The mending wall – Flashcards
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What is the name of the poem?
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The mending wall
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Who wrote the poem the mending wall?
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Robert frost
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What years did Robert frost live?
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1874- 1963
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How does the speaker feel towards the wall?
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Something in him doesn't love it
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What causes the rocks to fall out?
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They expand from the cold
They shrink from the heat
They are dug out by hunters trying to get to the rabbits
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How big are the holes?
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So big 2 people can past abreast (holding hands)
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Who picks up the holes the hunters make?
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The speakers
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What to the hunters bring out?
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The rabbits from hiding
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Why do they hunt the rabbits and dig through the wall?
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To please their dog
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Who sees or hears the holes being made
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No one
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When do they find the holes?
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At spring mending time
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That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper borders in the sun
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This is how the stones fall out the wall
They expand in the cold and shrink in the heat
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What happens when spring comes around?
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The speaker calls his neighbor and the set the wall between them again
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How do they set the wall?
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They walk on either side and pick up the boulders that fall on their side
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The work of hunters in another thing
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Another way the wall is breadth
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I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
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The author is forced to pick up the mess the hunters make
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But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
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Little bunnies like to hide inside the wall from the hunters, and, so, in turn, the hunters tear down the wall to find them. Poor little bunnies.
However, the hunters aren't the selfish wall-wreckers that we think they are - they're merely trying to please their bunny-loving dogs. Wow.
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No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
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No one sees the holes being made but when they go to mend the wall, they find the holes
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I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
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The man contacts his neighbor and they agree on when to fix the walls. They meet each on their own side of the wall and fix the wall between them
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To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
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You pick up the boulders that have fallen on your side of the wall and put them back into the wall
Some are small and more are big
The rocks are hard to put back in place so the men tell them to stay until they leave, know the wall will fall apart again
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We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
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It makes their hands sore from handling the rocks
Putting the wall means nothing to the author, it is just a game
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where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
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The author does not think the wall is needed, they are too different for it to be needed
He wants to convince his neighbor it's not
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He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
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The man just tells the man to his plea to take the wall down that good fences make good neighbors (he likes his privacy)
The author wishes he could make the neighbor change his mind
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'Why do they make good neighbors?
Isn't it Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say, "Elves" to him
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The author wants to know why hood fences make good neighbors?
He doesn't see the point of the wall, they have no cows to separate
He hints that the wall was all his neighbor's idea and if it was up to him he would list the pros and cons before doing it and who he would offend
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But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
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Our speaker can tell his neighbor that elves keep destroying the wall, but he knows that it's not elves, and he wants his neighbor to come up with some silly explanation on his own.
He wants his neighbor to lighten up, and to question the real necessity of keeping a wall between them.
The author thinks his neighbor looks like a cave men putting rocks up
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He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
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There is darkness in the neighbor
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He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
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We learn that the neighbor's favorite saying ("Good fences make good neighbors") actually isn't his own, but harkens back to his father's saying.
When the speaker tells us this, we see this neighbor as a man of tradition and old-school rules.
