Mending Wall by Robert Frost

Oh Frost, you are so famous for your poetry, yet I often feel frustrated by it.  When a poem flows like a poem ought to (purely my opinion) I find them so much easier to interpret.  I read between the lines and look for a hidden message, and am disappointed when there is nothing to be found between the lines.  I was looking for some sort of romance, two lovers with a wall built between them, but I think he was just talking about his actual neighbor.  I don't like poems that read more like short shorts.  But it has to be that way, because some poets have short stories to write and cannot.  I know I am slightly gifted in poetry writing, if and when the mood strikes me, but my short stories aren't very good.  I am me.  I am not Tom, Barbara, Cindy or any other protagonist.  I write how I feel.  People who write short stories, on the other hand, become Tom, Barbara, or Cindy and write amazing short stories and become other people, but often can't get personal enough in self indulgence to pour out their feelings into poetry.  This was my last literature instructor.  Awesome short stories, but said he had trouble with poetry.  So I think when poets want to to both, they have to write like how Frost wrote this one.

In this poem, the speaker has a neighbor who doesn't want to be friends.  He wants to keep the wall up and keep to his own.  The speaker, I think, wants to be friends and take down the wall.  He doesn't understand why his neighbor thinks this way.  People are just different.  It's just like in college.  We don't get to pick our roommates sometimes, and sometimes they are different.  I can relate to this speaker because of my experience with my roommate.  I didn't want walls put up.  I wanted to be friends.  She preferred walls.  So it didn't work out.  She couldn't build a wall high enough and moved.  At least that's my interpretation.  But in life we will always have that person in the next cubicle, next house, next bed, that has a say in how high the wall will become.  Everyone is different.  Everyone is unique. And in life we will all be challenged by walls.  Sometimes it is just best to quit trying to climb over them and just walk past to the next one that isn't so high.

Walls don't have to mean no relationship though.  Sometimes they just mean a limited one.  I did have a few questions about this poem though.  What the heck was he talking about cows for?  Was it because walls are only needed to keep in animals, not keep out people?  I'm not sure, so I'll have to remember to ask about it in class.  I enjoy getting other peoples' interpretations on literature.  I wish that's all we did in class was talk about one piece for fifty minutes.  We would get so deep in discussion in my other literature class that our instructor once said, "Wow, we might as well be sitting around here getting stoned because this discussion is getting so deep."  Perhaps I will take my career as a journalist and become a literary critic.  Then I would be doing what I love.

Until next time,

Keri Jo