Poetry Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 4

Poetry - Essay Example â€Å"The Mending Wall† basically tells the story of two men, the narrator and his neighbor, and their annual ritual of walking along the wall between their two properties and mending the stone fence. He starts the poem by indicating how unnatural a wall is in the words â€Å"Something there is that doesn’t love a wall† (1). Within this single sentence, Frost has already managed to establish a rambling rhythm to his poem. The reader is forced to slow down and pay attention to the grammatically correct but unusual phrasing of this statement. As the story continues, this rhythm is punctuated by sudden bursts of energy from the narrator, â€Å"’Stay where you are until our backs are turned!† (19), answered by the steady beat of the neighbor’s response, the repetition of an old adage, â€Å"Good fences make good neighbors† (27). Thus, if rhythm were light, we’d see steady pulses interrupted by sudden flashes of color rebuffed by an equally sudden, light-deadening gray wall. The rhythm of the poem is echoed by the symbolism of the poem. As the narrator tries to determine what it is that doesn’t love fences, he manages to convey the sense that it is something larger or deeper than the superficial elements he is naming: â€Å"The gaps I mean, / No one has seen them made or heard them made, / But at spring mending time we find them there† (9-11). This prompts the reader to begin thinking below the surface early in the poem and, 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