Before one can fully learn to appreciate poetry, it is necessary to learn how to analyze it appropriately. This can be done by looking at aspects of poems such as their rhythm and symbolism. By looking at these individual elements, the reader can usually develop a greater understanding of the author’s skill and meaning. At the same time, the reader can develop a finer appreciation of how these elements are constructed to contribute to the final impact of the poem. Robert Frost is well known for his ability to combine idyllic pastoral settings with philosophical commentary through his skill in combining these elements. Analyzing the rhythm and symbolism in Frost’s poem “The Mending Wall” shows how he manages to merge pastoral settings and philosophical considerations in looking at human relationships.
The story of “The Mending Wall” is the story of two men. These are the narrator and his neighbor. They have an annual ritual of walking along the wall between their two properties and mending the stone fence. The poem begins by considering how unnatural a wall is, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” (p. 1). Within this single sentence, Frost has already given his poem a rambling rhythm. The reader is forced to slow down in their reading to pay attention to Frost’s grammatically correct but unusual phrasing. As the story continues, this rhythm is interrupted by sudden bursts of energy from the narrator, “’Stay where you are until our backs are turned!” (p. 19). These bursts of excitement are answered by the steady beat of the neighbor’s continuous response, “Good fences make good neighbors” (p. 27). If the rhythm of the poem was translated into light like in an equalizer display, there would be steady pulses of light interrupted by sudden bright flashes and an answering matte gray surface presented to deaden the light. This indicates how people feed off each other, brightening or deadening the relationship as they go.
The symbolism of the poem reflects the rhythm. As the narrator spends his time thinking about what it is that doesn’t love fences, he suggests that it is something larger or deeper than the superficial elements he is naming: “The gaps I mean, / No one has seen them made or heard them made, / But at spring mending time we find them there” (pp. 9-11). This way of phrasing his thoughts prompts the reader to begin thinking below the surface of the images early in the poem. As the narrator continues to discuss the mundane elements of rebuilding a fence that will only be falling down again ‘the moment their backs are turned’, the sense continues to build that the fence is not a physical fence at all, but a fence upon the mind. This is made much clearer by the end of the poem as the narrator, after several attempts at levity, watches his neighbor bringing more rocks back to the wall: “I see him there, / Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top / In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. / He moves in darkness as it seems to me” (pp. 38-41). His neighbor’s mind is so steeped in the traditions of the past that the narrator envisions him in terms of a stone-age hunter whose mind is closed to the possibilities of greater thought and imagination.
Through rhythm and symbolism Robert Frost is able to make a connection between a simple yearly pastoral chore and questions of humanity and relationships. Without lecturing or brow-beating, Frost is able to suggest that a mind closed by strict adherence to the traditions of the past is incapable of considering a greater world in which some traditions are no longer valid all while simply discussing a mundane country activity.
Works Cited
Frost, Robert. “The Mending Wall.” New Enlarged Anthology of Robert Frost’s Poems. New York: Washington Square Press, 1971: 94.