Mending Wall

In English classes and literary anthologies, Frost and New England are often inextricably linked, but his image as a farmer poet whose identity was galvanized by his relationship with the rugged natural landscape of this particular region of America warrants a closer look. Like many of the poems for which Frost is famous, “Mending Wall” examines humans in relation to nature, and the detailed nature imagery in the poem implies that both speaker and poet enjoy a special intimacy with place and a poignant appreciation of the notion of nature as home. In reality, however, Frost the man was not as rooted to the earth as his poems may have one believe.

Though Frost’s collection North of Boston contains many poems like “Mending Wall” that concern New England farming life, the themes of Frost’s own life are ironically in opposition to the steady reliability that characterizes the themes of the collection. By the time he published his first collection of poems at the age of 39, Frost had already lived a complicated life as a sometimes farmer and sometimes teacher. For various parts of his life Frost lived in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont. Further afield, he also had two residences in England, one in Key West, Florida and one in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Frost’s actual lived restlessness conflicts with his literary associations as a poet who is bonded with a specific geography, and it invites readers of his work to look more carefully at the way he uses language to evade easy categorization.

Though Frost did attempt to be a farmer at several junctures in his adult life, the demands of the various farms on which he lived served mainly to distract him from writing. Frost’s peripatetic approach to life is not limited to home addresses; his professional career, his academic career and his personal relationships were also rife with stops and starts. Some literary critics have even pointed out an erratic quality to his poetic language; Frost’s avoidance of certainty and definitive statements in his poetry allows readers to make their own interpretations of his work, which means that some of Frost’s poems have been widely misunderstood by the reading public (see Further Literary Resources).

Frost had highly complex literary and personal experiences both in America and abroad, yet Robert Frost remains an emblem of New England. He recited a poem at the age of 86 at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy that seemed to seal his reputation as a poet of the land, yet there is much more to Frost and to his body of work than the cultivated identity of a simple farmer poet implies.