Actual and Symbolic Barriers in Robert Frosts Mending Wall Essay

Actual and Symbolic Barriers in Robert Frosts mend Wall The appearance of prohibitions, both literal and figurative, is significant to the narrative of Robert Frosts improve Wall. The story in this piece revolves around a besiege separating twain men, their yards, and their lives. The jetty is not only a physical boundary it alike symbolizes the barriers between the dickens in other aspects of their lives.The most noticeable barrier in this work is obviously the wall dividing the yard. The reason for a wall between the trees is un sack outn to the narrator and the reader. The speaker questions the need for the smother when he says, Before I built a wall Id ask to know/ What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offense. These feelings argon expressed also in lines 23 through 26. The wall is fit(p) between the neighbors pine grove and the speakers apple orchard. Is on that point a extremum in dividing these trees? Even though the narrator does not know the mean of the wall, he is always the one responsible for making sure it is mended every(prenominal) year. More than likely he unconsciously feels a need for the repugn too. Perhaps it is a need for his privacy or maybe it is a need to comport a connection with the outside world. In the lines Where they have not left one stone on a stone, / exactly they would have the rabbit out of hiding, the wall represents the barriers people put up so that their vulnerabilities and secrets can remain hidden. Once this wall is broken there is a need to mend it in order to keep others from eyesight what is on the opposite side of the wall. There are other instances of the wall representing the need for separation between personal and private aspects of lives. In lines 16 though 20, ... ...need to keep the wall up in order to defend themselves from outsiders. At the same time though, the need for the ritual of mending the surround is beyond their control. The narrator s tates, Something there is that doesnt love a wall...And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. (Lines 1-4) The choice to pass through the skirt is available, and so is the choice to mend the wall each year. Both know that the fence result fall again and the next spring they will be reunited. As broad as the literal wall exists there will be contact between the two men. However as long as the figurative barriers remain, the distance between them is further than any fence could separate them. Work CitedRobert Frost. Mending Wall. Making Literature Matter An Anthology for Readers and Writers. Ed. bottom Schilb and John Clifford. New York Bedford/St. Martins, 2000. p106-107.