quotes from the mending wall about forgiveness settling conflict

The neighbor is cast as his opposite: someone who does not ask questions and is content to accept what has always been. He is curious, inquiring, and reflective. The speaker wants to know why good fences make good neighbors. They are questions anyone might be expected to ask about such a wall, and not just in the mischief of spring there is something more to it than that.

The speaker acts as though his own questions are about making mischief more than anything else, which suggests he already knows the answers to them. He simply responds with his father’s old saying: “Good fences make good neighbors.” This becomes his mantra, the only words we hear from him. The other neighbor is cryptic when the speaker, the forthright one, questions him about the purpose of the wall.

When they are chasing a rabbit to “please the yelping dogs,” but mostly themselves, they too have been known to send boulders tumbling. The speaker explains that hunters are also sometimes responsible for the gaps. The ground swells and the less securely placed boulders tumble off. Winter does not love a wall, we learn in the second line it creates gaps in the wall. The poem opens with the statement, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” and Frost’s readers are left to speculate for the remainder of the poem precisely what that something is. He makes boundaries and he breaks boundaries. The secret of what it means I keep.” Providing a bit of a hint, he also once explained that the poem contrasted two types of people: “I’ve got a man there he’s both a wall builder and a wall toppler. On a visit to Moscow in 1962, nearly 50 years after the poem’s first publication, Frost said, “People are frequently misunderstanding or misinterpreting it.

Much anthologized, the poem has almost come to symbolize Frost, for good or ill. The opening poem of Frost’s hailed second collection, North of Boston, “ Mending Wall” is one of his most popular and celebrated poems. He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Quotes from the mending wall about forgiveness settling conflict