condition as old as human conditions, but one quiteprevalent in his contemporary society - the struggle between the old and the new, the strugglebetween tradition and change. Notice this idea as it represented in the lines, "Spring is themischief in me, and I wonder/If I could put a notion in his head:/'Why do they make goodneighbors?" The speaker now can be seen as not just the mischief of Spring; she is Spring. Sheis that which is new, the coming of a new season. She is warmer than the neighbor with all hischilly tradition and cold cliches. It is the narrator's desire to mend her neighbor's thinking. Shewishes to "put a notion in his head." However, he wishes only to mend this physical wall, notquestion the presence of the mental walls that brought this structure into being. In the last lines of the poem, Frost drives his thesis home with trademark subtleties thatmade his writings so rich and full of depth, despite there commonplace appearance. Thenarrator muses, "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out,/And to whom I was like to give offence." This is the Spring in the narrator, not satisfied withthe cliche of tradition with which the neighbor identitifes, but as typifies Spring, some of thenew life that warmer weather brings is not always new - sometimes it just a life reborn. Whilethe narrator has evolved from the stagnation of tradition that the neighbor embraces, she is stillsomewhat bound by what has been. Before she "built a wall..." she would question its purpose,but why then does she not do the same in the rebuilding, or mending of a wall. She is, after all,the one who initiated the mending of this wall. Did she "give offence" to her neighbor in thisinitiation? Regardless of the flaws in the narrator's thinking, it is still obvious that she is wellintentioned, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall/That wants it down. I could say 'Elves'to him/But it's not elves exactl...
