EV1641
Annual Event by Chalicea
Setter’s Blog
In MENDING WALL, ROBERT FROST tells of repairing the wall between his apple trees and his neighbor’s pine forest. The neighbor insists that GOOD FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBORS.
Setter’s Blog
I am sure that saying “Good fences make good neighbours” was easy to identify for solvers. Robert Frost’s poem, ‘Mending Wall’ is somewhat ambiguous about the conventional idea when he meets his single-minded neighbour in the spring to repair the wall separating their property. He comically points out that his apple trees are unlikely to invade the neighbour’s pine forest – it isn’t as if there were cows, say, involved. The poem contrasts a modern view that boundaries are not necessary between friends, with a traditional fixed idea.
I have long regretted opting for the English literature course, at university and ploughing through Pope, Byron, Sheridan and company, when there was an American literature option. It seemed a safer choice after years of English school literature but now some firm favourites are superb American works like The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury, Miller’s plays, and poetic gems like Frost’s Mending Wall, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, and The Road Not Taken.
Of course, Mending Wall was asking to have a crossword written on its theme – there’s the wall between the apples and the pine trees, though, as usual, I abandoned symmetry to fit in the quotation, that title and the poet’s name. I hope it was a pleasure to solve.
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A full review of this puzzle can be seen over on fifteensquared.