The Themes of Robert Frosts Mending Wall Essays -- Mending Wall Essays

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... ...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)