Critical Thinking Blog #3

Out of all the Frost poems the one that I was interested with the most was "Mending Wall." I would see Frost as a modernist because he constructs a very simple world in his poetry, especially in "Mending Wall," that doesn't focus on materialism. The concept of the "wall" in the poem is meant to keep people and objects separated, "My apple trees will never get across/And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him" and the theme of "Good fences make good neighbors" is an incredibly modern concept. He's saying that fences, meant to divide, also keep us from connecting with our community and a support system that is supposed to be involved in our lives. A good neighbor is defined, according to Frost, as someone who keeps to themselves and doesn't meddle. The person that Frost has as the protaganist asks, "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out,/And to whom I was like to give offense." Nowadays we have all sorts of barriers keeping us separate from the outside world and we don't even notice how untrusting we are of people around us. I think that Frost has this type of growing community dealing with this makes us look at our own community. His themes are new and relevant because they are inherent in our world today. The question I pose to other is what else could the fences in "Mending Fences" symbolize and why does the character feel the need to question the use of fences?