Great authors can give immense amounts of details despite using minimal wording. Poetry writers can leave a great deal to the readers imagination by using ambiguous language. Robert Frost, one of the 20th century's greatest poets, gives both great detail and ambiguity in his poem "Mending Wall-. In only 45 lines, Frost allows us to take a meticulous look at the thoughts and ideas of a New England farmer.
"Mending Wall" is written in non-rhyming iambic pentameter. Blank verse is usually written so that when the poem is told, it sounds like an everyday conversation or monologue. Frost uses it to emphasize that the speaker is the typical New Englander and not an omnipotent narrator who knows what his neighbor is thinking. Despite the speaker's language is rather colloquial, certain lines, the opening four lines for example, lend to the poem's rhythmical flow. Also, Frost does not write "Mending Wall- using stanzas so as to give the poem a continuous flow.
The opening lines are typical of a Frost work because they involve nature much like almost all his other writings as well can be interpreted many ways:.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,.
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,.
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;.
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. (1-4).
The speaker sets the tone for the rest of the poem by saying how maybe a winter's frost and wind destroyed a wall so badly that two people can walk freely through the gaps. The brute force of the winter was strong enough to knock down the largest stones. The speaker continues to deliberate on what ruined this wall:.
The work of hunters is another thing:.
I have come after them and made repair.
Where they would have left not one stone on a stone,.
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,.
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,.
No one has seen them made or heard them made,.
But at spring mending-time we find them there.