Frost and Stevens

*Sigh*... For this weeks readings we were assigned Frost and Stevens both of which are poems.... I thought to myself "this should be easy". Wrong. As I began reading I realized that these poems have a lot more to say then they actually do. I'm currently struggling on where to start and what to write about... but I will give it my best.
I will begin with Frost and the first poem on our assignment. "Mending Wall"... several times through out the poem the author says; "Good fences make good neighbors." To me that says we don't want people to know who we really are. We build walls around us to protect ourselves maybe. Or maybe even we hide our true identities from our neighbors so we don't have to deal with explaining anything to anyone.
Looking at the poem as a whole and taking the larger picture of it all, considering it was written in 1914, the country was going through some rough and controversial times. I almost want to say that’s what he is talking about. People and the nation divided.
I will take a shot at another one of Frost poems “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep”. Here I believe he is talking about the American society. People don’t look inside the souls of one another. They only see the color of ones skin or the social class of one another. This thought entered my mind when I read the fourth stanza first two lines. “They cannot look out far. They cannot look in deep.” I think people even now a day are stubborn, and don’t like to change. People back in the beginning of 1900s were even more close-minded then they are now. Changing someone’s mind can be the most difficult task. We don’t want to look at the big picture. Most people judge the book by its cover so to speak. And that’s what I think Frost is trying to say here. Look beyond someone’s race. Look deep into the soul.
Stevens to me is a lot harder to read. I keep reading through his poems over and over and cannot make sense of what he is trying to say. “The Snow Man” caught my attention because of the title. But I don’t see how it has anything to do with the poem? The last stanza all three lines stood out to me. Personally they were my favorite even though I might not understand them.
“For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
Maybe Stevens like Frost is talking about the nation at the present time. No one wants to listen to one another. Everyone is in it for himself or herself.