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Well, here's something, but its far from an argumentative analysis essay:

Mending Wall is one of the poems that I'm studying in IB this year. The poem starts out with the ambiguous "Something there is that doesn't love a wall". Frost ponders why there's something in him, perhaps in all humans that doesn't like walls. Yet the irony is that he contacted his neighbor "I let my neighbor know beyond the hill" to fix the wall. Frost is the one that instigates this fixing of the wall. He also mocks his neighbor a bit, repeating "good fences make good neighbors", as if the man is very stubborn and determined to fix the fence. Also, Frost's neighbor seems to be ignorant or simplistic, perhaps even primitive. The neighbor is described to be "like an old-stone savage". Yet, at the very end of the poem, Frost seems to come to the realization that fences, though he may not like them, are necessary because they give people a sense of security. The end of the poem is much darker than the rest of the poem, and Frost seems to see that there may be a part of his neighbor that he, too, would like to keep away from him, as shown by,

"In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

It seems that his neighbor can appear dangerous as well, and Frost ends with his neighbor's statement, "Good fences make good neighbors". In short, the fence is what physically keeps the two neighbors apart, but also brings them together each spring to mend it once again.

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17y ago

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