Robert Frost's Poems the Mending Wall

In Robert Frost’s poems the “Mending Wall” and “The Ax-Helve,” he speaks of the different types of neighbors that a person can live next door too. He uses different types of metaphors to show separation and barriers neighbors can put up to exclude themselves. Frost shows how people put obstacles in the way of opening up and letting people into their world. Even when communicating it shows how barriers are put up to keep that separation visible. In this essay I will compare the neighbors in the Mending Wall and The Ax-Helve and show how both neighbor keep obstacles and barriers up to keep themselves alienated.

In the poem the “The Ax-Helve” the ax is used at the barrier from the old world to the new world. Robert Frost introduces the character Baptiste as a very intrusive person. In the first paragraph of the poem you see how he views him.

“I’ve known ere now an interfering branch

Of alder catch my lifter ax behind me.

But that was in the woods. To hold my hand

From striking at another alder’s roots,

And that was, as I say, and alder branch

This was a man, Baptiste, who stole one day” (Frost p. 897)

In this poem Frost depicts Baptiste as being a person of the old ways. He feels that if things were done the “old way” then it has to be better. He talks about the ax being made in a factory and how it wouldn’t be sturdy and it would be of poor quality since it wasn’t made by hand. In this poem, it seems like Baptiste doesn’t want to change with the times nor does he want to allow his children the opportunity to explore new things of the “new world.” With any new things you have to change and if you don’t adapt to the change then you will get lost and be left behind. Baptiste