The speaker of “Mending Wall,” for example, appears something of a liberal in his disdain of walls, beginning the poem by saying, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” But the speaker is not Frost. Rather, the poem reveals a conflict of “sayings”: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” is balanced by the competing line of the neighbor, “ ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ ” The irony of the poem becomes apparent when we realize that it is the speaker who initiates the mending, the “re-pairing.” And his own openness appears contradicted by his disdain for hunters who knock the wall down: “The work of hunters is another thing:/I have come after them and made repair/Where they have left not one stone on a stone,/But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,/To please the yelping dogs.” Is the work of hunters “another,” a different sort of, thing from what the “frozen-ground-swell” does subtly to the wall, or just one more thing or force? This vigorous aside unmasks the speaker’s none-toopopulist and egalitarian attitude. His contempt and fear of his neighbor and his desire to maintain his own place in an imagined hierarchy of being lead him to call the French-Canadian “an old-stone savage armed,” a primitive clinging to his relics. But the truth of what this “savage” says is borne out in the drama of the poem. Good fences do make good neighbors because they allow for colloquy while also keeping privacy and individuality. Despite their seemingly different positions, both men are leveled equal by the fact that they play the same “outdoor game,/One on a side,” though it is, as Frost would write later, “play for mortal stakes.”

The survival of home and the future is at stake in Frost’s representation of the conflict between men and women. If love poetry had traditionally involved the address of a single speaker to his absent lover, Frost’s development of a poetry in which women have an equal and great presence may be one of his most important contributions to modern poetry. His portraits of women in “A Servant to Servants” (a dramatic monologue), “The Witch of Coös,” “Home Burial,” “The Fear,” “In the Home Stretch,” or “Wild Grapes” are among the greatest and most complex in English poetry. Often Frost appears to speak through these women, and they are not, as some have argued, merely mad or tricksters but powerful ethical figures who subvert the control and reveal the cruelty of those around them. In “Wild Grapes,” the woman narrator resists the reductive instructions of her brother to hang on to her passions and dreams. She has no desire to let go with the heart, even to the point of uselessness and death. The speaker of a “Servant to Servants” reasons because she suffers, and her story becomes a moving example for the botanizers on her doorstep of a soul attempting to maintain itself despite the curse of heredity and the cruelty of her husband. “The Generations of Men” finds a powerful girl teasing a boy with Hamlet-like cleverness and dissembling—in the game of courtship, she exercises the power of choice. The power of women to choose and control the world as well as the sadness at the loss of that power lurks beneath the masquerades of “The Witch of Coös” and “The Pauper Witch of Grafton.” In its explorations of the mythologies of women and nature, the deceptions and insights of naming, and the limits of human control, “Maple” remains an unacknowledged masterpiece.