1)Does mending wall separate the two neighbours or bring them closer

together. Justify your answer through examples from poem.

2)Does a wall serve a practical purpose?

“Mending Wall” is a poem by the American poet Robert Frost. It was published in 1914, as
the first entry in Frost’s second book of poems, North of Boston. The poem is set in rural
New England, where Frost lived at the time—and takes its impetus from the rhythms and
rituals of life there. The poem describes how the speaker and a neighbor meet to rebuild a
stone wall between their properties—a ritual repeated every spring. This ritual raises some
important questions over the course of the poem, as the speaker considers the purpose of
borders between people and the value of human work.

 “Mending Wall” Summary

o There is some force that doesn’t like walls. It causes the frozen ground to swell
underneath a wall, and the wall's upper stones then topple off in the warmth of the
sun. This creates gaps in the wall so big that two people could walk through them
side-by-side. And then there are the hunters who take apart the wall—that’s
something different. I often have to come and fix the spots where hunters haven't left
a single stone in place, as they tried to flush out the rabbits that hide in the wall in
order to make their barking dogs happy. No one has seen or heard these gaps in the
wall being made. We just find them there in the spring, when it comes time to fix the
wall. I reach out to my neighbor, who lives over a hill, and we find a day to get
together and walk along the wall, fixing these gaps as we go. He walks on his side of
the wall and I on mine, and we deal only with whatever rocks have fallen off the wall
on our side of it. Some of them look like loaves of bread and some are round like
balls, so we pray that they’ll stay in place, balanced on top of the wall, saying: "Don’t
move until we’re gone!" Our fingers get chafed from picking up the rocks. It’s just
another outside activity, each of us on our side of the wall, nothing more.

There’s no need for a wall to be there. On my neighbor’s side of the wall, there’s
nothing but pine trees; my side is an apple orchard. It’s not like my apple trees are
going to cross the wall and eat his pine cones, I say to him. But he just responds,
 "Good fences are necessary to have good neighbors." Since it’s spring and I feel
mischievous, I wonder if I could make my neighbor ask himself: "Why are they
necessary? Isn’t that only true if you’re trying to keep your neighbor’s cows out of
your fields? There aren’t any cows here. If I were to build a wall, I’d want to know
what I was keeping in and what I was keeping out, and who was going to be offended
by this. There is some force that doesn’t love a wall, that wants to pull it down.” I
could propose that Elves are responsible for the gaps in the wall, but it’s not exactly
Elves, and, anyway, I want my neighbor to figure it out on his own. I see him, lifting
up stones, grasping them firmly by the top, in each hand, like an ancient warrior. He
moves in a deep darkness—not just the darkness of the woods or the trees above. He
does not want to think beyond his set idea about the world, and he likes having
articulated this idea so clearly. So he says it again: “Good fences are necessary to
have good neighbors.”
 “Mending Wall” Themes
o

Borders

At its heart, “Mending Wall” is a poem about borders—the work it takes to maintain
them and the way they shape human interactions. The speaker and the speaker's
neighbor spend much of the poem rebuilding a wall that divides their properties. As
they do so, they debate the function of the wall and how it affects their relationship.

The speaker suggests that the wall is unnecessary, both practically and politically: in
the speaker's mind, walls exclude people, injuring otherwise harmonious
relationships. But the neighbor argues that walls actually improve relationships,
because they allow people to treat each other fairly and prevent conflict. The poem
doesn't fall too heavily on either side of the debate, ultimately allowing readers to
decide for themselves which vision of human community is most convincing.

The speaker believes the wall isn't necessary, given the crops that the speaker and the
neighbor grow: while cattle might wander over to graze in someone else's pasture, the
speaker's apples aren't going to eat the neighbor's pine trees. More importantly, the
speaker believes that walls actively damage people's relationships. This is because
walls are likely to “give offense”—that is, to offend people with their implication of
mistrust and exclusion.

The speaker thus asks the neighbor why they need to continue repairing the wall at
all. In response, the neighbor says simply and repeatedly: "Good fences make good
neighbours." He believes that a good neighbor establishes clear boundaries, and in
doing so prevents problems from arising between people who live near each other.
The neighbor seems haunted by the possibility of future conflicts. In fact, he seems to
regard such conflicts as an inevitable part of life—and as such that it’s important to
take steps to prevent them.

For the speaker, there's no reason to engage in such preventative measures because
there are no conflicts between him and his neighbor—not even the seeds of future
conflict. "Here there are no cows," the speaker says, literally referencing the fact that
there aren't any cattle around that need to be penned in, lest they graze on someone
else's property, and also figuratively suggesting that the speaker and the neighbor
have no reason to be especially possessive of their lands. They aren't competing for
resources, and should be able to live peacefully side by side. In this worldview,
people are basically decent. It is building the wall itself that seems to the speaker
most likely to cause conflict, by creating a sense of "us" vs. "them" and implying that
the neighbors don't trust each other.

The speaker and his neighbor thus disagree over an issue so fundamental to human
society and political thinking: they debate whether conflicts between human beings
are inevitable (if preventable) or whether those conflicts are the result of misguided
cynicism about the possibility of peace between people.

Yet though the speaker gets the most air-time in the poem, it's not entirely clear that
the reader is supposed to take the speaker's side. Instead, the poem itself remains
decidedly ambiguous—for all the speaker's complaints about the wall, the speaker is
the one who sets the mending in motion by reaching out to the neighbor, and the
poem even gives the neighbor the final word.
 The poem thus asks its reader to decide for themselves who is right and who is wrong,
and to make up their minds about the utility of walls, borders, and other political and
physical devices that divide people.

The Value of Work

As the speaker describes it, the work of “Mending Wall” is ritualistic: each year, the
speaker and the neighbor walk along the wall together and repair the sections that
have been damaged by frost or by hunters over the previous year. It is hard, taxing
work: by the end, their hands are chapped from it. The difficulty of the work, and the
need to renew it every year, makes the speaker question why—and whether—it’s
necessary to keep rebuilding the wall. More broadly, the act of repairing the wall
serves as an allegory for human labor. Though the speaker and the neighbor continue
to rebuild the wall, the poem calls into question the value of labor for labor’s sake—
and asks whether a different relationship to work might be possible.

At the heart of the poem’s meditation is a routine, even monotonous act: the speaker
and the neighbor pick up rocks and put them back on the wall. The act is reminiscent
of a famous myth, with which Frost—classically educated at Harvard—would likely
have known intimately: the myth of Sisyphus. As a punishment for being crafty and
deceitful, Sisyphus, the king of Corinth, was condemned to spend eternity pushing a
boulder up a hill. When he reached the top of the hill, the boulder would roll back to
the bottom and he would have to start over.

There is something Sisyphean about the work that the speaker and the neighbor do in
“Mending Wall”: each year rebuilding the same wall—a wall that serves no practical
purpose. For Sisyphus, the boulder rolls down to the bottom of the hill each time
because the gods have decreed it. “Mending Wall” presents an equally futile but much
less religious vision: instead of the gods, it is the frost that damages the wall over and
over again, forcing the speaker and the neighbor to repair it over and over again.
Nature itself, with its capacity to damage and destroy human artifacts, seems to defeat
 human ambitions, to force it to endless repeat the same futile projects without making
progress.

Given that their task is repetitive and fruitless, the speaker suggests that they might be
better off if they stopped repairing the wall altogether. But the neighbor insists that
they keep doing so. And he may suggest that the work itself is good and valuable: it
may not simply be the fence that makes “good neighbours,” but the act of rebuilding
it, of working together for a common goal.

For the speaker, work is justified only by its results, or in this case physical products:
the material and permanent difference it makes in the world. For the neighbor,
however, work is justified as an end in itself, and that work (in his mind, at least) is
part of maintaining a fair and livable society.

This might also serve as an allegory for endeavors like poetry: implicit in this debate
is a question about the value of creative work—work that is simply beautiful, and that
does not materially change or improve society.

Change and Modernity

As the speaker of “Mending Wall” and the neighbor debate the political and practical
purpose of the wall they’re repairing, the poem raises an implicit question about the
possibility of change. The speaker argues that the neighbor’s belief—that fences are
necessary to keep people from getting out of control—is out of date: the speaker
compares him to an “old-stone savage.” But though his attitudes may be antiquated,
the neighbor remains influential in the present—articulating a deeply held belief that
it is necessary for society to restrain people in small ways to keep them from acting
out in big ways.

The poem thus asks its readers to ponder whether the debate between the speaker and
his neighbor will ever be resolved—and, more broadly, whether it is possible for
society itself to change. The poem suggests that it is not: whatever the speaker’s
objections to the activity, the speaker still rebuilds the wall.
Despite often using every-day, simple language, the speaker is clearly an educated,
loquacious figure. The speaker is likely fluent in philosophy, precisely countering the
neighbor by invoking the writings of Henry David Thoreau (in the reference to
"cows"); the speaker engages in flights of fancy, musing that mythical "Elves" might
be to blame for the wall's destruction; and the speaker uses a prestigious literary form
—blank verse—in a rough but perceptible fashion to relate ideas to the reader.

By contrast, the neighbor is stern and old-fashioned. He says only one thing in the
poem—and he then he says it again! His speech is direct and unpretentious. The
speaker emphasizes this side of the neighbor’s character: his unwillingness to think
broadly or deeply, or to interrogate his own ideas. Instead of thinking things through
for himself, the neighbor depends on “his father’s saying[s]”—that is, he relies on
received wisdom. As a result, the neighbor seems to the speaker to be “like an old-
stone savage armed.” His work in rebuilding the wall resembles primitive forms of
violence. He has not advanced beyond that primitive state, but rather preserves its
violence in his insistence on constructing barriers between people.

By implicit contrast, then, the speaker is a more modern figure. The speaker fancies
himself as someone who has been released from the “darkness” in which the neighbor
moves—and found a more enlightened, peaceful way of life. Yet the speaker is the
one who lets the neighbor know when it’s time to fix the wall. The speaker sets the
repair in motion, even as the speaker insists it's not necessary.

Thus the speaker, unconsciously or not, has internalized the need for the wall—or, at
least, has internalized the futility of pushing back too strongly against the neighbor
and his deeply held beliefs. (And the speaker likely wouldn’t have a problem with a
wall if there were cows around!).

The poem thus suggests that as long as people hold ideas like the neighbor’s, society
itself will be captivated by them, unable to refuse the projects they inspire. It's hard to
shake off the beliefs of the past and to implement change for the future.
  Frost

The frost—or as the speaker calls it, "the frozen-ground-swell"—is a mysterious, unsettling
force in "Mending Wall." It acts in powerful and damaging ways, ultimately knocking over
large sections of the wall each winter. But, despite its force, it's only doing the bidding of
something else that remains undetectable; this "something" doesn't like walls, and as such
"sends" the frost out to destroy them.

As the speaker notes, describing the gaps it makes in the wall, "No one has seen them made
or heard them made." The frost and the strange force behind it thus occupy a complex
position in the poem. Frost is a real force, a natural phenomenon. And yet it has a kind of
supernatural quality in the poem, in having been sent by some powerful, absent entity. The
reader might take both frost and this entity as a broader symbol for nature itself and for
nature’s effects on human artifacts. The things that people make, the poem suggests, are
fragile and temporary, when compared and subject to the grand forces of nature.

 Meaning

Spring

The spring is traditionally a symbol of rebirth, and it works, in part, as  a symbol for renewal
in this poem: it's the time of year when the speaker and the neighbor repair the wall between
their properties.

It's also important to recognize that in Christianity, the spring is associated with Christ's
resurrection. Frost plays with this tradition in "Mending Wall." The renewal that the speaker
and the neighbor take part in by rebuilding the wall is quite different from the Christian
resurrection: it is the result of human work, rather than divine grace; it is temporary, not
permanent; and it must actively be renewed each year.

In other words, "Mending Wall" takes a symbol that often has a strong religious flavor and
strips away that religious content. The symbol becomes more complex and ambivalent: if
spring symbolizes a temporary renewal or rebirth, it also implies that death and decay will
 arrive again. This, in turn, reflects the poem's broader thematic consideration of the value or
point of work itself.

Fences

A fence is a physical structure that divides two areas—in the case of "Mending Wall," two
people’s property. It may be confusing that the neighbor uses the word "fence" here to
describe what the speaker calls a "wall," but the speaker clearly uses the two words
interchangeably. In any case, fences in the poem represent not simply the actual, physical
border between the two subjects' land areas, but also the broader divisions between human
beings. The poem debates the question of whether borders in general—be they fences
between plots of land, or country boundaries on a map—encourage goodwill or mistrust
between human beings.

Do borders separate people into an "us" and a "them," creating divisions where none need
exist? Or is establishing clear boundaries essential to peaceful coexistence? It's ultimately up
to the reader to decide.

Cows

Cows are important symbols, in the American philosophical tradition, of the damage that one
person might cause another. Henry David Thoreau writes: "Who are bad neighbors? They
who suffer their neighbors' cattle to go at large because they don’t want their ill will,—are
afraid to anger them. They are abettors of the ill-doers." Thoreau imagines a slippery slope: a
small initial infraction leads to larger and more serious problems.

Here Thoreau isn’t concerned with literal cows, but symbolic cows: cows that symbolize the
small injuries that, if left unchecked, might grow into more serious conflicts between people
who live close to each other. Cows also suggest a certain selfishness and greed, as one may
allow their own cattle to graze on another's pasture—taking another's resources for
themselves.
 The cows in "Mending Wall" function similarly. Though it's true that neither the speaker nor
the neighbor seem to own cows, the speaker is concerned with something broader when
announcing "here there are no cows." The lack of "cows" points to a lack of potential conflict
—the speaker and the neighbor use their lands differently and don't compete for resources,
meaning there's little danger of tension. They can live peacefully side by side, and thus
perhaps don't need a wall between them.

Darkness

The "darkness" that the neighbor "moves in" is not only a literal shade or shadow. In line 42,
the speaker specifies that it is not the darkness "of wood only and the shade of trees." The
speaker does not tell the reader, however, what kind of darkness it is. Most likely, it is a kind
of symbolic darkness.

In western thought, darkness is often treated as a symbol for ignorance or error. (By contrast,
light is a symbol for enlightenment and truth). Darkness also serves a symbol for history or
the past; the past is often described as lost in darkness, in obscurity. The speaker may mean
both at once: the neighbor is not only wrong and ignorant, but he also remains tied to
obsolete, antiquated ideas—such as his "father’s saying" about good neighbors, which makes
him "like an old-stone savage armed."
3)Critically analyse the poem “Waiting till the majesty of
death” by Emily Dickinson
Introduction

Poem number 171 is one of Emily Dickenson's poems revolving around the
theme of death". The poem presents a personification of Death as nobility and
royalty, comparing him to a king to show his superiority and present him as "the
Lord of lords". In this poem, Dickinson shows how it doesn't matter who you
are during life, Death will treat everyone the same way, through the
personification of Death, visual imagery, and diction.

Personification of Death

The personification of Death as royalty and nobility shows his superiority and
how Death will not care about the hierarchy of people when, he takes their
lives, seeing them all as equal. In the first line of the poem, the speaker
describes Death as "the majesty of Death", Immediately creating this image of
death being more important and part of the upperclass. By saying, "Wait till the
majesty of Death Invests so mean a brow", the poet is saying to wait for Death
to set his eye on you. This creates the fear of Death because no one can escape
from this "mean brow" and when he sets his eve on you, there is no salvation. In
the 5th line, by saying "everlasting robes", the poet is resorting to the
personified image of Death with the black robes, Here, the poet is also
comparing Death's robes with a King's, personifying him as nobility. In line 6,
by saying "democrat", shows how there are no rules for Death and he is the
most important being. The third stanza has several examples of this
personification, showing Death's superiority and power. From the 9th to the
11th line, the poem describes Death as a "quiet courtier and presents him as a
king by creating the image of him being surrounded by a group of "obsequious
angels", portraying how the angels are his "royal retinue" and obey him. With
the repetition of "Full" in lines 11 and 12 in "Full royal" and "Full purple",
shows how he is higher than anyone else, presenting him as "the Lord of the
lords". So, this repetition is used to emphasize this powerful and superior image
of Death. Also the use of "purple in line 12, helps personify him as nobility
because this color is usually associated with royalty and nobility. This, again,
accentuates Death's power and superiority. In lines 13 and 14, the Dickinson is
personifying Death by creating the image of a lord lifting his hat to Death. This
portrays Death as superior because even a lord is lifting a hat at him, and this is
a sign of respect. She also personifies him in the 15th line, calling him "the
Lord of lords", which shows his importance and power over all other lords.
Here, Dickinson might also making a comment on religion, saying that Death
has more importance than God because usually, God is mentioned as "the
Lord".