Tension and Conflict in Mending Wall :: Mending Wall Essays

Tension and Conflict in Mending Wall The negate in Mending Wall develops as the speaker reveals to a greater extent and to a greater extent of himself while portraying a native Yankee and responding to the regional odor he embodies. The opposition between observer and observed--and the tension produced by the observers sensation of the difference--is crucial to the poem. Ultimately, the very knowledge of this opposition becomes itself a kind of barricade behind which the persona, for all his dislike of walls, finds himself confined. But at the beginning, the Yankee sodbuster is not present, and the persona introduces himself in a reflective, offhanded way, musing close walls Something there is that doesnt love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it And spills the upper boulders in the sun, And makes gaps regular two can pass abreast. Clearly, he is a casual sort. He broaches no difficult subjects, nor does he insist on talking well-nigh himself yet Frost is at his best in a strong belief like this. Through the language and rhythm of the lines we gain a lightheaded but unmistakable sense of the poems conflict. Like the frozen-ground-swell, it gathers strength while fictionalization buried beneath the denotative surface of the poem. From the start, we suspect that the speaker has more sympathy than he admits for whatever it is that doesnt love a wall. Frost establishes at the outset his speakers discursive in restrainion. He combines the indefinite pronoun something with the loose expletive verbalism there is to evoke a ruminative vagueness even before aggrandizement the central subject of walls. A more straightforward character (like the Yankee farmer) might condense this opening line to three direct lyric Something dislikes walls. But Frost employs informal, indulgently convoluted language to provide a linguistic texture for the dramatic conflict that develops later in the poem. By using syntactical inversion (something there is . . .) to introduce a rambling, uncurbed series of relative clauses and compound verb phrases (that doesnt love . . . that sends . . . and spills . . . and makes . . .), he evinces his personas unorthodox, unrestrained imagination. not only does this speaker believe in a strange force, a seemingly intelligent, natural or supernatural something that sends the frozen-ground-swell to ravage the wall, but his saving is also charged with a deep sensitivity to it. The three restless verbs (sends, spills, makes) that impel the second, third, and fourth lines forward are completed by direct objects that suggest his close observation of the destructive process.