On Mending Wall

【中图分类号】H31 【文献标识码】A 【文章编号】2095-3089（2013）09-0119-02

“Beginning with happiness， ending with wisdom” can be the best description of Robert Frost’s poems which are seemingly simple but are in fact full of meanings. He is good at describing country scenery and country life in New England with his concise， simple， and humorous language which fascinated both readers at home and abroad. So， many critics tend to call him optimistic “country philosopher” and his poems are considered ordinary and simple natural poems. This paper is going to make some interpretations on Mending Wall to illustrate this point.

I. Different views on Mending Wall

In terms of the process of poetic creation， we may think： if a poet himself is a great artist， the poem itself may have different facets of meanings. The critic David A. Sohn and Richard H. Tyre once proposed that the poem be a political propaganda， social analysis， and revelation of the poet’s attitude toward human relations and the relation between people and work. American psychoanalyst Norman N. Holland interpreted this poem with his psychoanalytical approach like this： “breaking the wall of alienation in infancy in order to return to the state of intimacy…” Obviously， different people drew different conclusions from this poem. What impressed me most are the structural and rhetorical devices used in this poem.

II. The structural and rhetorical devices in Mending Wall

The poem tries to show people’s mixed emotions toward the wall in nature or the wall in their mind and also reveals their longing for understanding， peace and freedom. Frost himself showed his great ingenuity in arranging the structure of Mending Wall and led readers to read between the lines.

For the coherence and unity of the whole poem， the poet adopted a device―the arrangement of syntactic construction while he was creating his poem. His purpose was to attract reader’s attention by such an emphasis and help them better understand the theme and meaning of this poem. The structure of Mending Wall was carefully arranged to form a unity， which stresses the theme by dramatic contrast. At first， we may see these two lines：

1. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.

2. “Good fences make good neighbors.”

We may find the privilege of the position of example 1.（Line1）. Here “something” is put in the dominant place， that is， it functions in a prominent position instead of being in the normal order.（The normal order of the sentence should be： There is something that doesn’t love a wall.） We may guess whether the topic is related to the word “something”. But if we go on searching， we may find that the unclear and even mysterious word “something” is exactly the factors―the completely negative attitude toward mending wall which resulted in the conflicts. Just as Northrop Frye stated， “It is not a question of ‘Good fences make good neighbors’， the task is to identify the meaning of ‘something’.” Besides， the word “something” shifted from the normal position， breaking the normal sentence order and making it loose but the whole poem was written in smooth and conversational language and it was natural. Thus， this line seems unique and as line 1 in the whole poem， it becomes one of the most important lines to reveal the topic.