"Mending Wall" Robert Frost listen to poet himself recite his poem

Mending Wall
By Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
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 offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
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.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

[@northernvibe4870]

How cool is the internet? We get to hear the poet himself read his own work, read God knows how long ago. I must say, he didn't cadence the work as I have always read it in my head. Thanks for putting this up.

[@christinemartin63]

A wry, humorous poem! (Surprisingly, he recites it very solemnly.) Thanks for posting.

[@aarabhipramod3117]

My fav poet is robert frost

[@caliburntl8855]

I also believe that this poet is the best

[@willhatchet]

Bro me tooooo!!!11!!11!!!!!11!!!!!1!!!!!11!!!!!!!!!11!11!!!!!1!!!!

[@Zesales1]

Bump

[@1969sofine]

Robert Service > Robert Frost 😝

[@BJ-fj6jw]

someone said poetry is an extraodinary decription of an ordinary perception ... i wonder if this piece by Frost inspired them to say that. what say you?

[@caliburntl8855]

This changed the way I think of life, I will now think of life as a trophy because I earned the right to live, thank you Robert Frost for these lovely words you have graced me with

[@Zithn]

I need your help can u explain this poem a little bit to me I’m trying to grasp it but it’s quite hard I love poems but this one I need a little help on would you mind?

[@caliburntl8855]

@@Zithn this is 1900's trump trying to tell everyone to build a wall

[@hbbarn8607]

Three parts to this series, just search for part b and c. kzbin.info/www/bejne/bYuXdIdjmMidhrs

[@kevinphillips150]

You were given the right to live by being born. The rest is up to you.

[@s.mayurispoetryblowsyourbl4806]

WELL READ!

[@malvavisco10]

Wow, when was this recorded?

[@nymphrodellsalavin]

I'm going to be honest, it isn't perfect. It's still far and away the best reading I've heard though. You can tell Robert Frost gets the poem... he should! he wrote it after all...

[@sruti19jan]

I kind of agree to the neighbour, unpopular opinion, ik, but I think walls (or boundaries) are what keeps us from ruining the bond we have with people we know 🤷

[@JJJRRRJJJ]

I agree. Frost comes across as highly condescending… lacking self-awareness… dismissing his neighbor as a shallow know-nothing who can’t even think for himself, as opposed to the ever-so-enlightened, free-thinking, worldly man that he himself his. Gives little effort to consider the alternate perspective charitably. _He_ seems to be the closed-minded one to me.

[@rhymingvine9516]

I don't know, I thought about the Berlin Wall while reading this poem and listening (and I have no context for it at this moment). I don't think that keeping out neighbors or lacking self-awareness for your neighbors is the point here but maybe how we use fences and walls to separate us from one another rather than respecting the boundaries we set without having to state/show them. /gen /lh

[@sruti19jan]

@@rhymingvine9516 when we were taught this poem in school, we were told that Robert Frost in his poems, never forces any ideas on us. He keeps his poems pretty vague so it's pretty much up to the reader to interpret the meaning and take a side. This ones about maintaining a barrier vs not ( physical or otherwise. Depends on how you interpret it) and stopping by woods on a snowy evening is about duty vs desire. It's up to you to choose. Frost takes sides, sure. But again if you read closely, he never says which side of the argument is the supposed correct argument

[@felixhutter4547]

But in this specific case if they had a good fence(which they didn't have to fix every year) they wouldn't meet it every year as their ritual. So in this specific case the bad wall makes them better neighbors

[@oliveleaf7376]

Frost is interesting in how stripped down and universalist his poems are, they're not about a specific time or place, but about the attitudes of people. There's a lot of subtext that the neighbor seems to miss in the inherent metaphor of the wall, and that's the issue Frost has with him, more than his actual beliefs about the wall. One of the most obvious issues with the neighbor's view of the world is that their wall is demonstrably not a good "fence", thus making the metaphor the neighbor is using fall apart. Just like the wall does! That is what forces them to interact with one another as they each repair their side, the flaw in the metaphor is staring the neighbor in the face, and he just keeps repeating "good fences make good neighbors"