrated American poet, penned these words a hundred years ago in his poem, “Mending Wall.”
Human contact is considered to be one of the worst elements of life to be deprived of. In nearly all prison systems, isolation is the punishment given to inmates who commit the worst offenses. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that such reclusiveness is the theme of many literary works and essays. In one, a man insists a wall be kept up between himself and his neighbor, all because of his father’s mantra. In another, there 's a young woman, murdered brutally in the street, while all of her neighbors watch in horror, but make no move to help. There 's also a young family that, after moving to Spain, discovers just how welcoming and friendly and inclusive the Spaniards are compared to their home country. All three
Charles Dickens is well known for his distinctive writing style. Few authors before or since are as adept at bringing a character to life for the reader as he was. His novels are populated with characters who seem real to his readers, perhaps even reminding them of someone they know. What readers may not know, however, is that Dickens often based some of his most famous characters, those both beloved or reviled, on people in his own life. It is possible to see the important people, places, and events of Dickens' life thinly disguised in his fiction. Stylistically, evidence of this can be seen in Great Expectations. For instance, semblances of his mother, father, past loves, and even Dickens himself are visible in the novel. However, Dickens' past influenced not only character and plot devices in Great Expectations, but also the very syntax he used to create his fiction. Parallels can be seen between his musings on his personal life and his portrayal of people and places in Great Expectations.
“Charles Dickens: Great Expectations.” (2 Feb, 2006): 2. Online. World Wide Web. 2 Feb, 2006. Available http://www.uned.es/dpto-filologias-extranjeras/cursos/LenguaIglesaIII/TextosYComentarios/dickens.htm.
Frost’s poems will be read for many years to come and will always make the reader think before going onto another poem because that’s how different Frost’s poems are compared to other poet’s. Frost makes readers think outside the box and uses his personal life in most of his poems so the reader can understand where he is coming from. Without poems like “The Mending Wall” or “The Road Not Taken” we wouldn’t think of looking into a situation more closely. Frost had changed the literary world and we will still be learning and trying to understand all of his astonishing poems for years to come.