When we talk about "exploration" here, we don’t necessarily mean Christopher Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci. Our speaker explores uncharted waters as he begins to question why there needs to be a wall between his property and his neighbor’s property. Our speaker challenges the old-school values that his neighbor embodies.
Questions About Exploration
- At what point does our speaker venture into uncharted waters, and what are these waters?
- Is the speaker ever fearful or anxious?
- What (if anything) does our speaker discover over the course of the poem?
- Do we ever find out who or what the "something" is that the speaker refers to in line 1?
Chew on This
Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.
In challenging the wall’s necessity, the speaker ultimately does not hope to get rid of the wall.
As readers, we discover more about our relationship to boundaries than the speaker does.