MENDING WALL

This poem is the first work in Frost's second book of poetry, “North of Boston,” which was published upon his return from England in 1915. While living in England with his family, Frost was exceptionally homesick for the farm in New Hampshire where he had lived with his wife from 1900 to 1909. Despite the eventual failure of the farm, Frost associated his time in New Hampshire with a peaceful, rural sensibility that he instilled in the majority of his subsequent poems. “Mending Wall” is autobiographical on an even more specific level: a French-Canadian named Napoleon Guay had been Frost’s neighbour in New Hampshire and the two had often walked along their property line and repaired the wall that separated their land. Ironically, the most famous line of the poem (“Good fences make good neighbours”) was not invented by Frost himself, but was rather a phrase that Guay frequently declared to Frost during their walks. This particular adage was a popular colonial proverb in the middle of the 17th century, but variations of it also appeared in Norway (“There must be a fence between good neighbours”), Germany (“Between neighbour’s gardens a fence is good”), Japan (“Build a fence even between intimate friends”), and even India (“Love your neighbour, but do not throw down the dividing wall”).

In terms of form, “Mending Wall” is not structured with stanzas; it is a simple forty-five lines of first-person narrative. Frost does maintain iambic stresses, but he is flexible with the form in order to maintain the conversational feel of the poem. He also shies away from any obvious rhyme patterns and instead relies upon the occasional internal rhyme and the use of assonance in certain ending terms (such as “wall,” “hill,” “balls,” “well”).

In the poem itself, Frost creates two distinct characters that have different ideas about what exactly makes a person a good neighbour. The narrator deplores his neighbour’s preoccupation with repairing the wall; he views it as old-fashioned and even archaic. After all, he quips, his apples are not going to invade the property of his neighbour’s pinecones. Moreover, within a land of such of such freedom and discovery, the narrator asks, are such borders necessary to maintain relationships between people? Despite the narrator’s sceptical view of the wall, the neighbour maintains his seemingly “old-fashioned” mentality, responding to each of the narrator’s disgruntled questions and rationalizations with nothing more than the adage: “Good fences make good neighbours.”

As the narrator points out, the very act of mending the wall seems to be in opposition to nature. Every year, stones are dislodged and gaps suddenly appear, all without explanation. Every year, the two neighbours fill the gaps and replace the fallen boulders, only to have parts of the wall fall over again in the coming months. It seems as if nature is attempting to destroy the barriers that man has created on the land, even as man continues to repair the barriers, simply out of habit and tradition.

Ironically, while the narrator seems to begrudge the annual repairing of the wall, Frost subtly points out that the narrator is actually more active than the neighbour. It is the narrator who selects the day for mending and informs his neighbour across the property. Moreover, the narrator himself walks along the wall at other points during the year in order to repair the damage that has been done by local hunters. Despite his sceptical attitude, it seems that the narrator is even more tied to the tradition of wall-mending than his neighbour. Perhaps his sceptical questions and quips can then be read as an attempt to justify his own behaviour to himself. While he chooses to present himself as a modern man, far beyond old-fashioned traditions, the narrator is really no different from his neighbour: he too clings to the concept of property and division, of ownership and individuality.

Ultimately, the presence of the wall between the properties does ensure a quality relationship between the two neighbours. By maintaining the division between the properties, the narrator and his neighbour are able to maintain their individuality and personal identity as farmers: one of apple trees, and one of pine trees. Moreover, the annual act of mending the wall also provides an opportunity for the two men to interact and communicate with each other, an event that might not otherwise occur in an isolated rural environment. The act of meeting to repair the wall allows the two men to develop their relationship and the overall community far more than if each maintained their isolation on separate properties.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Dulce et Decorum Est, hailed as the best poem of World War 1, is a skillfully crafted text which has been loved by all for its realistically gritty and gruesome representation of World War 1 and for its ironic quip at those who preach war as glorious.

The first stanza is populated by hunchbacked beggars (line 1), coughing hags (line 2) and soldiers who are more like zombies than men as they lamely march asleep, blind and drunk with fatigue(lines 5, 6, 7). It is this trifold simile, quickly dropped onto the reader with the juxtaposition of a fluid iambic pentameter, that inaugurates the representation of war as three things: identity stripping, individualism forbidding and both body and mind haunting.

Alongside this ghoulish imagery, another juxtaposition is created. This time of the alliteration of contrastingly hard K’s and T’s in the lines 2, 7 and 8, and vague, thumping M’s in line 5. The former bring to mind the cracking of gunshots and the latter conjure up images of missiles hitting the ground. As a result, the apprehension already created in the poem is exacerbated. The resulting tension, combined with the atmospheric imagery, creates a scene that represents war as nothing less than devilish.

The second stanza is a stark contrast to the first. On line 9, Wilfred Owen interrupts the safe iambic pentameter with the short and harsh stabs of “Gas! Gas! Quick boys!”. Not a moment later does the calm become action and the slumbering march an “ecstasy of fumbling” (line 9) as the soldiers try to fit their gas mask. Due to the introduction of gas, the reader realises that this poem is set in World War 1 and with this realisation comes a question: Wasn’t World War 1 normally poetically characterised by patriotism and the honour seeking of young soldiers? 

However this hint of irony is quickly snatched from the reader as they are told of a soldier who wasn't able to fit his mask quickly enough. A soldier never given a name, just described as yelling, stumbling, guttering, choking and finally, drowning.

With their depiction of the soldiers as hags, beggars and walking dead, and the replaying of the soldier’ death in in the speaker’s dreams, it is these two stanzas that really expresses the representation of war that Owen was trying to impress upon the reader’s mind: soldiers either die in a nightmare, or live with their bodies forever haunted, and their minds forever taunted.

The final stanza extends the imagery of the dying man with alliteration, sibilance, linking rhyme and even a reference to satan himself. The second important part to this stanza is the shift in setting and purpose; the poem now becomes a challenging question posed to the reader. At first, it seems as though the soldier is still speaking. However, the reader soon realizes that speaker is now Wilfred Owen himself. 

With the words ‘My Friend’ on line 25, Owen is actually making a direct reference to a poet named Jessie Pope, who with her famous poem “Who’s For The Game”, ignorantly compared war to a sporting match. It is her whom Owen reproaches when he, after declaring it a ‘Lie’, quotes the famous Latin words of Homer, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”. Ending the poem the poem in such a way has a great affect; the irony sinks in, and so does the final facet of Owen’s representation of World War 1: a rebuke to all poets who hail war merry.

LAMB TO THE SLAUGHTER

Dahl commences with a picture of static cosiness in a middle-class, domestic setting. Mary Maloney, six months pregnant, waits for her policeman husband Patrick Maloney to come home from work. The scene emphasizes domesticity: ‘‘the room was warm and clean, the curtains drawn.’’ Matching chairs, lamps, glasses, and whisky, soda, and ice cubes await. Mary watches the clock, smiling quietly to herself as each minute brings her husband closer to home. When he arrives, she takes his coat and hangs it in the closet. The couple sits and drinks in silence—Mary comfortable with the knowledge that Patrick does not like to talk much until after the first drink. So by deliberate design, everything seems normal until Mary notices that Patrick drains most of his drink in a single swallow, and then pours himself another, very strong drink. Mary offers to fix dinner and serve it to him so that he does not have to leave his chair, although they usually dine out on Thursdays. She also offers to prepare a snack. Patrick declines all her offers of food. The reader becomes aware of a tension which escapes Mary’s full notice.

Patrick confronts Mary and makes a speech, only the upshot of which is given explicitly: ‘‘so there it is. . . . And I know it’s a kind of bad time to be telling you, but there simply wasn’t any other way. Of course, I’ll give you money and see you’re looked after. But there needn’t really be any fuss.’’ For reasons which Dahl does not make explicit, Patrick has decided to leave his pregnant wife.Mary goes into shock. At first she wonders if she imagined the whole thing. She moves automatically to retrieve something from the basement freezer and prepare supper. She returns with a frozen leg of lamb to find Patrick standing by a window with his back to her. Hearing her come in, he tells her not to make supper for him, that he is going out. With no narrative notice of any emotional transformation, Mary walks up to him and brings the frozen joint of meat down ‘‘as hard as she could’’ on his head. Patrick falls dead.

She emerges from her shock to feel panic. Do the courts sentence pregnant women to death? Do they execute both mother and child? Do they wait until the tenth month? Not wanting to take a chance on her child’s life, she immediately begins setting up an alibi. She puts the lamb in the oven to cook, washes her hands, and tidies her hair and makeup. She hurries to her usual grocery store, telling the grocer, Sam, that she needed potatoes and peas because Patrick did not want to eat out and she was ‘‘caught . . . without any vegetables in the house.’’ In a moment of truly black comedy, the grocer asks about dessert: ‘‘How about afterwards? What are you going to give him for afterwards?’’ and she agrees to a slice of cheesecake. On her way home, she mentally prepares herself to be shocked by anything tragic or terrible she might find.

When she sees her husband’s corpse again, she remembers how much she once loved him, and her tears of loss are genuine. She is sincerely distraught when she calls the local police station—the one where Patrick has worked—to report what she has found. Mary knows the policemen who report to the crime scene, and she casts Sergeant Jack Noonan in the role of her comforter. A doctor, police photographer, fingerprint expert, and two detectives join the investigation, while Noonan periodically checks on Mary. She tells her story again, from the beginning: Patrick came home, was too tired to go out for supper, so she left him relaxing at home while she started the lamb cooking and then ran out for vegetables. One detective checks with the grocer, who confirms Mary’s account. No one seems to seriously consider her a suspect. The focus of the investigation in on

finding the murder weapon— which must be a large, heavy blunt instrument. The detectives ask Mary about tools, and she professes ignorance but says that there may be some out in the garage. She remains in a chair while the house is searched.

Noonan tries to persuade Mary to stay somewhere else for the night, but she refuses. She asks him to bring her a drink and suggests that he have one too. Eventually all of the police investigators are standing around, sipping drinks, tired from their fruitless search. Noonan notices that the oven is still on and the lamb has finished cooking. Mary thanks him for turning the oven off and then asks her dead husband’s gathered colleagues–knowing that they have worked long past their own mealtimes—to eat the dinner she had fixed for Patrick. She could not eat a thing, she tells them, but Patrick would want her to offer them ‘‘decent hospitality,’’ especially as they are the men who will catch her husband’s killer.The final scene of the story concerns the policemen eating in the kitchen and discussing the case while Mary listens from the living room. The men agree that the killer probably discarded the massive murder weapon almost immediately, and predict that they will find it on the premises. Another theorizes that the weapon is probably ‘‘right under our very noses.’’

Themes

Betrayal:‘‘Lamb to the Slaughter’’ tells of at least one betrayal: Patrick Maloney’s unexplained decision to leave his pregnant wife. This violation of the marriage-vow is obviously not the only betrayal in the story, however. Mary’s killing of her husband is perhaps the ultimate betrayal. Her elaborately planned alibi and convincing lies to the detectives also constitute betrayal.

Identity:Dahl plays with the notion of identity both at the level of popular psychology and at a somewhat more philosophical, or perhaps anthropological, level. At the level of popular psychology, Dahl makes it clear through his description of the Maloney household that Mary has internalized the bourgeois, or middle class, ideal of a young mid-twentieth century housewife, maintaining a tidy home and catering to her husband; pouring drinks when the man finishes his day is a gesture that comes from movies and magazines of the day. Mary’s sudden murderous action shatters the image that we have of her and that she seems to have of herself. Dahl demonstrates, in the deadly fall of the frozen joint, that ‘‘identity’’ can be fragile. (Once she shatters her own identity, Mary must carefully reconstruct it for protective purposes, as when she sets up an alibi by feigning a normal conversation with the grocer.) In the anthropological sense, Dahl appears to suggest that, in essence, human beings are fundamentally nasty and brutish creatures capable of precipitate and bloody acts. Then there are the police detectives, who pride themselves on their ability to solve a crime, but whom Mary sweetly tricks into consuming the main exhibit. Their identity, or at least their competency, is thrown into doubt.

Love and Passion:At the beginning of ‘‘Lamb to the Slaughter,’’ Mary Maloney feels love and physical passion for her husband Patrick. She luxuriates in his presence, in the ‘‘warm male glow that came out of him to her,’’ and adores the way he sits, walks, and behaves. Even far along into her pregnancy, she hurries to greet him, and waits on him hand and foot—much more attentively, it appears from his reactions, than he would like. Patrick is presumably motivated to leave his wife by an overriding passion for something or someone else. Mary’s mention of his failure to advance at work, and his own wish that she not make a ‘‘fuss’’ about their separation because ‘‘It wouldn’t be very good for my job’’ indicate that it may be professional success that he desires. His treatment of his wife does not suggest that he loves her.

Passivity:The concept of passivity figures in the story. The first pages of the story portray Mary’s existence as almost mindlessly passive: she sits and watches the clock, thinking that each minute brings her husband closer to her. She is content to watch him closely and try to anticipate his moods and needs. Patrick’s predictability up to this point is part of this passivity. The two are living a clockwork life against which, in some way, each ultimately rebels. Passivity appears as the repression of passion, and passion finds a way to reassert itself.

Justice and Injustice:The question of justice and injustice is directly related to the question of revenge. ‘‘Lamb to the Slaughter’’ narrates a train of injustices, beginning with Patrick’s betrayal of Mary and their marriage, peaking with Mary’s killing of Patrick, and finding its denouement in Mary’s deception of the investigating officers. Patrick acts unjustly (or so it must be assumed on the basis of the evidence) in announcing his abandonment of Mary, for this breaks the wedding oath; Mary acts unjustly, in a way far exceeding her husband’s injustice, in killing Patrick, and she compounds the injustice by concealing it from the authorities.

Commentary

“Lamb to The Slaughter” may be an easy read to understand its literal meaning, but one needs to go little further than this to derive the true meaning the story has to convey. In order to understand their meanings that lie concealed in the title’s depth, the reader should be sensitive to scan the crux of the story. Otherwise, one may get easily misled.The theme of deception is in fact introduced in the title itself. ‘Lamb to The Slaughter’ is not to be understood as the usual gentle lamb which is taken to the slaughter house, but as the lamb with immense potential to slaughter its butcher.

The protagonist of the story, Mrs. Maloney is an ideal wife who loves her husband from the core of her heart and counts every single second of his presence to be precious. She is no doubt a lady with lamb-like character with gentleness, docility, devotion and homeliness, but she is also the most jovial person as long as she is with Patrick, her husband. She is also projected as a person who can do anything for her husband’s sake.

Contrarily, as deception unfolds its menace she is naturally forced to drive to the other side of her human nature. She is extraordinarily alerted when she realizes that her true love for him is taken too far to be treated as of no value. Gradually her passion of anger, frustration and disappointment blindfold her to commit the most deadly scene that she could never imagine otherwise. The dreadful action takes place within a flicker of time.It is the total deception of Patrick that leads to this gruesome act in the house that had no forebodings in the past. It is this inhuman character of her dear husband that shakes her faith and totally blinds her to wildly avenge for his deed. Understanding the magnitude of the matter, most women in her situation would go into that degree of frenzy.

The theme of deception takes its double fold, when Maloney embarks on revenge. She not only shocks her husband to death but the readers too, when she turns out to be like a tigress with her strategic forays.Once she realizes that she is into an affair there is no going back for her. So she wittily plans to deceive everybody involved in the matter. There is no exception for the detectives. Why should she trust others when she knows her most trusted person failed to hold accountability. In that regard she even succeeds in making the detectives eat away the whole meat club which is the testimony of her crime that would have darkened the rest of her life.At the end, Mrs. Maloney

becomes a good deceiver as she successfully deceives many besides her husband who deceived her at first, hence the title, ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’.

Justification of the Title:The story ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ is a story that presents human characters with all its vices and virtues, with all its positive and negative qualities blended together. The story begins with Mary Maloney, six months pregnant and a very affectionate and devoted wife eagerly waiting for her policeman husband Patrick Maloney. She is an exemplary housewife maintaining her house neat and clean and willingly doing everything for the comfort and happiness of her husband. Every day she eagerly waits for the return of her husband. Thus we can comfortably say that she symbolises a lamb – an innocent and gentle creature. But when she realizes that everything was over from her husband’s side and that he has decided to leave her and break their marriage she immediately decides, out of extreme frustration and anger’ to slaughter her husband. After killing her husband she does not feel sad, nor does she regret her action. Rather she cleverly makes a perfect alibi to save herself from all the consequences of her crime and she becomes successful too. Thus the title of the story is very appropriate and suitable.From other point of view too, the title appears to be very suitable. Patrick Maloney, the husband, too can be considered to be a lamb. As people often kill a lamb without any fuss or warning so he has been slaughtered by his wife without any warning or fuss. Therefore the title, once again, seems to be appropriate. However we should not forget that keeping his monstrous actions in mind – his decision to leave his wife when she is so caring and loving and at the time when she is six months pregnant – it is difficult to associate him with such an innocent creature as lamb. Thus his association with lamb could be valid only for his slaughter like a lamb. And lastly we should not forget that a lamb (leg) has been used in this story as the tool, as the weapon for the murder and hence from this point of view too, the title of the story is very much appropriate.