Free Mending Wall Essays: The Two Walls :: Mending Wall Essays

The Two groins in Mending Wall It is arguable that the pietistic speaker of Mending Wall is himself obsessively committed to wall building, farthest more intractably and instinctively committed than his clich-bound neighbor. While the speaker of Mending Wall justifiably castigates his unthinking neighbor and is himself far more informed of the powers of style for good and for ill, he is nonetheless caught up, humourousally perhaps, in the same real task, wall building, which will have the same results and look no diverse from his neighbors contribution despite the narrative he brings to it. There are several(prenominal) possibilities for irony here, depending on the level of Frosts self-awareness. Wall imagery pervades his poetry, as a conscious poetic image and as a psychosexual bulls eye of control and limitation. That the speaker is the one who calls the neighbor to mend the wall is vitally important, then, but it is not clear that Frost soakedt for the speaker to be i ronically perceived as a hypocrite. The simple explanation, that the speaker acts out of a sense of inevitability, knowing his neighbors habits, seems hardly enough given the contextual symbol of the wall in Frosts poetry the psychological explanation attendant upon this indication might suggest that Frosts conscious intent was subverted by his own unconscious mind hire for walls. So while Frost might not mean the speaker to be self-parodic, the reader might judge that there is an ironic discrepancy between what is said and what is meant, two by the speaker and by the poet. On a deeper level even than this is the possibility that Frost was aware of, had taken account of and justified, his own need for barriers. One does, after all, need something against which to push. In this case, the poem might be completely unironic, for while both men are engaged in the same task, each brings a different narrative to it, the one limited to a thoughtless clichJ , the former(a) enriched phil osophically.