Robert Frost’s Poetry Answers

Read the excerpt from "Mending Wall."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 ballsWe 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.What does the phrase “one on a side” mean?

Why does the neighbor say that “good fences make good neighbours” in "Mending Wall"?

Which practice was common among modernist poets?

Read this excerpt from “The Man Against the Sky” by Edwin Arlington Robinson.Between me and the sunset, like a domeAgainst the glory of a world on fire,Now burned a sudden hill,Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher,With nothing on it for the flame to killSave one who moved and was alone up thereTo loom before the chaos and the glareAs if he were the last god going homeUnto his last desire.Dark, marvelous, and inscrutable he moved onTill down the fiery distance he was gone,—Like one of those eternal, remote thingsThat range across a man's imaginingsWhen a sure music fills him and he knowsWhat he may say thereafter to few men,—The touch of ages having wroughtAn echo and a glimpse of what he thoughtA phantom or a legend until then;For whether lighted over ways that save,Or lured from all repose,If he go on too far to find a grave,Mostly alone he goes.What is the main difference between Robinson’s “The Man Against the Sky” and Frost’s "Mending Wall"?

Read the excerpt from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life; This excerpt is an example of

Read the excerpt from "Mending Wall."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 repairWhere 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. Whom does the speaker blame for the gaps in the wall?

Read the excerpt from "Mending Wall."Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonderIf I could put a notion in his head:"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't itWhere there are cows? But here there are no cows.Before I built a wall I'd ask to knowWhat 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."Now read “The Pasture,” also by Robert Frost. I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):I shan’t be gone long.—You come too.I’m going out to fetch the little calfThat’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,It totters when she licks it with her tongue.I shan’t be gone long.—You come too. Which best accounts for the different views of spring expressed in the poems?

Which practice did Robert Frost have in common with his modernist peers?

Read the excerpt from "Mending Wall." I see him thereBringing a stone grasped firmly by the topIn 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 wellHe says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."Based on the excerpt, what does the speaker think of his neighbor?

Which lines from "Mending Wall" indicate that the neighbor is willing to participate in mending the wall?