![]() I should comment that at least one person who read my journal said they would now go and read this poem.īy citing Frost, I was by no means implying that Robert Frost's poem, “Mending Wall”, was about compassion. If it is the consensus of the ORT that it should be removed I will do so voluntarily. John D - My comment is more about how Frost, through this poem in particular, has influenced my own worldview. He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors." ![]() He will not go behind his father's saying,Īnd he likes having thought of it so well Not of woods only and the shade of trees. In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,īut it's not elves exactly, and I'd ratherīringing a stone grasped firmly by the top Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. "Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors." ![]() There where it is we do not need the wall:Īnd eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. We wear our fingers rough with handling them. "Stay where you are until our backs are turned!" We have to use a spell to make them balance: To each the boulders that have fallen to each.Īnd some are loaves and some so nearly balls No one has seen them made or heard them made,īut at spring mending-time we find them there. Where they have left not one stone on a stone,īut they would have the rabbit out of hiding, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,Īnd spills the upper boulders in the sun Īnd makes gaps even two can pass abreast. dark and deep/But I have promises to keep".Something there is that doesn't love a wall, The poem moves from a more conversational tone to the charming effect that characterizes the ending.The language indeed demonstrates this change: we move from the colloquial "His house is in the village though" to the poetic "The woods are lovely. This combination of regular rhythms and rhymes produces a pleasant hypnotic effect, which only increases which only increases as the poem progresses. Frost, likewise, stabilizes the poem by the rhyme scheme of aaba bbcb h ccdc dddd, without a single forced rhyme. And so, any lack of certainty we might first suspect is smoothed over by this regular rhythm. Typically, monosyllabic lines are difficult to scan Frost wrote the poem almost entirely in monosyllables and it demonstrates his technical perfection, as the poem scans in perfect iambic tetrameter. The fifst line consists entirely of monosyllables. However, the mysterious wood and the death like environment have added one kind of objectivity in the tone of the poem. Moreover, the poet has tried to bring warmth of personal rapport by using the colloquial tone and dramatic beginning. By using the first person narrative the poet has made the poem personal. The overall tone of the poem is serious and philosophical. These antimonies, his lack of certainty, and the muted sense of passion provide the tension by which the poem operates. ![]() There is a slight lack of surety in the speaker saying to himself, "I think I know" thus again signifying the meeting ground between what he knows and what he does not. The first line establishes the tone of a person musing quietly to himself on the situation before him: "Whose woods these are I think i know." He stops by the woods in "the darkest evening of the year" the point in time poised between the day and the night, between consciousness and unconsciousness, between waking and sleeping, between life and oblivion. Perhaps the first thing we notice is that the poem is an interior manologue. This poem is very popular because it contains a great truth in casy and realistic language. ![]() "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" provides a doorway into an understanding of the poet's great popularity with "ordinary" readers. So, the harsh and abrupt movement of lines like, 'He gives his harness bells a shake / To ask if there is some mistake', give verbal shape to the matter-of-fact attitude attributed to the horse, just as the soothing and gently rocking motion of the lines that follow this ('The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake') offer a tonal equivalent of the strange, seductive world into which the narrator is tempted to move. The narrator himself, however, continues to be lured by the mysteries of the forest just as the Romantic poets were lured by the mysteries of otherness, sleep and death. It is then sustained through the next two stanzas: the commonsensical response is now playfully attributed to the narrator's horse which, like any practical being, wants to get on down the road to food and shelter. Throughout the poem we get 'realistic' and 'romantic' attitudes to life. The owner of the forest is absent from the scene. In the first stanza we find the poet to stop his horse in front of an unknown forest. ![]()
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