A Reflection by Karla Hines

Mending WallThe poem is not as simple as it seems. At a first glance it’s 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 I’m concerned there are two people in the world; me and the rest of the people in the world.

Mending WallI 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.

After Apple PickingIt took a lot of thought to catch anything from After Apple Picking and I didn’t think I’d get it. What I pulled from it is that it’s about life. The barrel the narrator didn’t fill is not for ambition as you’d 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.

After Apple PickingWe are all guilty of using others to further our own ends, albeit some resort to this more than others and some don’t know what they’re doing when they do. I do it all the time and it generally works. For instance, when I need something even people I don’t 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 won’t be off thinking of apples and the harvest that I gave my soul for (I’ve never picked apples), but I know I’ll think along similar lines if my life keeps going the way it is.

BirchesSwinging 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. He’s 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.

BirchesI’ve 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.

I’ve 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 don’t stand back up after the weight of the ice bows them, I’m a human being and I vow to be different.

The Wood-PileThe 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 he’d never visit, but eventually he ended up there anyway.

It seems that he’s 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 it’s tail that catches my attention and leads me to my father’s legacy, but until then, I will stop before I reach the wood beyond the frozen swamp and wait.

On the critique of the Wood-PileThis article was extremely long and slightly… boring. It’s in-depth but hard to follow unless you’re a professor of English at some advanced university.

The writer talks about the poem being about leaving the familiar behind and traversing something that doesn’t look overly pleasant to come to a sort of senseless act of kindness. In my own opinion, this isn’t what the poem’s 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.

BibliographyMr. 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