Question

Referring closely to the poem, Mending Wall, discuss the two attitudes to barriers or walls, as presented in the poem. What, in your opinion, does the poet wish to convey through the poem?

Answer 1

First published in England in 1914 (and the United States a year later) as part of Frost's second book of poetry, “Mending Wall” was written in the waning years of European imperialism and the onset of World War I. Read in light of the time's geopolitics, geographers might recognize a desire for clear distinction of emergent national identities and colonial control. Understood ambivalently, one could also read in the final lines of the poem a passing judgment of the political “darkness” in which the era moved. This early setting for Frost's poem pushes us to understand that the issue of negotiating boundaries and borders comes much earlier and in other types of struggles than the contexts in which “Mending Wall” is currently widely cited. The popularity of “Mending Wall” took off with the wide circulation of the Complete Poems of Robert Frost in 1949 (Mieder, 2003) and reflects Frost's rising public profile (Gerber, 1982, p. 25). Not surprisingly, the poem struck a nerve during the Cold War. With its “intense concern about drawing limits,” writes Axelrod (2003), the poem “became one of Frost's most canonical texts … It spoke to a people consumed with the burdensome task of creating a ‘containing wall’ around communism” (p. 865; see also Lippmann, 1947, p. 56). Constructing a more tangible barrier to back up its own restrictions on movements across its border with the West, the German Democratic Republic began construction on a barbed wire fence in 1951 and closed the inner German border a year later. An even more complete sealing, including construction of the Berlin Wall, began in 1961 (Buchholz, 1994, pp. 56e57) and gave Frost's poem a renewed immediacy. Post-Cold War borders and more recent debates concerning border barriers provide only the latest geographic context for interpreting this poem. In many ways “Mending Wall” is a Rorschach test in which proponents see and hear their own positions reflected in the narrative contours of the poem. And while political geography has embraced the idea that impartiality is as much a distracting pretense as a useful position from which to produce scholarship, we believe that such a shift threatens to mask the fact that all political positions emerge from a complex set of determinationsdlike walls they are constructions that over time appear to us as natural, self-evident, and self-explanatory truths. To theorize “Mending Wall's” reception and understand its use of spatial metaphors, we read the poem as a part of a collectively imagined social space (after Lefebvre, 1991) whose boundaries are continuously shifting but whose contours can be productively if only partially delimited. “Mending Wall” and Frost's oeuvre more generally provide an unusually rich opportunity to explore our ambivalence vis-a-vis the external and internal Other ( Bhabha, 2004, p. 214). Equally important, like much of Frost's work this poem evokes a powerful sense of place. As part of the tradition of the loco-descriptive poem, it offers literary scholars and geographers a way to think about “position” in all the senses of that word (see Potkay, 2011). The loco-descriptive poem, or romantic and post-romantic ode, links external nature (phenomenological awareness of the environment, scenes of nature, etc.) to the general structure of subjectivity. Thus, Charles Olson, a late romantic, is able to begin such a poem, “I come back to the geography of it” (the “it” being the memory of a specific place) and end the same poem with the lines, “polis is this” (the “this” being his embodied subjectivity; Mahoney, 2012; Morton, 2002; Olson, 1983, pp. 184e185). The poem then becomes a means of proprioception (Olson, 1997, pp. 181e183). Whether addressed from a postcolonial (Bhabha, 2004), Queer Theory (Butler, 1997, p. 29), Marxian (Althusser, 1990), psychoanalytic, or political geographical perspective, proprioceptionethe ability to occupy and locate oneself provisionally in spacedis an essential aspect of becoming a political subject.