Physical and metaphorical walls in poetry – "wall repair" and "The Love Song by J Alfred Prufrock"

“Good fences make good neighbours” is an old British proverb that Robert Frost reinvigorated in his 1914 poem “Mending Wall.” According to the narrator’s neighbor, personal space is an inevitable part of living together, even if the boundary between people is only psychological. However, what good fences don’t make is a lot of sense, especially if nature has anything to say about it.

The poem’s narrator talks about how groundwater freezes every winter, bulging the ground in places and causing stones to scatter. Also, the rabbits always hide in the wall, forcing the hunters to go through it to catch them. In fact, the narrator doesn’t even farm the same thing as his neighbor or have any cows to keep track of, so why bother to rebuild the damn thing together every year? “Mind your own business, interrogator boy,” says the neighbor. Oh right, that’s why.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” released just a year later, also addresses the idea of ​​limits, but in a less rural setting. There might well be something in nature that doesn’t love a wall, but Prufrock lives smack in the middle of a city, and it shows; he has a wall around him worthy of a Pink Floyd nightmare.

He is in love with someone, he does not say who, but he is too shy to reveal his feelings to her. He spends his time wandering the dark streets contemplating his situation and putting off his decision. Or he just imagines that he does it while he is distracted at tea parties; we are never sure. It turns out that someone is a bit on the details, which means that we, the community of readers, are left in the dark, which means voila! Prufrock managed to alienate himself a bit more.

Prufrock is so cut off from everyone, in fact, that he actually cuts them into little pieces, metaphorically speaking, anyway. He does not see people as people, but as “faces you meet”, “eyes that fix you” and “[a]rms who have bracelets.” Pretty ironic, coming from a guy who’s terrified of being torn apart by society as a scientific specimen.

So the question is, are people unable to connect in a meaningful way? Kind of, but then again, not really. Think about it: here’s Prufrock, complaining that he can’t express himself and that no one will ever understand him, in 132 of the most riveting lines of poetry in the English language. Spoiler alert: complaining about a lack of communication is actually a form of communication. Or what about the fact that the only time the narrator of “Mending Wall” interacts with his neighbor in the poem is when they, what else, work together to rebuild the wall? Maybe good fences really do make good neighbors.