Tuesday 19 April 2016

What are the questions in the speaker's mind?

Basically, the entire poem is a stream of the speaker's thoughts.  He starts the poem with the rhetorical question, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," the ambiguous "something" revealing that he does not quite understand why the wall continues to crumble season after season.  


When he and his neighbor are repairing the fence in the spring, he thinks the pivotal question of the poem: "Whydo they [fences] make good neighbors?"...

Basically, the entire poem is a stream of the speaker's thoughts.  He starts the poem with the rhetorical question, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," the ambiguous "something" revealing that he does not quite understand why the wall continues to crumble season after season.  


When he and his neighbor are repairing the fence in the spring, he thinks the pivotal question of the poem: "Why do they [fences] make good neighbors?" (l. 30).  The speaker does not understand why there is a need for a fence when there are no animals to keep in or out (ll. 30-31); there are only pine trees on the neighbor's side and apple trees on the speaker's (ll. 24-26).  The speaker then circles back to his original question about the "Something" that keeps knocking down the wall, that wants to break the barrier between the speaker and his neighbor.  While he jokes that it is elves (l. 36), he really wants to push against the norm, the old saying that his neighbor repeats from "his father's saying, / And he likes having thought of it so well" (ll. 43-44).  The neighbor, however, will not buck the system, so he and the speaker will continue to rebuild the wall, season after season.

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