Essay on the Defense of Walls in Mending Wall :: Mending Wall Essays

Opposing the Unthinking exculpation of groins in Mending Wall   The utterer in Mending Wall questions his neighbors stolid assumption that groovy fences make good neighbors. Perhaps, what he objects to is non so much the sentiment itself as the unwillingness or softness of the other to think for himself, to go beyond his fathers saying. Just so we essential try to get beyond the apophthegm-like opening line of Mending Wall, scrutiny carefully for gradations of tone as we proceed. Is it the proverb-like authority of something there is . . . that makes it so lifelike to equate something with the speaker? Once this equation has been made, the reader joins the speaker in sympathizing with this mysterious something and hence in opposing the neighbors unthinking defense of walls. hoar rings subtly drastic changes on the sound of a articulate like good fences make good neighbors. By the time the metrical composition ends, this line has acquired some of the pat stupidity o f a slogan. Similar turns of the chicane affect the opening line, when to it is added the darker phrase that wants it down and again when the speaker refuses to tell apart the antiwall something. Elves is the closest he gets, yet Its not elves exactly, and Id rather / He tell it for himself. Elves may mean not willowy things out of Tolkien but darker forces of the wood, for the next image is one of darkness. The neighbor is viewed as subtly menacing, an old-stone savage armed. further this homophile has been the one to defend boundaries. The apparently relaxed and leisurely pace of the poem has made us lower our own boundaries and forget who is on what side. At any rate, although the speakers ironic evasiveness undermines any confident interpretation, Poirier is surely skilful when he makes the following point . . . .it is not the neighbor . . . a man who can only dully repeat good fences make good neighbors-- . . .it is not he who initiates the fence-making. Rather it is th e far more spirited, lively, and mischievous speaker of the poem. While admitting that they do not need the wall, it is he who each course lets my neighbor know beyond the hill that it is time to do the cable anyway, and who will go out alone to fill the gaps made in the wall by hunters.