Compare the Neighbors in “Mending Wall” and “the Ax-Helve” by Robert Frost.

Essay 1: Compare the neighbors in “Mending Wall” and “The Ax-Helve” by Robert Frost.

In comparing the neighbors in “Mending Wall” and “The Ax-Helve” by Robert Frost, the poet’s view of his neighbors seems to be an effort to satisfy his own conscience to answer his own behavior in the community. Although Frost’s best known poems transcend the lives and profound mental images of rural characters on New England farms, his multi-cultural view was much ahead of his time when he introduced French-Canadian neighbor from “The Ax-Helve”. The views about his neighbors spoke to the worldwide readers in terms of understanding the nature of community and underlined truth about one’s responsibility.

The truths he sought were innate in the heart of humanity and in common objects. But people forget, and the poetry, he said, “make you remember what you didn’t know you knew.” A poem is no didactic but provides an immediate experience which “begins in delight, and ends in wisdom”; and it provides at least “a momentary stay against confusion” (Perkins 882).

Robert Frost is the most universal in his appeal. His writing is an act of clarification without simplifying the truth (Perkins 880).

The neighbor in “Mending Wall” is separated by a barrier, a stone wall from the speaker’s property. They meet to walk the wall and jointly to make repairs. However, the speaker sees no reason for their hard work repairing this wall (Frost 884):

There 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.

He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Again, the speaker points out “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” referring to poet’s view that the forces of nature brings this wall to decay and require it to be mended regularly. This event forces two neighbors to meet and walk jointly having an insightful discussion about “Good fences make good neighbors”...