Contrast Essay Sample: Mending Wall and Let America Be America Again

Mending Wall is a literature work that revolves around the hardship that is experienced in the society in an attempt to change the traditional conventions. The wall acts as the dividing factor between the assets of the two neighbors who keep on repairing the wall now and then. The mending of the wall indicates how the neighbor is old-fashioned and the way they still believe in the ancient practices. The neighbor confirms the same when they keep on repeating the phrase, Good fences make good neighbors. The phrase was borrowed from the old colonial saying that was used in Germany, Japan and India on the issue of the neighborhood. The speaker in Mending Wall, however, remains unsavory unconvinced and also goes the extra mile of using mischievous methods to press the neighbor to look past the old-fashioned idiocy of that kind of reasoning. The speaker of the poem imagines his neighbor to be from a Victorian period and an existing instance of a dark-age mindset, an attribute that made his neighbor not be easily swayed. The neighbor instead just repeats the proverb all over again. On the other hand, Let America Be America Again is a poem that clearly captures the American Dream that in a nutshell never transpired. The poem also investigates issues relating to impartiality and freedom among the African-Americans struggles and also those who were struggling economically, characterized by social discrimination and biased treatments. This poem also focuses on issues and related events that were top notch during those times. The poem also stretches out to discuss different sectors in the American society, elaborating about specific conditions and their identical circumstances.

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In Mending Wall form, the blank verse seems to be the standard pattern of the poem even though some of the lines tend to match along in blank verses appearances lock-step iambs, five well-informed. Frost tried to preserve five strained syllables in each line but mixed the feet expansively to maintain the standard speech like the superiority of the stanza. Also, there are no verse breaks whatsoever, no observable end rhymes, and rhyming forms, but most of the end words in the poem seems to share the some repetition such as wall, hill, stone mean, etc. In Let America be America Again, Hughes employed different literary expedients in the poem spread among many different verses. He used rhyme specifically in lines 2, and 4 with illustrations such as be and free and also in lines 6 and 8 rhymed words like dreamed and schemed and so on throughout the poem. The poem also uses strong imagery such as the line I am the worker sold to the machine which yields a resilient effect and the perfect description of what exactly workers are going through.

Mending Wall utilizes commentary to help readers avoid the consequences of forced memorization, which is never enjoyable in most cases. The poem is dark, relaxed yet completely serene. It is also submerged in many levels of different meaning that are inferred by its well-wrought recommendations. This kind of insinuations encourages many reader interpretations which help in making definitive evaluations suspect. In contrast to Mending Wall, Let America Be America Again has one of the best portrayed rhythmic quality that leaves the readers with a non-fading imprint altogether. Even though the poem illustrates and describes the suffering the lower classes in the American society were going through, the song also tries to explain a fresh picture of the African-American society at those specific times quite conspicuous. It is making Hughes work to be considered one of the most vital and prominent pieces in the collection of the American literature in overall.

Examining Mending Wall carefully, we realize that Frost begun the poem in some straightforwardness and then the poem later ends in a very composite uncertainty. It is evident because the speaker would have the readers believe there exist two different types of persons in the poem, that is, the kind that inflexibly insists on erecting unnecessary walls and the kind that would completely bestow with this practice including both the wall builders and breakers. The narrator in the poem scorned both his neighbors stubborn wall building activities and his amusing unbiasedness but on the contrary goes ahead to restore the wall after damages done by hunters. The speaker is the one that who goes to signal his neighbor during wall restoration periods to fix up the annual schedules. Whereas in Let America Be America Again, the greatest famous and buoyant proclamation comes almost near the conclusion of the poem whereby the speaker in the poem cries to all victims and implores them to stand tall and rise against their current situations and fight to build what Hughes referred to as the American of their dream. Hughes also believed that American had the potential and room for improvement making the poem conclude in the best high and optimistic note there is.