Robert Frost

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Robert Frost
A Reflection by Karla Hines
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Mending Wall
The poem is not as simple as it seems. At a first
glance its about two guys fixing a wall. Not a
brick wall but the kind where you just sort of
pile up the stones on top of each other and hope
they stay put. Of course, the higher you build
them, the easier Mother Nature can knock it
down. I have a wall like this, but not in the
physical sense. My wall is around me. If I were
to write a poem like this, I suppose it would be
about my trench coat and my interaction with the
world. Like in Mending Wall, as far as Im
concerned there are two people in the world me
and the rest of the people in the world.
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Mending Wall
I suppose the sentiment I mentioned before is a
bit callous to most people, especially since
Mending Wall is arguing against putting up
emotional barriers in the first place. The poem
made me wonder why I have barriers around myself.
The answer is simple. I do not like pain. Pain is
not something most people enjoy having inflicted
on themselves. Hence, to ward off those that
might cause me some sort of pain, I build my
wall. My wall, like the one in the poem, is
broken. My trench coat literally fell apart and
that bothers me to no end because I am without
defenses and there will be no spring wall
rebuilding for me.
4
After Apple Picking
It took a lot of thought to catch anything from
After Apple Picking and I didnt think Id get
it. What I pulled from it is that its about
life. The barrel the narrator didnt fill is not
for ambition as youd think, but for
relationships. The apples are relationships. The
narrator is about to die and his brain is
presenting his life. Obviously, he was all work
and no play. He has basically met people, used
them to further himself and then threw them out
into the cider apple pile.
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After Apple Picking
We are all guilty of using others to further our
own ends, albeit some resort to this more than
others and some dont know what theyre doing
when they do. I do it all the time and it
generally works. For instance, when I need
something even people I dont know will offer
assistance because people tend to like me and I
have some amount of charm. At the end of my life,
I most likely wont be off thinking of apples and
the harvest that I gave my soul for (Ive never
picked apples), but I know Ill think along
similar lines if my life keeps going the way it
is.
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Birches
Swinging on birches sounds like fun to me. Only
creative children with too much time on their
hands and not enough people around to squash
their dreams would be perpetrating such an act.
Then the pathless woods of the world hits and
they start getting lost. I slipped through the
cracks long ago, but not as far as the narrator.
Hes definitely been to the school of hard knocks
and is reminiscing about times before Truth had
shattered the illusion that he had built for
himself when he was young and still had an
imagination.
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Birches
Ive certainly felt the crush of outside
expectations weighing on my shoulders and not
giving me time to be imaginative or to have any
fun. I make time anyway and then the world seems
vastly unfair. Ive considered what it would be
like to just get away from earth for a while, but
then I realize like the narrator of the poem that
to leave earth like that would mean not being
able to come back and that would not be good.
Better to endure hardship and rely on memories of
times gone by than to try and escape it. Besides,
even thought the birches dont stand back up
after the weight of the ice bows them, Im a
human being and I vow to be different.
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The Wood-Pile
The poem is about passing on your legacy in life.
The bird was a hobby that became an obsession to
the narrator and led him to a wood pile in the
middle of nowhere. The wood pile is the legacy of
someone. Probably his father, which he thought
hed never visit, but eventually he ended up
there anyway. It seems that hes the type like
me. I have vowed never to be as my father is. I
refuse. I will one day find that little bird with
the white feather in its tail that catches my
attention and leads me to my fathers legacy, but
until then, I will stop before I reach the wood
beyond the frozen swamp and wait.
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On the critique of the Wood-Pile
This article was extremely long and slightly
boring. Its in-depth but hard to follow unless
youre a professor of English at some advanced
university. The writer talks about the poem being
about leaving the familiar behind and traversing
something that doesnt look overly pleasant to
come to a sort of senseless act of kindness. In
my own opinion, this isnt what the poems about,
but I probably read to deeply into things and
tried too desperately to connect some aspect of
it to my life that the interpretation was skewed
for me.
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Bibliography
Mr. Jay Michalowski, Tim Kroemer and Stephen J.
Goodson(1999) http//www.robertfrost.org/
Prepared and Compiled by Cary Nelson and Edward
Brunner http//www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f
/frost/frost.htm