Friday, October 25, 2019
Comparing Frost’s Mending Wall and Rosenblatt’s A Game of Catch :: comparison compare contrast essays
Robert Frost’s Mending Wall and Roger Rosenblatt’s A Game of Catch Humans have an uncanny ability to place themselves at a comfortable distance from each other and call it a â€Å"mutual understanding,†a â€Å"friendship,†or even â€Å"true love,†but it is all lies. The essence of man’s mystery is somewhat of a paradox. He yearns to become more familiar with those around him, yet he is unwilling to allow this to happen.            The power of "Mending Wall," one of Frost's most often quoted poems, rests upon an opposition. Its two famous lines contradict each other. The poem upholds that:  Something there is that doesn't love a wall. But it also asserts that: Good fences make good neighbors.  The contradiction is reasonable, for two different types of people utter the conflicting remarks and both are right. Man cannot live without walls, boundaries, limits and especially self-limitations; yet he resents all fetters and is happy at the destruction of any barrier. In "Mending Wall" the boundary line is useless:  There where it is we do not need the wall.  And, to stress the point, the speaker facetiously adds:  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.  One may find far-reaching connotations in this poem. As well as that it states one of the greatest difficulties of our time: whether national walls should be made stronger for our safety, or whether they should be let down, since they impede our progress toward understanding and eventual common humanity.  "Mending Wall" can also be considered a symbolic poem. In the voices of the two men the younger, capricious, "modern" speaker and the old-fashioned farmer who replies with his one dogged sentence, his inherited aphorism. Some may hear the opposition of two forces: the zeal of revolt, which challenges tradition, and the spirit of restraint, which insists that customs must be upheld, built up and continually rebuilt, as a matter of principle.  The poet himself looks down upon such symbolic analysis. He denies that the poem says anything more than it seems to say. The dispute is the heart of the poem. It answers itself in the paradox of people, in neighbors and competitors, in the antagonistic nature of man.            Roger Rosenblatt’s essay, â€Å"A Game of
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