After reading the poem, I think the word mending is important. Rock walls need to be repaired and looked after. You could say the same about our relationships with other people. For some, it's easier to mend the wall than repair the relationship.

Building rock walls is one of the most primitive ways of subjecting our enviornment to our wishes. Before we had cranes and nail guns, we moved rocks. I think Frost is trying to point out that this primitive side of our brains still exists and manifests itself in stacking rocks to make walls.

This seems to reference the earlier line "no one has seen them or heard them made". You can spend all day stacking rocks but they're not going to stay stacked forever. Maybe that's what he's really getting at in this poem. The act of creating the wall can be more important than the wall itself. It's easy to hop over a little rock wall so maybe the point of the wall is to divide and not block passage?

The act of creating a wall between the speaker and his neighbor sounds like it is bringing them together. Walls are generally used to separate people but in this case, the building of the wall is a communal experience between the speaker and his neighbor. The wall being between them physically draws them together.

This sounds like the speaker is ending the poem. The main players in he poem were the saw and the boy. The saw is not talked about after the boy slices his hand and then the boy dies. Since both characters are removed, it makes sense that the poem is about to end.

I wonder if he's talking about the saw meeting the hand or the boy meeting death? If you take the line by itself it could be the boy seeing his mortal wound and that being his first glimpse of the death that is coming for him.

A bit of a weirdly worded line, "That a boy counts so much". It sounds like he was really trying to nail the feeling you get on a job site when your boss says you can start cleaning up early after a long day. He definitely nailed that feeling for me. I wonder if the weirdly worded line is meant to create a pause in your brain while you try to decipher it sort of like the pause from surprise you feel when you get to pack up early.

Really interesting that a plant that could help us also helps the spider but serves as a grave for the moth.

The last line talks about how it's hard to see the whole picture of a thing when you're too close to it. It sounds like the spider catches the moth by camouflaging itself against the backdrop of the flower. Does the spider know that or does it just know that it can get some food if it hangs out in this spot? It reminds me of this trashy tv show called "Monster Bug Wars" I loved as a kid. The show was just edited video and commentary of some ants subduing and killing a wasp or something like that but the producers added these great monster noises. The show, like this poem, took something we would normally not notice and hyper focused on it. If there are designs governing this spider that it cannot see, there are probably designs governing us that we do not notice.

The poem sounded like a brag to me. I find it interesting that instead of talking about how powerful or witty he is, the speaker's trait put forward is how acquainted he is with the quiet, lonely parts of life.

This line sounds like the description of a superhero, faster than the furthest city light. The speaker is an explorer but instead of walking towards something, he is walking away from something.

I'm seeing ambiguity everywhere now that I'm looking for it! The repetition of this line sounds like it could either be the speaker wearily reminding himself of his duties or is he reveling in his journey knowing another sight that made him stop could be just beyond the next bend?

The more I think about this line, the stranger it feels. When I'm driving to the grocery store, I don't think about all the different roads I could take, I just take the quickest road. I wonder if he's being sarcastic. Also, I wonder if him thinking about not being able to travel the other road is actually him going down another road? If he's thinking about that, he might not be paying attention to the road he is on and that would alter his trip on the road.

Another ambiguous point. Is he sighing with relief because he made it through the woods or is he regretting the path he took? Or is he just sighing because he's sick of telling this story?

After listening to the different readings of this poem, I'm having a hard time telling if he's being sincere here.

Life put them through the mill. This seems a little too on the nose for me but I understand why he made that choice. They were ground up and made into a sad poem.

I had trouble figuring out what was happening in this last stanza but this line made it abundantly clear. Maybe it's me being dense but this last bit feels weaker than the previous two stanzas. I thought she was going to kill herself because her husband had but I had to read it a few times to understand it.

I don't think he's thinking about the past here. I think he's thinking about reasons for why he can't do things or why he feels disconnected.

The whole poem is giving me Poe vibes and the more I hear "nothing more" the more it sounds like "nevermore"

Just rewatched "Fargo" last night and the repetition of this line sounds like something Buschemi's character would repeat. If there's nothing more to say, why is he saying it again? I think he's saying that there is nothing more to say about the people but there is still something to say. Or he might just be indulging himself in a good ole fashioned pity party.

It's interesting that they never name the wife. I wonder if he didn't include her name because he thought the word "wife" fit better instead of "Rebecca Bright", or whatever her name is, or because he wanted to poem to focus on Reuben and that would have been extra information the reader didn't need.

I might be a bad person but this last line made me laugh because it's such a radical left turn. The poem is talking up Corey on almost every line until "one calm summer night" he decides to end it. If you cut out the last two lines it would be a completely different poem.