Presenting himself as a modern man, far beyond old-fashioned traditions, the speaker is really no different from his neighbor: he also agrees with the concept of property and division, of ownership and individuality.īut truly, the speaker has mended the walls of his personality, and rather than combating an opponent, attempting moral or philosophical sallies, and worrying about victory or defeat, he has again taken an observer`s approach to his neighbor. His skepticism may be an attempt to justify his behavior to himself. (Kemp 21) Despite his skeptical attitude, the speaker is even more tied to the annual tradition of wall-mending than his neighbor. He is quick to think the worst, presuming that the farmer`s concern with the wall is motivated by base selfishness, despite the latter`s expressed interest in being. While attacking his neighbor`s lack of open-minded amiability, the speaker is the one who exhibits antisocial tendencies. In the poem there are two distinct characters having different ideas about what good neighbor really means. Starting from here we can always presume that Mending Wall may lead us to more than one path: one familiar, one more subtle. As an adjective the word refers to the wall and serves a more subtle function: as a mending wall, it keeps the relationship between the two neighbors in good condition`, justifying the author`s affirmation in his essay: “Education by Poetry” (1931), Robert Frost says: `Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another`. The verb refers to the activity that the speaker and his neighbor perform in repairing the wall between their two farms. Mending can be seen either as a verb or an adjective. For Frost, the world is often one of isolation. Frost shows the way in which people interact, how they function as body. Some others sub themes that are found in Mending Wall are the nature of a society, human relationships and physical and emotional barriers. The spirited discussion of the poem bears witness to its moving evocation not only of the two characters, but also of the paradoxically linked themes that their conflict dramatizes: neighborliness and isolation, open-mindedness and prejudice, dependence and independence. 10) but somehow the gaps naturally exist and are always found when the two get together. ‘No one has seen them made or heard them made'(l. This word could also stand for the ‘gaps’ that the neighbors are placing between each other. Frost uses the word ‘gaps’ to describe the holes in the wall. Mending Wall describes two neighboring farmers who live in isolation from one another. We can reach at the conclusion that Frost uses a simple, rural context, the annual mending of the wall to highlight a more general theme, the metaphor of the wall as the totality of self-limitations and boundaries that a living human can’t live without. The poem can be seen as an autobiographical poem: it is said that Frost had a neighbor in New Hampshire, named Napoleon Guay, with whom he often walked along their lands and repaired the wall that separated them. He associated his time in New Hampshire with a peaceful, rural sensibility that we can find in his poems. While living in England with his family, Frost missed the farm in New Hampshire where he had lived with his wife from 1900 to 1909. Mending Wall is the first poem in Frost’s second book of poetry, “North of Boston,” which was published upon his return from England in 1915. The purpose of my essay is to analyze Frost`s poems Mending Wall, The Road Not taken, and The Gift Outright to highlight the contrast between communication and self isolation and between human relationships and boundaries/barriers of the individual and twentieth society seen through Robert Frost`s eyes.

In The Road Not Taken the author present the final limitations of man, as a simple human being with one chance, with one life only. The isolation of the individual is widely described in Mending Wall in which Frost’s illustrates man’s necessity for barriers to isolate themselves from their `neighbors`. Themes like isolation, final limitations of a man and human relationships marked Frost`s poetry and are heavy explored in poems like Mending Wall, The Road Not taken and The Gift Outright. To have a career as a modern poet he felt obliged to go abroad, taking the voice of a simple England farmer and using simple comprehensible words and scenes to depict high moral issues that a 20th century man confronted with. Although born on the West Coast, he is usually associated with New England in his poetry. Robert Lee Frost, 20th century American poet and a four time Pulitzer Prize winner, was born in San Francisco in March of 1874. This is the way in which Richard Gray describes the 20th century cultural atmosphere characterized by doubt, by innovation but also a return to past and traditions, a return to the simplicity of the rural life.

The theme of the road not taken