Essay Contrasting Mending Wall with Other Poems in Frosts North of Boston :: comparison compare contrast essays

Contrasting Mending W completely with Other Poems in Frosts North of Boston Mending W solely is the opening numbers of Frosts North of Boston. One of the dominating moods of this volume, forcefully established in such important poems as The Death of the Hired Man, Home Burial, The Black Cottage, and A consideration to Servants, and carried through some of the minor pieces, flows from the tension of having to maintain balance at the precipitous edge of hysteria. With The Mountain and with A Hundred Collars, Mending Wall stands fence to such visions of hu domain existence more precisely put, to existences that are fashioned by the neurotic visions of central characters like the wife in Home Burial, the handmaid in A Servant to Servants. Mending Wall dramatizes the redemptive imagination in its playful phase, guided surely and confidently by a man who has his world under full control, who in his serenity is riding his realities, not being shocked by them into traumatic response. T he place of Mending Wall in the structure of North of Boston suggests, in its sharp contrasts to the dark tones of some of the major poems in the volume, the psychological necessities of sustaining supreme fictions. The opening lines evoke the coy passenger car of the shrewd imaginative man who understands the words of the farmer in The Mountain All the funs in how you say a thing, Something there is that doesnt love a wall, That sends a frozen-ground-swell under it And spills the upper boulders in the sun, And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. It does not take more than one reading of the poem to understand that the verbalizer is not a country primitive who is easily spooked by the normal processes of nature. He knows very well what it is that doesnt love a wall (frost, of course). His fun lies in not naming it. And in not naming the scientific truth he is able to manipulate intransigent fact into the world of the mind where all things are pliable. The artful vagueness of th e phrase Something there is is enchanting and magical, suggesting even the bushed tones of reverence before mystery in nature. And the speaker (who is not at all reverent toward nature) consciously works at deepening that sense of mystery The work of hunters is another thing I have come after them and make repair