Robert Frost's Poetics of Isolation and Community

Introduction: The Wall as Symbol of Human Disconnection

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall," reads the first line of Robert Frost's classic poem "Mending Wall." The narrative depicts two farmers — one surrounded by pine and the other by apple orchard — engaged in the almost ritualistic action of summer fence mending common among New England farmers. The apple farmer, speaking in the voice of the poet, notes that his "apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines." Yet still, the farmers persist in mending fences and keeping barriers between one another. This theme of attempted isolation followed by a reaching toward connection, mirrored in the behavior of the natural world, runs through "Mending Wall," "The Telephone," and "The Wood-pile."

The larger theme of "Mending Wall," though superficially about physical walls, is the disconnection between human beings enforced by legal property lines and by human-constructed technology in the form of fences and boundaries delegated by carefully surveyed, separating farm plots. This disconnection is symbolically threatened by the "something there is that doesn't love a wall, / That wants it down" — a force that breaks down artificial barriers between human beings, not so much through the poet's own agency, at least in the speaker's perception, but through the natural world itself.

Technology, Nature, and the Barriers Between People

Technology creates rifts between human beings even while nature breaks them down. Humanity, in the primitive form of stone construction and in the myths and clichés holding that fences make good neighbors, tries to keep people apart. Even modern technology supposedly designed to forge better connections and create more stable ties between human beings in a spread-out world — the telephone — creates barriers. In "The Telephone," it is the poet who flees connection with humanity as he wanders in desired solitude. "First tell me what it was you thought you heard," says the speaker, showing how even modern technology breeds instability of connection, generating misperceptions of hearing rather than serving as a genuine aid to it.

Rather than the literal implement he could use to call a friend, the speaker holds a flower that resembles a telephone. The questions he asks suggest the child's game of confusion rather than the clarity that a constant telephone connection with others might produce: "I listened and I thought I caught the word — What was it? Did you call me by my name?" This constant questioning recalls the mischievous questioning of the speaker of "Mending Wall" directed at his neighbor on the other side of the fence, suggesting that Frost sees the poet as a societal gadfly — one who questions the conventional wisdom that good fences make good neighbors and that technical communication is superior to the communication of the natural world. The poet's desired connection through the natural world of flowers also parallels nature's breaking down of the fences in "Mending Wall."

The Telephone and the Language of Nature

More powerful than the human-constructed telephone is the language of flowers. Only in nature does Frost cry out to others; when among humanity, he seeks solitude, as evidenced by his early wandering at the beginning of the poem. In "The Telephone," what is subtle and naturally spoken in nature is more truthful than what is exchanged overtly. "I leaned my head, / And holding by the stalk, I listened and I thought I caught the word."

Like "Mending Wall," the poet in "The Telephone" begins in a state of isolation rather than human connection, even though the speaker evidently seeks some form of communication. "When I was just as far as I could walk," the poem begins — in other words, as far away as the poet can walk from humanity — he suddenly gives in to an impulse to use a flower as a telephone. The fence menders of "Mending Wall" construct disconnection through walls, yet are still forced to communicate because the task cannot be completed by any one person alone.

The parallels between the two poems underscore Frost's consistent structural pattern: the speaker begins by moving away from community and then, in some form, reaches back toward it. Whether through a flower held to the ear or a question lobbed across a stone wall, the impulse toward connection cannot be fully suppressed.

Conclusion: Transient Connections in Frost's New England

The poem ends on a poignant note of failed connection. Despite his respect for the bird's solitude and his own solitary wanderings, when the poet comes across an abandoned woodpile he cannot help but fantasize about the character of its cutter and the reasons it was left behind: "I thought that only / Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks / Could so forget his handiwork on which / He spent himself the labor of his axe, / And leave it there far from a useful fireplace / To warm the frozen swamp as best it could / With the slow smokeless burning of decay."

Nature and human innovations to cope with nature — as in the mending and breaking-down of physical walls or the creation of real and flower telephones — create powerful but momentary connections that are transient in "The Wood-pile" as well. Rather than warming the speaker or the woodpile's absent creator, the technical innovation of the accumulated wood reveals only a stranger the poet can never meet. Across all three poems, Frost's New England setting functions as more than backdrop: it is an emotional landscape in which the human desire for community and the fact of isolation exist in permanent, unresolved tension.

Works Cited

Frost, Robert. "Mending Wall." From University of Pennsylvania Poetry Website. Last modified: Friday, 06-Aug-2004. http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/frost-mending.html

Frost, Robert. "The Telephone." From Literature Website. http://www.lit.kobe-u.ac.jp/~hishika/frost.htm

Frost, Robert. "The Wood-pile: New England 1915." From American Poems Website. http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/robertfrost/12061