MENDING WALL—ROBERT FROST

Mending Wall is the first poem in Robert Frost's, “North of Boston,” which was published upon
his return from England in 1915. “Mending Wall” is autobiographical on an even more specific
level: a French-Canadian named Napoleon Guay had been Frost’s neighbor in New Hampshire,
and the two had often walked along their property line and repaired the wall that separated their
land. Ironically, the most famous line of the poem (“Good fences make good neighbors”) was
not invented by Frost himself, but was rather a phrase that Guay frequently declared to Frost
during their walks. This particular adage was a popular colonial proverb in the middle of the 17th
century and became the background for “Mending Wall”.
In the poem itself, Frost creates two distinct characters who have different ideas about what
exactly makes a person a good neighbor.
It is an old custom in England that every year during Spring, two neighbours meet to repair the
stone wall that divides their property. However, the narrator is skeptical of this tradition, unable
to understand the need for a wall when there is no livestock to be contained on the property, only
apples and pine trees. He does not believe that a wall should exist simply for the sake of existing
and says, “Something there is that does not love a wall.” Moreover, he cannot help but notice
that the natural world seems to dislike the wall as much as he does: mysterious gaps appear,
boulders fall for no reason. Nature causes “the frozen-ground to swell” creating gaps. He
presumes that the work of hunters could also be another thing- “they have left not a stone on a
stone to have the rabbit out of hiding, to please the yelping dogs.”
The narrator points out that the very act of mending the wall seems to be in opposition to nature.
Every year, stones are dislodged and gaps suddenly appear, all without explanation. Every year,
the two neighbours fill the gaps and replace the fallen boulders, only to have parts of the wall fall
over again in the coming months. It seems as if nature is attempting to destroy the barriers that
man has created on the land, even as man continues to repair the barriers, simply out of habit and
tradition.
Over the course of the mending, the narrator attempts to convince his neighbour otherwise and
accuses him of being old-fashioned for maintaining the tradition so strictly. Ironically, while the
narrator grudges the annual repairing of the wall, he is more active than his neighbor. He selects
the day and informs about the repairing to be done. It is on a particular day that they “meet to
walk the line and set the wall” between them. They even have to act as magicians and “use a
spell to make them balance” Initially he makes an understatement by saying that the act of
mending wall is “just another kind of outdoor game, one on a side.” But the fact is , “It
comes to a little more” and the narrator and his yankee neighbor wear their “fingers rough
with handling them”.
The neighbor, on the other hand, asserts that the wall is crucial to maintaining their relationship.
The narrator deplores his neighbour’s preoccupation with repairing the wall; he views it as old-
fashioned and even archaic. After all, he quips, his apples are not going to invade the property of
his neighbor’s pinecones. Moreover, within a land of such freedom and discovery, the narrator
asks, are such borders necessary to maintain relationships between people? Despite the narrator’s
skeptical view of the wall, the neighbour maintains his seemingly “old-fashioned” mentality,
responding to each of the narrator’s disgruntled questions and rationalizations asserting that a
wall is after all vital to having good relationship. No matter what the narrator says, though, the
neighbor stands his ground, repeating only: “Good fences make good neighbors.”

The phrase "mending fences" was well known in Frost's time, as it is now. The phrase means to
repair relationships. Frost intentionally uses the title Mending Wall instead to show sarcastically
that the relationship here is not being repaired. Instead, it is being damaged by the actions of the
neighbor who insists on keeping walls. In spite of the logical argument put forward by the
narrator that before building a wall he would like to know “What I was walling in or walling
out” or the more pertinent question “to whom I was like to give offence”. The narrator felt he
could tell him that the work of breaking a wall was done by “Elves” but he believed that it was
for his neighbor to think. Finally, the narrator gives up in despair when he sees his old-fashioned
neighbor “bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top in each hand, like an old-stone savage
armed” believing that he lives in darkness- not just “the darkness of woods and the shade of
trees” but also of his primitive, conservative viewpoint that will never let him go behind his
father’s saying, “Good fences make good neighbours”.
In terms of the form, “Mending Wall” is not structured with stanzas; it is a simple forty-five lines
of first-person narrative. Frost does maintain iambic stresses, but he is flexible with the form in
order to maintain the conversational feel of the poem. He also shies away from any obvious
rhyme patterns and instead relies upon the occasional internal rhyme and the use of assonance in
certain ending terms (such as “wall,” “hill,” “balls,” “well”).

The theme is that you won't get to know a person unless you put down your wall or barrier. The
speaker can be characterized as philosophical, amiable, and unconvinced. The speaker is also
amiable for he friendly converses with his neighbor about the necessity of the wall. The speaker
remains unconvinced about why the neighbor wants to keep the wall. Lastly, the speaker's tone is
yearning and inquiring for a change and an end to the wall. However, the poem does not end
with a definite conclusion allowing the readers to read the poem and make their own
interpretations.