mending wall by robert frost essay

Mending Wall Summary & Analysis by Robert Frost

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

“Mending Wall” is a poem by the American poet Robert Frost. It was published in 1914, as the first entry in Frost’s second book of poems, North of Boston. The poem is set in rural New England, where Frost lived at the time—and takes its impetus from the rhythms and rituals of life there. The poem describes how the speaker and a neighbor meet to rebuild a stone wall between their properties—a ritual repeated every spring. This ritual raises some important questions over the course of the poem, as the speaker considers the purpose of borders between people and the value of human work.

• Read the full text of “Mending Wall”

The Full Text of “Mending Wall”

1 Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

2 That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

3 And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

4 And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

5 The work of hunters is another thing:

6 I have come after them and made repair

7 Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

8 But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

9 To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

10 No one has seen them made or heard them made,

11 But at spring mending-time we find them there.

12 I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

13 And on a day we meet to walk the line

14 And set the wall between us once again.

15 We keep the wall between us as we go.

16 To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

17 And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

18 We have to use a spell to make them balance:

19 "Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"

20 We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

21 Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

22 One on a side. It comes to little more:

23 There where it is we do not need the wall:

24 He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

25 My apple trees will never get across

26 And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

27 He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."

28 Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

29 If I could put a notion in his head:

30 "Why  do they make good neighbours? Isn't it

31 Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

32 Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

33 What I was walling in or walling out,

34 And to whom I was like to give offence.

35 Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

36 That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,

37 But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

38 He said it for himself. I see him there

39 Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

40 In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

41 He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

42 Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

43 He will not go behind his father's saying,

44 And he likes having thought of it so well

45 He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

“Mending Wall” Summary

“mending wall” themes.

• See where this theme is active in the poem.

The Value of Work

Change and Modernity

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “mending wall”.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

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.

The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made,

Lines 11-16

But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbour know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

Lines 17-22

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: "Stay where you are until our backs are turned!" We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of out-door game, One on a side. It comes to little more:

Lines 23-27

There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Lines 28-31

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: "Why  do they make good neighbours? Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Lines 32-38

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him, But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather He said it for himself.

Lines 38-42

I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

Lines 43-45

He will not go behind his father's saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

“Mending Wall” Symbols

• See where this symbol appears in the poem.

“Mending Wall” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• See where this poetic device appears in the poem.

End-Stopped Line

Epanalepsis, alliteration, “mending wall” vocabulary.

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Frozen-ground-swell
• Mending-time
• See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Mending Wall”

Rhyme scheme, “mending wall” speaker, “mending wall” setting, literary and historical context of “mending wall”, more “mending wall” resources, external resources.

Sadie Stein on "Mending Wall" — The critic Sadie Stein discusses "Mending Wall" for the Paris Review.

Frost Poetics — A group of scholars and poets debate Frost's "Mending Wall" at the Kelly Writers' House at the University of Pennsylvania.    

Was Robert Frost a Modernist? — Poet and critic Robert Pinsky considers whether Frost was a modernist.    

Robert Frost Reads "Mending Wall" — The poet himself reads "Mending Wall" aloud.

Essays on "Mending Wall" — A series of essays on "Mending Wall" from the University of Illinois.

LitCharts on Other Poems by Robert Frost

Acquainted with the Night

After Apple-Picking

A Roadside Stand

Desert Places

Dust of Snow

Fire and Ice

Home Burial

My November Guest

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

The Death of the Hired Man

The Oven Bird

The Road Not Taken

The Sound of the Trees

The Tuft of Flowers

The Wood-Pile

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

A Summary and Analysis of Robert Frost’s ‘Mending Wall’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Mending Wall’ is a 1914 poem by the American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963). Although it’s one of his most popular, it is also one of his most widely misunderstood – and, like another of his widely anthologised poems, ‘The Road Not Taken’, its most famous lines are often misinterpreted.

Before we address these issues of interpretation and analysis, it might be worth reading ‘Mending Wall’ here .

‘Mending Wall’: summary

To summarise: ‘Mending Wall’ is a poem about two neighbours coming together each spring to mend the wall that separates their two properties.

This wall is made of stones piled on top of each other, and the winter weather has ravaged the wall and left it needing repairs, because there are gaps in the wall between stones.

Hunters coming past have also knocked holes in the wall. The speaker of the poem (this poem is a lyric, expressing the personal thoughts and feelings of the poem’s speaker, although whether the speaker and Frost are one and the same is difficult to say; there’s almost certainly some overlap here, though) approaches the chore of mending the wall as a sort of game.

While he and his neighbour fix the wall, it becomes clear that the speaker isn’t convinced by the need for a fence dividing their two properties. When he asks his neighbour what the purposes of the dividing wall is, all his neighbour can do is parrot an old piece of wisdom his father used to say: ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’

‘Mending Wall’: analysis

We might interpret this piece of family wisdom as meaning: having clear boundaries between ourselves and others leads to healthy relationships between neighbours because they won’t fall out over petty territorial disputes or ‘invading each other’s space’.

For instance, we may like our neighbours, but we don’t want to wake up and draw the curtains to find them dancing naked on our front lawn. There are limits . Respecting each other’s boundaries helps to keep things civil and amicable. However, does this mean that Frost himself approves of such a notion?

‘Mending Wall’ is frequently misinterpreted, as Frost himself observed in 1962, shortly before his death. ‘People are frequently misunderstanding it or misinterpreting it.’ But he went on to remark, ‘The secret of what it means I keep.’ Which, let’s face it, doesn’t exactly clear up the matter.

However, we can analyse ‘Mending Wall’ as a poem contrasting two approaches to life and human relationships: the approach embodied by Frost himself in the poem (or by the speaker of his poem, at least), and the approach represented by his neighbour. It is Frost’s neighbour, rather than Frost himself (or Frost’s speaker), who insists: ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’

‘Good fences make good neighbours’ has become like another of Frost’s sentiments: ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, / I took the one less travelled by.’ This statement, from ‘The Road Not Taken’, is often misinterpreted because readers assume Frost is proudly asserting his individualism, whereas in fact, as we’ve discussed here , the lines are filled with regret over ‘what might have been’.

‘Good fences make good neighbours’ is actually more straightforward: people misinterpret the meaning of this line because they misattribute the statement to Frost himself, rather than to the neighbour with whom he (or his speaker) disagrees. As the first line of the poem has it, ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall’: this, spoken by Frost or by his poem’s speaker, clearly indicates that Frost does not agree with the view that ‘good fences make [for] good neighbours’.

It is also worth noting that this line, ‘Good fences make good neighbours’, did not originate with Frost: it is first found in the  Western Christian Advocate  (13 June 1834), as noted in  The Yale Book of Quotations .

‘Mending Wall’: form

‘Mending Wall’ is written in blank verse , which is unrhymed iambic pentameter . Given the closeness of iambic pentameter to ordinary human speech patterns in the English language, and the more natural tone which the lack of rhyme helps to create, this is a particularly pertinent choice of verse form for a poem about two neighbours chatting (although before we overinterpret the significance of the blank verse for ‘Mending Wall’, it’s worth mentioning that Frost uses this verse form in many of his poems).

However, it’s worth stopping to consider the conversational nature of the speaker’s account of mending the wall, and the significance of the two men’s utterances in ‘Mending Wall’. Whereas the speaker of the poem is explorative, playful, ironic, and even tongue-in-cheek (for instance, pretending that they have to cast a spell to keep some stones in place), his neighbour can only repeat the same mantra whenever the speaker asks him what the purpose of the wall is: ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’

This is taken as sufficient. In other words, it’s as if the neighbour is putting up a metaphorical ‘wall’ between him and his neighbour, refusing to share in his more relaxed and puckish attitude towards the question of the wall.

For the neighbour, the hand-me-down proverb from his father is enough wisdom for him to live by: it’s always been said, as far as he’s concerned, that ‘good fences make good neighbours’, so who is he to question such a notion? By contrast, Frost’s speaker can’t resist questioning or probing the matter.

In this connection, Frost’s line, ‘We keep the wall between us as we go’ can be taken as double-edged: physically they keep to their own sides of the wall, respecting the physical boundaries between their homes, but there’s also a figurative suggestion of putting up social boundaries between them and not being entirely honest or open.

Yet it’s also worth acknowledging, as a final point of analysis, that through ‘mending wall’ so as to retain it, the speaker and his neighbour also come together: the wall brings them together as they ‘meet’ in order to mend it, but they only come together in order to reinforce the division between them.

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.

Type your email…

4 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Robert Frost’s ‘Mending Wall’”

If Frost were alive and well today and cleared up the issue, would we be happy or sad? Isn’t the ambiguity that makes it interesting?

“Mending Wall” is, to my mind, one of Frost’s two greatest works (the other being “Death of the Hired Man”). And, while you are correct that the poem is oft misinterpreted, I think that part of Frost’s genius in it has been that we cannot get completely comfortable with either of the two clearest (and opposing) potential interpretations. Yes, the speaker disagrees with the statement about good neighbors and presumably intends for us to disagree with it as well. And yet Frost gives his neighbor the last word. Also, it is the speaker who always takes the effort to go to the neighbor and remind him that it’s time to mend the wall, not the other way round. If he didn’t, would the neighbor simply forget? Would the pines and the apple orchard naturally border each other in peace? We don’t know. Because the speaker who ostensibly disagrees with the neighbor’s statement continues to perpetuate its practice.

Here is my reading of “Mending Wall” which I hope I have done justice: https://poetscorner.blog/2019/10/05/the-death-of-the-hired-man/

Pardon the strangeness in the link. I changed my mind about which Frost poem to record at the eleventh hour.

That’s great – I think you’re right, too. There’s probably a tension between the two neighbours’ views and the best outlook is to be found somewhere between them. Having lived with both nice neighbours on good terms and not-so-nice neighbours on less-than-good terms, it’s important to maintain a sense of privacy and distance – as long as it isn’t too rigidly enforced!

I’m not sure there’s any hidden meaning Frost is keeping here. Rather, as with “Road Not Taken,” it’s simply that the ideas and feelings of the speaker are more complex than what a superficial reading of an isolated line of the poem would suggest. Here, that complexity seems to be a divide in how the speaker feels about the wall. He questions it and sees no need for it, and yet he also actively engages in rebuilding the wall with his neighbor every spring — and never raises any of his questions out loud to the neighbor (and this is so, in part, because as you note, there is a figurative social boundary between them). So, does the speaker not want the wall or does he want the wall? The poem contains evidence that he feels both ways about it. And the poem thus raises another complexity: is the wall senseless and unnecessary, or is it purposeful and good? The ominous references to the neighbor at the end of the poem (“he moves in darkness,” “old-stone savage armed”) seem to suggest that it’s probably a good thing they are separated.

Comments are closed.

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

(92) 336 3216666

[email protected]

• Mending Wall

Read below our complete notes on the poem “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost. Our notes cover the background, summary, themes, and analysis of Mending Wall by Robert Frost.

Background of the Poem

Robert Frost is one of the most beloved poets of America. Robert Frost wrote “Mending Wall” in 1914, at the peak of literary modernism. “Mending Wall” is one of his most well-known and well-appreciated poems. This poem narrates the story of a stone wall that is constructed between two properties of two neighbors in the countryside. Some unseen and unheard agents continually destroy this wall. An appealing aspect of “Mending Wall” is the addition of a sense of mystery and loneliness by Frost. The poem begins as a quest to find the identity of the wall-destroyer. It ends in a meditation on the worth of tradition and boundaries.

“Mending Wall” is the first poem in North of Boston that is the second book of poetry by Frost. It was published when Frost was in England. Frost was living at the time of many modernist poetic movements. However, he isn’t associated with any specific group of poets. His style in “Mending Wall” marches to his drummer. This poem received a good deal of criticism from the literary world. But, it is precisely Frost’s originality that shines through this poem. 

Literary Context

When “Mending Wall” was published, it was the height of modernism, a broad and complicated literary theory. It was the time when literature responded to the dramatic hype of industrialization and urbanization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At that time, literature emphasized the sense of loneliness that many people felt in a new modern world. Literature did it by breaking from traditional literary forms. Modernist writers made a new path and started writing without meter, rhyme, or a proper form. Additionally, new forms were invented. Fragments and quotations were brought together. Poets at the time of “Mending Wall” sought to cultivate the same innovation and excitement in the literature that they saw in the world around them.

Frost’s relationship with modernism and “Mending Wall” has been a topic of hot debate among scholars for many years. Many critics dismissed this poem as out of touch and even anti-modernist. The environment shown in “Mending Wall” is far from the busy cities of early twentieth-century America. 

It uses free verse that is one of the most prestigious traditional forms.

More recent critics have defended Frost and argued for counting him and this poem among the modernists. Though this poem is far from the most radical poems of the modernist poets, it nonetheless makes significant and subtle innovations in the forms it uses. These innovations are evident in “Mending Wall” and in the irony that suffuses the poem. 

The poem does not resolve its argument for its readers. It also does not present a particularly trustworthy or admirable speaker. The old certainties have fallen away. While “Mending Wall” may be distant from the pulsing heart of modernity, all the uncertainty and disorientation that modernism possesses are evident in the poem.

Historical Context

“Mending Wall” was written in the early 1910s. It was a transitional period in American life. The years just before the Great War, WWI (1914-1918), were surrounded by broad social and political changes. The old order of imperialism, formality, rigid class structure was dying away and a new order of society emerged.

Because of the mass immigration and industrialization, the United States became a substantially more diverse and populous place than it had been at its founding. It had become a substantially more urban place as well. The gentlemen farmers who established American democracy had been replaced by the ill-tempered urban political parties. Alongside this, there were populist rural political movements as well. Further, the country expanded from the Atlantic coastline to the Pacific. The frontier had been officially declared closed in 1890.

As these rapid transformations took place, a series of tension developed in the country. There occurred a clash between urban and rural populations. The clash was also between the educated upper class and wide swaths of uneducated or under-educated people. New England Protestants, who could trace their ancestors to the earliest pilgrims, came in a fight with the more recent Catholic and Jewish arrivals.

Although “Mending Wall” does not openly acknowledge this societal context, it is indirectly expressed throughout the poem. One might read the argument between the speaker and his neighbor as an expression of the tussle between an urban and rural population. It can be taken as friction between the two persons regarding an old New England stock and a newer crop of immigrants who are claiming the country and trying to shape it line with their ideals.

Summary of Mending Wall by Robert Frost

The poem starts with the speaker who talks about a force that doesn’t like walls and breaks it again and again. This force causes the frozen water to swell under a wall. It also causes the wall’s upper stones to fall off its top in the warmth of the sun. It creates gaps in the wall so big that two people can walk through them shoulder-to-shoulder in the same direction.

There are the hunters who make holes in the wall but it is something different. The speaker often comes to fix those spots. The hunters haven’t left even a single stone in its place. They tried to allow the rabbits to come out that hide in the wall to make their barking dogs happy and feed them. No one has seen or heard these gaps in the wall when they are made. The speaker and other nearby people just see them there in the spring when it is time to fix the wall.

The speaker contacts his neighbor who lives on the other side of the hill. They find a spring day to meet and walk together along the wall. They start fixing these gaps as they go. 

The neighbor of the speaker walks on his side of the wall while the speaker walks on his. They only fix those stones that have fallen off the wall on their side of it. Some of them look like a piece of bread and some are round in shape. They pray that they stay in their place. They also pray that they remain balanced on the top of the wall. The speaker and his neighbor keep on saying: “Don’t fall back until we’re gone from here!” Their fingers get scratches from picking up the rough stones. It’s just another outdoor activity for them. Each one of them plays this game on their side of the wall. It is nothing more.

According to the speaker, there’s no good reason for a wall to be there. On his neighbor’s side of the wall, there’s nothing but only pine trees. On the speaker’s side of the wall, there is an apple orchard. The speaker says that his apple trees are never going to cross their limit. They are not likely to cross the wall and eat his neighbor’s pine cones. He says this to his neighbor but he only responds that “Good fences are necessary to have good neighbors.” Since it is spring and the speaker feels prankish, he thinks if he could make his neighbor ask himself  “are these walls and boundaries necessary? Isn’t that only necessary if one is trying to keep his neighbor’s cows away from his fields? There aren’t any cows here. 

The speaker says that If he were to construct a wall, he would like to know what he was keeping in and what he was keeping out, and who was going to be displeased by this. Some force doesn’t love a wall. It wants to break it down. The speaker suggests that Elves are responsible for the gaps in the wall, but it’s not Elves.

The speaker wants his neighbor to find it out on his own. He sees him when he lifts stones, grasps them firmly in each of his hands. He acts like an ancient warrior. He moves in deep darkness and it is not just the darkness of the thick woods or the trees. He does not want to think otherwise about his fixed idea about the world. He likes to articulate this idea so clearly. Therefore, he says it again: “Good fences are necessary to have good neighbors.”

Themes in Mending Wall

Borders and limits.

“Mending Wall” is a poem about borders and limitations. The speaker and the speaker’s neighbor are involved in an argument about rebuilding a wall that divides their properties. They argue about the role of the boundary wall and its effects on relationships.

The wall seems practically and politically unnecessary to the speaker of the poem. He is of the opinion that walls separate people and harm their otherwise smooth relations. However, the neighbor has the view that walls strengthen and improve relationships because they allow people to treat each other fairly and prevent conflict. According to him, walls make people stay in their limits. The poem itself doesn’t decide who is correct. The poem ultimately allows its readers to decide for themselves which vision of the human community is most persuasive and livable.

The speaker asks his neighbor what is the reason to continue rebuilding the wall. In response, the neighbor says repeatedly that “Good fences make good neighbors.” He believes that it is important for a good neighbor to maintain clear boundaries. They prevent problems arising between people who live closely. The neighbor seems to predict the possibility of future conflicts and considers it important to prevent them in advance. However, these issues are fundamental to human society. 

The poem lets the readers decide for themselves who is correct and who is wrong. This poem forces the readers to make up their minds about the necessity of walls, borders, and other political and physical agents that separate people.

The Value of Work

The work that the speaker and his neighbor do is ritualistic. Each year in spring, the speaker and his neighbor talk an inspection walk along the wall together. They together repair those areas of the wall that have been damaged over the years. It is tedious because, in the end, their hands get injured by lifting the rocks. In spite of the difficulty, they renew the wall each spring. The act of repairing the wall represents human labor. 

There is a reference to the myth of Sisyphus. He was the king of Corinth. He was a crafty and deceitful person. As a punishment, he was forced to spend eternity in taking a boulder up to the top of the hill by pushing. When he reached the top, the boulder would roll back to the bottom and he would have to start all over again. 

Similarly, the speaker and his neighbor would reconstruct the wall and they would have to do it again next spring. For Sisyphus, the rolling down of the boulder was a punishment by the gods. In “Mending Wall,” nature, with its capacity to damage man-made structures, defeats human ambitions. It forces the speaker and his neighbor in particular and humanity, in general, to repeat the same process again without making any visible progress. 

Additionally, the task in the poem is tiring and repetitive. The speaker wants to stop it but his neighbor insists to continue. It suggests that the work is valuable that the speaker cannot realize. It is not the fence that makes a good neighbor or it is not the wall that establishes good relations. In simpler words, it is the rebuilding of the fence and walls that make good neighbors by making them work together. 

For the speaker, the end result of the work is important. He values the permanent difference that such physical products make at the end. Oppositely, his neighbor values the work itself because he considers the work as an end in itself. He is of the view that work maintains a fair society. 

This poem also implicitly points towards the value of creative work. Such work is beautiful that does not materially change the society but satisfies one’s mind and soul. 

Customs, Traditions, and Modernity

Throughout the poem, the poet indirectly raises the question of the possibility of change. The speaker is of the opinion that his neighbor’s ideas are outdated. The speaker calls his neighbor an “old-stone savage armed.” He considers him a primitive man with a stone in his hands as if he is fighting a battle. The poem makes the readers think if the debate between the speaker and his neighbor will ever resolve. The speaker keeps on objecting to the activity but he still reconstructs the wall. 

The speaker uses simple, every-day language. He seems an educated man. He is clearly a loquacious figure. Also, he has enough knowledge of philosophy when he cites the writings of Henry David Thoreau by referring to “cows.” The speaker also refers to the mythical “Elves” that they might be the reason for the damage of the wall. The speaker uses the blank verse in a rough but observable fashion to convey ideas to the reader.

On the other side, the neighbor of the speaker is an old-fashioned man. He says only one sentence in the poem and repeats it. He speaks directly and in an unpretentious manner. The speaker emphasizes the unwillingness of his neighbor to think broadly. The speaker objects to his neighbor for relying on received wisdom. The only job that the neighbor is concerned about is the reconstruction of the wall. He has not improved beyond the primitive level. 

According to this contrast, the speaker of the poem is a modern figure. The speaker admires himself for coming out of the darkness of the primitive state. He looks down upon his neighbor who is still moving in the darkness. The speaker of the poem believes that he has got an enlightened and peaceful way of life. Yet it is the speaker who lets his speaker know that the wall needs repair. 

In this way, this poem suggests that as long as the people hold old ideas and beliefs, society itself will be affected by them. The society will be unable to refuse those notions that its people hold. It is hard to demolish the beliefs of the past completely and to bring change for the future.

Mending Wall Analysis

Lines 1 – 4.

In these lines, the speaker predicts that there is something that causes the wall to break down again and again. The speaker thinks that maybe the water under the ground gets frozen which results in ice that expands to cause cracks in the wall. It also makes the stones at the top of the wall fall down. With time, the crack in the wall grows so wide that it becomes possible for two people to pass through it by walking shoulder-to-shoulder. 

Lines 5 – 11

In these lines, the speaker does not agree with the idea that the wall could have been damaged by the hunters. He says that he himself has repaired the wall after the hunters have broken it. The hunters have displaced the stones to allow rabbits to come out of their holes. This way, they would feed their hungry barking dogs. However, according to the speaker, the gaps in the wall are made by something else that is not seen or heard by anyone. The speaker always finds the damage in the wall every spring.

Lines 12 – 15

The wall is between two farms that are separated by a hill. The speaker informs his neighbor about the hole who is living on the other side of the hill. They both meet one another on a fixed day and take a walk along the wall. The damaged wall separates them as they walk on each side of the wall. The speaker and his neighbor inspect the damage on their own side. The farmer who lives on the other side of the hill is informed about the hole.

Lines 16 – 19

The speaker says that he and his neighbor take the responsibility to put the rocks back on their position. However, each one of them fixes their own side. It is an exhausting task for both. The rocks are not regular in shape. Some of them are in the shape of bread while others are round. Nothing can hold them in their places except a magic spell. Therefore, the speaker tells the stones to stay at the positions unless they are gone. 

Lines 20 – 24

In these lines, the speaker says that their hands get injured because of picking up the heavy and rough stones. For the speaker, this activity is just like an outdoor game where there is only one rival on each side. It feels like they are playing some sort of game where there is only one opponent on each side. It seems to the speaker more like a game rather than a hectic work. The speaker does not consider it necessary to rebuild the wall because he and his neighbor are growing different plants. The speaker grows apples while his neighbor grows pines.

Lines 25 –29

In these lines, the poet says that he tells his neighbor that his apple trees will never cross their limits and reach his property. In response, his neighbor says that it is necessary for a good neighbor to construct fences. The speaker seems unconvinced by the logic of his neighbor. He says that he feels a little naughty. Therefore, he thinks to convince his neighbor with his opinion. 

Lines 30 – 35

In these lines, the speaker asks his neighbor why fences are necessary to maintain good relationships with neighbors. The speaker is of the idea that fences are only required in these places where there are cows. As there are no cows where the wall stands, the speaker does not understand the point of constructing a wall. The speaker wants to know what will be protected by the walls. He also wants to know who will dislike the idea of building a wall.

Lines 36 – 41

Here, the speaker again predicts that the wall could have been broken down by Elves. He does not want to tell his neighbor about this assumption because he wants him to figure it out on his own. As the neighbor works, the speaker compares him to an uncivilized person who is living in a dark age. According to the speaker, the stones in the hands of his neighbor seem like his weapons.

Lines 42 – 46

In these last lines, the speaker says that his neighbor is still moving in the darkness. Although the world has become modernized, his neighbor is still unaware of all the advancements and changes. His neighbor always follows what his father has said to him. He says again that divisions through fences are important. 

Speaker and Narration

The speaker of “Mending Wall” narrates the poem from his point of view in first-person dramatic narration. The speaker in the poem possesses a carefree attitude towards reconstructing a boundary wall. He does not see any valid reason for dividing properties. He has a radical and enlightened mind as opposed to his neighbor’s narrow mindedness. 

Setting of the Poem

The setting of “Mending Wall” is the site of the stone wall between the farms. The wall has been damaged. The two farms on either side of the wall belong to two hardworking farmers. One of them is the speaker of the poem. This location belongs to a rural area of New England. The two men are arguing about how the wall is broken. They are walking on each side of the broken wall. It is the spring season. 

The tone of “Mending Wall” is quite mysterious. It suggests that some natural or supernatural force is breaking the wall again and again. The speaker and his neighbor in the poem have never seen or heard any such force. This mysterious tone changes into a mischievous and sarcastic tone when the speaker convinces his neighbor with this opinion. The speaker could have rejected his neighbor’s view straight away but he listens carefully and patiently. 

Form and Style

“Mending Wall” is written in blank verse. It is a form of poetry with unrhymed lines in iambic pentameter. It has five pairs of syllables per line. Each pair contains an unstressed syllable that is followed by a stressed syllable. 

The speaker says that the frozen ground swells. Frost is a mysterious force in “Mending Wall.” This frost damages the wall each winter in a powerful way. Despite the force of frost, there is something else that is more powerful and undetectable. That unseen and unheard force does not like the wall and it damages it again and again. 

The frost and the unknown force behind it thus have a complex and mysterious role in the poem. Frost is a real and natural phenomenon. The speaker in the poem has given it a supernatural quality. The reader might take both frost and the unknown entity as the representation of nature itself and its effects on man-made objects. The things that are made by a man are weak and temporary. Such objects are always vulnerable to stronger forces that damage them sooner or later.  

The spring is typically taken as a symbol of rebirth. In poems, spring acts as a renewal. In “Mending Wall,” spring is the symbol of rebirth. Spring is that time of the year when the speaker and his neighbor reconstruct the wall.

In Christianity, spring is linked with the resurrection of Christ. The renewal that the speaker and his neighbor take part in is quite different from Christ’s resurrection. The renewal in the poem has resulted from human work. It is temporary that needs a rebirth every year like a ritual.

A fence is a partition that divides two places. In “Mending Wall,” the wall divides the two people’s property. The speaker used “fences” and “wall” interchangeably. Fences in the poem do not only symbolize the physical division between properties but it represents human’s limitations. The poem presents the points that such divisions and limitations are important to sustain good relationships. The poem asks the questions if such borders separate people into “them” and “us” or do they clearly define limitations for peaceful living. 

In American philosophical tradition, cows symbolize damage that one person may cause to another. They represent those small conflicts that cause huge destruction if they are unchecked. Cows symbolize greed and selfishness. When a person allows his cows to graze on another person’s pasture, it shows that he is controlling another person’s resources. In “Mending Wall,” neither the speaker nor his neighbor has cows. It shows that they are not competing with one another for resources and they can live peacefully.  

The speaker of the poem says that his neighbor moves in darkness. It is not literal darkness. It is symbolic darkness. In the western world, darkness represents ignorance. On the other side, light symbolizes knowledge and open-mindedness. The speaker’s neighbor is stuck to outdated ideas and he does not know anything about the ways of the modern world. 

Literary devices in the Poem

When a speaker addresses an absent person or a non-living entity, it is called an apostrophe. In “Mending Wall,” the speaker uses apostrophe in line nineteenth when he and his neighbor say that “Stay where you are unless our backs are turned.” Here, they tell the stones to stay balanced. The speaker again uses apostrophe from line thirty to thirty-five when he asks questions from his neighbor. 

Personification

Personification means to attribute human qualities to something that is not human. In this poem, the speaker personifies his apple trees. He says that his apple trees will never cross their limits and eat his neighbor’s pines. He also personifies “fences” by saying that “Good fences make good neighbors.” Making relationships is a human quality.  

Epigram means to make a brief yet interesting and memorable satirical statement. In this poem, the speaker says that “Good fences make good neighbors.” it means that it is important for peaceful coexistence that people do not interfere with one another’s businesses. 

When a comparison is made between two things by using “like” and “as,” it is called a simile. In this poem, the poet uses simile when he compares his neighbor to a “savage” from the primitive age. He makes this comparison by using “like.”

It is the repetition of the same vowel sound in a line. In this poem, the sound /e/ is repeated in “To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean.” 

It refers to the continuation of a line without a pause at the end. For example, 

“And he likes having thought of it so well

 He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Imagery means to make the readers identify things with their five senses. Visual imagery is used in “Mending Wall.” For example, “And some are loaves and some so nearly balls”, “He is all pine and I am apple orchard” and “Not of woods only and the shade of trees.” Shapes, colors, and shade appeal to one’s visual sense. 

It is the repetition of identical consonant sounds in the same line. For example, the sounds /n/ and /t/is repeated in “And set the wall between us once again”. Sound /th/ is also repeated in the first and fifth lines of the poem. The sound /p/ is repeated in “To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean.”

It is the comparison between two different things that have something in common. The speaker in the poem compares the shape of the stones to the shape of bread and ball. He says, “, “And some are loaves and some so nearly balls.”

More From Robert Frost

• The Road Not Taken

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Robert Frost’s Mending Wall

Analysis of Robert Frost’s Mending Wall

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on February 22, 2021 • ( 0 )

Mending Wall (1914)

The opening poem of Frost’s hailed second collection, North of Boston, “ Mending Wall”  is one of his most popular and celebrated poems. Much anthologized, the poem has almost come to symbolize Frost, for good or ill. On a visit to Moscow in 1962, nearly 50 years after the poem’s first publication, Frost said, “People are frequently misunderstanding [the poem] or misinterpreting it. The secret of what it means I keep.” Providing a bit of a hint, he also once explained that the poem contrasted two types of people: “I’ve got a man there; he’s both a wall builder and a wall toppler. He makes boundaries and he breaks boundaries. That’s man” (“On Taking Poetry”).

The poem opens with the statement, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” and Frost’s readers are left to speculate for the remainder of the poem precisely what that something is. Winter does not love a wall, we learn in the second line; it creates gaps in the wall. The ground swells and the less securely placed boulders tumble off. The speaker explains that hunters are also sometimes responsible for the gaps. When they are chasing a rabbit to “please the yelping dogs,” but mostly themselves, they too have been known to send boulders tumbling.

The gaps are mysterious, however. The winter and the hunter are suggestions: No one ever actually hears them or sees the gaps made. It is not until spring, when the speaker and his neighbor ritualistically meet at the wall for mending, that they discover the gaps and set about filling them. The two walk together, the wall between them, replacing the boulders that have been left behind during the winter when there has been no cause to venture out to the wall.

Mending a wall takes work, but there is also a sort of sorcery to it. Sometimes one even needs to cast a spell to make the boulders balance just so: “Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”

A game is made of mending the wall; it becomes almost a country version of bowls. The speaker remarks that mending the wall essentially “comes to little more” than a game, since the wall itself is unnecessary. Neither neighbor has on his property anything that would disturb the other’s. One has pine trees and one has apple, but neither has livestock. As the speaker teasingly tells his neighbor: “My apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines.” The wall mending is not about keeping things out, the speaker explains, raising the question whether it is about keeping things in.

The other neighbor is cryptic when the speaker, the forthright one, questions him about the purpose of the wall. He simply responds with his father’s old saying: “Good fences make good neighbors.” This becomes his mantra, the only words we hear from him. The speaker acts as though his own questions are about making mischief more than anything else, which suggests he already knows the answers to them. They are questions anyone might be expected to ask about such a wall, and not just in the mischief of spring; there is something more to it than that. The speaker wants to know why good fences make good neighbors. He is curious, inquiring, and reflective. The neighbor is cast as his opposite: someone who does not ask questions and is content to accept what has always been. He is unreflective, simply parroting back the phrase he learned from his father, carrying out his generation’s duty without question.

The speaker continues to question, despite his neighbor’s lack of interest. Frost teases as the speaker wonders, “to whom I was like to give offense.” He puns on the word offense, another part of the game in and of the poem. The speaker continues to want to know what the “Something there is” is, and he is not content to let it be. The most telling and coy lines are “I could say ‘Elves’ to him, / But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather he said it himself.” The suggestion is subtle, but the speaker clearly knows who undoes the wall. The lines suggest that the “elf” who leaves gaps in the wall is the neighbor himself, as if the speaker knows something about the neighbor he is unwilling to admit. At the least, it suggests that the speaker wants the neighbor to admit that deep down he also does not love the wall. The speaker suggests that the thing that does not love a wall is actually the very thing that does. It seems that the neighbor may take down the wall just so they can engage in the game of putting it back together again. A visual is presented for the reader: “I see him there / Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top,” and the speaker remarks, “He moves in darkness it seems to me, / Not of woods only and the shade of trees.” The sort of darkness his neighbor moves in is metaphorical. He may remove boulders in the dark, but he also moves in another kind of darkness. The neighbor moves not only in nature’s darkness but in the darkness that keeps him from more meaningful human connections. It is his lack of reflection, his lonely isolation of the sort encouraged by his father’s saying. Yet each spring he needs to meet with his neighbor once again to enact this ritual of building up together the wall that separates them.

Walls are not nature’s things; they are human things, created to keep neighbors apart, but in this case the wall also brings them together. There is a division here between what is civilized and what is natural, just as in Frost’s “The Middleness of the Road.” The neighbor personifies this division.

The two types of people are highlighted throughout but even more so in the irony of the second-tolast line: “he likes having thought of it so well.” It seems that those who move in darkness believe that their thoughts are original when they really are not. The individual is simply following what came before, seeing neither “out far or in deep,” being narrowed by custom, embracing it without question. The speaker is presented, in contrast, as the reflective and questioning freethinker.

The wall is being mended throughout the poem, but it is also a mending wall, doing its own mending. It is providing both characters with human contact as they wear their fingers rough by handling the stones. It takes a lot of effort to keep the wall there, but it seems to fulfill its complex function.

Frost wrote in a May 1932 letter to his friend Louis Untermeyer that he was “in favor of a skin and fences and tariff walls” (Cramer, 133).

Mark Richardson holds that the speaker is “obviously of two minds: at once wall-builder and wall-destroyer, at once abettor and antagonist of seasonal entropies” (142). Richardson describes the line “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” as having a tone that “ almost acquires an air of fingerwagging, country pedantry” (142). “Mending Wall” “at once acknowledges the limitations of walls (and aphorisms) and also their seductions and value,” he says (142).

“Mending Wall” was first published in North of Boston . Jeffrey Cramer reports that Frost once referred to the poem as “Building Wall” in a letter to Sydney Cox in 1915 (30). In Frost’s “On Taking Poetry,” his 1955 address to the Bread Loaf School of English, he said that the poem is “about a spring occupation in my day. When I was farming seriously we had to set the wall up every year. You don’t do that any more. You run a strand of barbed wire along it and let it go at that. We used to set the wall up. If you see a wall well set up you know it’s owned by a lawyer in New York—not a real farmer.” See WALLS.

FURTHER READING Attebery, Louie W. “Fences, Folklore, and Robert Frost,” Northwest Folklore 6, no. 2 (Spring 1988): 53–57. Clarke, Peter B. “Frost’s ‘Mending Wall,’ ” Explicator 43, no. 1 (Fall 1984): 48–50. Coulthard, A. R. “Frost’s ‘Mending Wall,’ ” Explicator 45, no. 2 (Winter 1987): 40–42. Cramer, Jeffrey S. Robert Frost among His Poems: A Literary Companion to the Poet’s Own Biographical Contexts and Associations. Jefferson, N.C.: MacFarland, 1996. Morrissey, L. J. “ ‘Mending Wall’: The Structure of Gossip,” English Language Notes 25, no. 3 (March 1988): 58–63. Richardson, Mark. The Ordeal of Robert Frost: The Poet and His Poetics. Chicago, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1997, 141–144. Timmerman, John H. Robert Frost: The Ethics of Ambiguity. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2002, 116–118. Trachtenberg, Zev. “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: Frost’s ‘Mending Wall,’ ” Philosophy and Literature 21, no. 1 (April 1997): 114–122.

Share this:

Categories: Literature

Tags: American Literature , Analysis of Robert Frost's Mending Wall , Apreciation of Robert Frost's Mending Wall , Criticism of Robert Frost's Mending Wall , Essay of Robert Frost's Mending Wall , Irony in Frost's Mending Wall , Literary Criticism , Mending Wall , Modernism , Notes of Robert Frost's Mending Wall , Plot of Robert Frost's Mending Wall , Poetry , Robert Frost , Robert Frost's Mending Wall , Robert Frost's Mending Wall Analysis , Robert Frost's Mending Wall criticism , Robert Frost's Mending Wall plot , Robert Frost's Mending Wall Summary , Robert Frost's Mending Wall Themes , Structure of Robert Frost's Mending Wall , Summary of Robert Frost's Mending Wall , Themes of Robert Frost's Mending Wall , Wall as a metaphor in mending wall poem

Related Articles

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Robert Frost: Poems

By robert frost, robert frost: poems summary and analysis of "mending wall" (1914).

Every year, two neighbors meet to repair the stone wall that divides their property. 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. 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. The neighbor, on the other hand, asserts that the wall is crucial to maintaining their relationship, asserting, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Over the course of the mending, the narrator attempts to convince his neighbor otherwise and accuses him of being old-fashioned for maintaining the tradition so strictly. No matter what the narrator says, though, the neighbor stands his ground, repeating only: “Good fences make good neighbors.”

This poem is the first work in Frost's second book of poetry, “North of Boston,” which was published upon his return from England in 1915. While living in England with his family, Frost was exceptionally homesick for the farm in New Hampshire where he had lived with his wife from 1900 to 1909. Despite the eventual failure of the farm, Frost associated his time in New Hampshire with a peaceful, rural sensibility that he instilled in the majority of his subsequent poems. “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, but variations of it also appeared in Norway (“There must be a fence between good neighbors”), Germany (“Between neighbor’s gardens a fence is good”), Japan (“Build a fence even between intimate friends”), and even India (“Love your neighbor, but do not throw down the dividing wall”).

In terms of 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”).

In the poem itself, Frost creates two distinct characters who have different ideas about what exactly makes a person a good neighbor. The narrator deplores his neighbor’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 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 neighbor maintains his seemingly “old-fashioned” mentality, responding to each of the narrator’s disgruntled questions and rationalizations with nothing more than the adage: “Good fences make good neighbors.”

As the narrator points out, 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 neighbors 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.

Ironically, while the narrator seems to begrudge the annual repairing of the wall, Frost subtley points out that the narrator is actually more active than the neighbor. It is the narrator who selects the day for mending and informs his neighbor across the property. Moreover, the narrator himself walks along the wall at other points during the year in order to repair the damage that has been done by local hunters. Despite his skeptical attitude, it seems that the narrator is even more tied to the tradition of wall-mending than his neighbor. Perhaps his skeptical questions and quips can then be read as an attempt to justify his own behavior to himself. While he chooses to present himself as a modern man, far beyond old-fashioned traditions, the narrator is really no different from his neighbor: he too clings to the concept of property and division, of ownership and individuality.

Ultimately, the presence of the wall between the properties does ensure a quality relationship between the two neighbors. By maintaining the division between the properties, the narrator and his neighbor are able to maintain their individuality and personal identity as farmers: one of apple trees, and one of pine trees. Moreover, the annual act of mending the wall also provides an opportunity for the two men to interact and communicate with each other, an event that might not otherwise occur in an isolated rural environment. The act of meeting to repair the wall allows the two men to develop their relationship and the overall community far more than if each maintained their isolation on separate properties.

Robert Frost: Poems Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Robert Frost: Poems is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Robert Frost as a poet Symbolisms

This is a really detailed question for this short answer space. Nature is Frost's main motif for symbolism. Frost is intetrested in the cycle of life and death shown through the seasons in a way that people can connect with. There is also the idea...

Relationship between man and woman?

In Frost's poems (particularly after 1914), he focuses on the trouble men and women have within their intimate relationships and examines the reason why many of these relationships have stagnated.

You might want to check out Gradesaver's theme...

Discuss the theme of the poem "The Road Not Taken" written by Robert Frost.

The central theme of "The Road Not Taken" revolves around the significance of human choice. Through its tone, language, and structure, the poem is able to offer multiple understandings of what it means to choose. The first interpretation of choice...

Study Guide for Robert Frost: Poems

Robert Frost: Poems study guide contains a biography of poet Robert Frost, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis of his major poems.

• About Robert Frost: Poems
• Robert Frost: Poems Summary
• "Mending Wall" Video
• Character List

Essays for Robert Frost: Poems

Robert Frost: Poems essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Robert Frost's poems.

• Nature Imagery in the Works of Robert Frost
• Robert Frost in England - A Short Biography
• An Explication of Mending Wall By Robert Frost
• The Most of It
• "Eternal Freshness of the Flawless Poem:" Why Frost's Poetry Remains Vital

Lesson Plan for Robert Frost: Poems

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Robert Frost: Poems
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Robert Frost: Poems Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Robert Frost: Poems

• Introduction
• Awards and recognition
• Legacy and cultural influence

• National Poetry Month
• Materials for Teachers
• Literary Seminars
• American Poets Magazine

Main navigation

• Academy of American Poets

User account menu

Find and share the perfect poems.

Page submenu block

• literary seminars
• materials for teachers
• poetry near you

Mending Wall

Add to anthology.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. 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. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: ‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’ We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of outdoor game, One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: ‘ Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him, But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather He said it for himself. I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father’s saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

From The Poetry of Robert Frost by Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1916, 1923, 1928, 1930, 1934, 1939, 1947, 1949, © 1969 by Holt Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Copyright 1936, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1951, 1953, 1954, © 1956, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1962 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1962, 1967, 1970 by Leslie Frost Ballantine.

More by this poet

A line-storm song.

The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift,    The road is forlorn all day,  Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift,    And the hoof-prints vanish away.  The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,   Expend their bloom in vain.  Come over the hills and far with me,    And be my love in the rain. 

Not to Keep

They sent him back to her. The letter came Saying... and she could have him. And before She could be sure there was no hidden ill Under the formal writing, he was in her sight— Living.— They gave him back to her alive— How else? They are not known to send the dead— And not disfigured visibly. His face?—

A Time to Talk

When a friend calls to me from the road And slows his horse to a meaning walk, I don’t stand still and look around On all the hills I haven’t hoed, And shout from where I am, What is it? No, not as there is a time to talk. I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground, Blade-end up and five feet tall,

Newsletter Sign Up

• Academy of American Poets Newsletter
• Academy of American Poets Educator Newsletter
• Teach This Poem

Mending wall – Summary, Appreciation and Questions

Table of Contents

Mending wall By Robert Frost

Introduction : The poem Mending Wall by Robert Frost was first published in 1914. The poem is about two neighbours who meet each year in Spring to mend the stone wall dividing their fields. It is a dramatic lyric and a monologue. This poem presents a sharp contrast between two views, the one which advocates the idea of raising wall and other which make a protest against this idea. The central idea of the poem is that walls are unnecessary. Walls are a symbol of savage thinking and we should demolish all kinds of walls, whether they are political, religious, ideological or national. This poem was written when World War One was just beginning in 1914, and this poem represents the hostility of the time.

About The Poet

Please enable JavaScript

Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963) is one of the most prominent 20th-century American poets. He has earned worldwide respect and fame. Frost won more awards than any other contemporary American literary figure. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times. More than forty colleges and universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, have given him honorary degrees.

Summary of Mending Wall

The poem, “Mending Wall” is a beautiful poem written by Robert Lee Frost. The speaker in the poem, the poet himself, and his neighbour, get together every spring to repair the stone wall between their respective properties. Spring is the season when the damages caused by winter have to be repaired. The neighbours meet and walk along the two sides of the wall repairing the damage as they move.

In the beginning, the speaker states that, something there is that doesn’t love a wall. Walls have many enemies. Frost – heave breaks them. Hunters pull them down to help their dogs to chase rabbits. The spirit of spring has made the poet slightly mischievous. A suggestion of some mysterious force in nature at work against walls and boundaries is skilfully expressed in such a line as “ Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” or “I could say ‘elves’ to him.” This something seems to include the frost – heave, hunters and elves.

The poet writes of inanimate objects as if they are alive. and therefore he addresses the boulders and says,

“ Stay where you are until our backs are turned.” Similarly of apple trees, he says, “ My apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines, I tell him” .

The neighbour has a closed mind, as he sticks to his father’s maxim that good fences make good neighbours.

Appreciation

This poem was first published in 1914, in the volume, North of Boston. It is a dramatic monologue . The poem is written in colloquial and dramatic style. The speaker asks questions and then himself answers them. The poet has created the casual and informal effect of conversation. The speaker is young, new-fashioned and has a progressive attitude. The neighbour is an old, conservative farmer.

Starting from the building of a broken boundary wall between his estate and that of the neighbour, Frost goes on to reflect about physical and figurative walls between individuals, families, races and nations.

While mending the wall, the poet suggested that the wall was unnecessary. According to the poet, heavy frost, hunters and elves do not like walls and they bring them down. Thus Nature, human beings and supernatural beings hate walls. After all, his apple trees could not eat his neighbours’ pine cones. Fences may be needed if there are cows with them. But that is not the case. The poet gives both sides of the argument for and against walls. The poet felt like arguing further. But the neighbour stuck to his view which was his father’s before him.

He, therefore, repeatedly utters,

“Good fences make good neighbours.”

But the poet is of the opposite opinion, as he points out:

“ There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard”.

Thus the poem portrays a clash between these two points of view. The wall symbolises all kinds of man-made barriers. The wall suggests the division between nations, classes, racial and religious groups.

The speaker describes his neighbour as an ‘old-stone savage.’ His views about the necessity for walls show that his mind was also in darkness. He could not think of breaking walls between men to maintain universal brotherhood. The poem ends with his utterance/maxim.

“Good fences make good neighbours.” This is the central theme of the poem. The poet leaves it to the reader to judge whether his neighbour is right in taking view that barriers such as walls help us to understand and respect one another. Thus “Mending wall” is a symbolic interpretation of the modern situation. We would like that there should be no barriers between men, between states, but we also love to live within four walls, within self – limitations.

Explain with Reference to the Context:

Stanza – 1 Something there is that does not love a wall That sends the frozen ground swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And make gaps even two can pass abreast

Reference to Context

The lines quoted above have been taken from Frost’s poem ‘Mending Wall’. It is a dramatic lyric or a monologue. This poem presents sharp contrasts between two views, the one which advocates the idea of raising a wall and the other which make a protest against this idea. Finally, this poem suggests that walls are unnecessary and we should demolish all kinds of walls whether they are social, political, ideological, religious or national walls. Walls are a symbol of savage thinking and spiritual darkness.

Explanation

The Poet does not like the idea of raising a wall. He says that there is perhaps some mysterious power that does not love a wall. This mysterious power makes the ground swell under it. As a result of it, the stones placed on the upper side of wall fall on the ground and make a large gap. Through this gap, two men can pass at the same time. What the poet tries to say is that it is not only the poet who does not like a wall but also some mysterious force.

Stanza – 2 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.

The lines quoted above have been taken from Frost’s poem ‘Mending Wall’. It is a dramatic lyric and a monologue. The Poem contains the idea that walls are unnecessary we should demolish all kinds of walls whether they are social, political, ideological, religious or national. Walls are a symbol of savage thinking and spiritual darkness.

The Poet says that there is something, perhaps some natural forces, that does not love a wall. The other things are hunter. The hunters also pull down the stones of the wall. Hunters chasing rabbits demolish a part of the wall to satisfy their dogs that want to get at the rabbit that burrowed its way under the wall to escape from dogs. In this process, they do not leave even a single stone and the poet has to mend the entire wall.

Stanza – 3 The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go.

The lines quoted above have been taken from Frost’s poem ‘Mending Wall’. It is a dramatic lyric and a monologue. This poem presents a sharp contrast between two views, the one which advocates the idea of raising wall and other which make a protest against this idea. The central idea of the poem is that walls are unnecessary. Walls are a symbol of savage thinking and we should demolish all kinds of walls, whether they are political, religious, ideological or national.

The Poet says that every year some portion of the wall falls down and that creates a gap in it. But no one has seen or heard the gaps being made. The onset of spring is the mending time of the wall. When the poet went there in the spring he found the gap in the wall. The poet informs his neighbour about all this who lives beyond the hill. They fix a day to mend the wall, each keeps to his side of wall. They walk along the lines of wall while mending it. The Poet says that there is a wall between man and man and it is man who makes it.

Stanza – 4 “To each the boulders that have fallen to each And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance ‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’ We wear our fingers rough with handling them Oh, just another kind of outdoor game One on a side. It comes to little more:”

The lines quoted above have been taken from Frost’s poem ‘Mending Wall’. It is a dramatic lyric and a monologue. This poem presents a sharp contrast between two views, the one which advocates the idea of raising a wall and other which make a protest against this idea of raising a wall. The final view emerging out of the poem is that walls are unnecessary. Walls are a symbol of savage thinking and darkness of heart. We should demolish all kinds of wall whether they are political, religious, ideological or national.

The Poet and his neighbour prepare to mend the wall that is between their farms. They decide to set those stones that have fallen to each other’s side. The Poet says that the stones are of different size. Some of them are flat like loaves of bread and some of them are round like balls. It is difficult to balance these stones. The Poet says mockingly that they have to use magic to balance them. After placing the stone in its position they ask the stones to stay there until the backs of both are turned. The Poet says that they make their fingers rough with handing stones. He says that this mending wall is just like an outdoor game. The only difference is that there is only one player on each side.

Stanza – 5 There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

The lines quoted above have been taken from Frost’s poem ‘Mending Wall’. It is a dramatic lyric and a monologue. This poem presents a sharp contrast between two views, the one which advocates the idea of raising a wall and the other which make a protest against this idea. The final view emerging out of the poem is that walls are unnecessary. Walls are a symbol of savage thinking and darkness of heart. We should demolish all kinds of wall whether they are political, religious, ideological or national.

The poet says that there is no need of a wall between his farm and that of his neighbour’s. He grows apples in his orchard and his neighbours have pine trees. The poet humorously says to his neighbour that his apple trees will never get across to eat cones under his pine. At this, the poet’s neighbour repeats his old saying that good fences make a good neighbour. It suggests how human behaviour is mechanical, conventional, parrot-like. It is a stereotyped response.

Stanza – 6 “spring is the mischief in me and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out. And to whom I was like to give offence.

The lines quoted above have been taken from Robert Frost’s poem ‘Mending Wall’. It is a dramatic lyric and a monologue based on a small incident. The poem presents a sharp contrast between two views, the one which advocates the idea of raising walls and other which makes a protest against this idea. The final view emerging out of the poem is that walls are unnecessary. Walls are a symbol of savage thinking and darkness of heart. We should demolish all kinds of walls.

The Poet says that spring has made him a little mysterious. The Poet wonders how he could be able to make his neighbour understand his point of view. He wants to ask his neighbour why good fences make a good neighbour. Wall is needed where there are cows. But neither he nor the poet has cows. There is no need of a wall between their farms. The Poet wants to know why the wall should be maintained. Before building the wall he wants to ask a question as to what he was walling in or walling out. Who will be offended if they do not have a wall? What the poet here tries to say is that the Wall is an unnecessary thing.

Stanza – 7 “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That’s wants it down” I could say “Elves” to him, But it’s not elves exactly and I’d rather He said it for himself. I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone strange armed.”

The lines quoted above have been taken from Frost’s poem ‘Mending Wall’. It is a dramatic lyric and a monologue. This poem presents a sharp contrast between two views, the one which advocates the idea of raising a wall and the other of the poet himself which makes a protest against this idea. The final view emerging out of the poem is that walls are unnecessary. Walls are a symbol of savage thinking and darkness of heart. We should demolish all kinds of walls. The poem is a crusade against everything that makes us forget our common bond of humanity.

The poet says that there is something in nature that does not love a wall and wants to bring it down. Then the poet imagines what it could be. He thinks it is perhaps elves. But it could not be elves exactly. He wants that his neighbour could say such thing to himself. He should also give up the idea of raising a wall. Then, the poet sees his neighbour bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top in each hand. The Poet ironically comments that he is looking like a stone age savage. These lines bring out the idea that man is often a prisoner of tradition. He follows old concepts without adjusting them to grand realities.

Stanza – 8 He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, “Good fences make good neighbour”.

The lines quoted above have been taken from Frost’s poem “Mending Wall”. It is a dramatic lyric and a monologue. This poem presents a sharp contrast between two views, the one which advocates the idea of raising walls and other which condemns this idea. The final view emerging out of the poem is that walls are unnecessary. They are barriers between man and man. They are a symbol of savage thinking, so we should demolish all kinds of walls. The poem is a crusade against everything that makes us forget our common bond of humanity.

The Poet says that his neighbour is not like him. He (the neighbour) believes in the idea of raising a wall between man and man. The poet says that his neighbour is moving in darkness. But it is not the darkness of woods or of the shade of trees, it is the darkness of heart and mind. His neighbour still sticks to traditional concepts. He does not want to follow the saying of his father. He thinks that the ideas of his ancestors are very good. He says again that good fences make a good neighbour. This repetition of line by the neighbour, again and again, shows that human behaviour is parrot-like. It is a blind, senseless observance of old concepts. This repetition of line again stresses the central idea of the poem that all walls are unnecessary.

Question-Answer (Essay Type)

Q.1. According to the speaker, there is no need for a wall between the two farms. Why?

Ans.: ‘Mending Wall’ is a poem based on a small incident. The poet narrates his annual experience with his neighbour whose farm of pine trees adjoins the poet’s apple orchard. The poet says that every year some portion of the wall falls down. Sometimes, the cause is known and sometimes it is not known. The Poet and his neighbour meet every year and repair the wall. This is repeated in a never-ending process. The opening line of the poem brings out the idea that all walls are unnatural, as they divide. The Poet says that it is not only he who does not love a wall but perhaps there is some mysterious force that also does not like the idea of the raising of a wall. The force makes the groundswell under the wall. As a result of it every year some portion of the wall falls down. The Poet says that there is no need of walls between two farms. He stresses this idea by arguing that he grows apple in his orchard and his neighbour has all pine trees. Trees can not intrude, trespass as cows can. He says that his apple trees will never move over to his farm to eat the cones under his pines. The Poet says that there may be a need of walls if either of them cows. Cows could go into other man’s field and can spoil his crops. But neither of them has cows. So, there is no need of any wall between both farms. But the poet’s neighbour does not agree with his idea. He says only that good fences make good neighbours. It is a stereotyped response. The neighbour refuses to examine the true purpose of his father’s saying. He is so conventional that he does not even want to listen to why there is no need of a wall. He just wants to stick to old convention . The poet wants the wall to be demolished. Wall is a symbol of every kind of barrier that man has created between each other. The Poem brings out the idea that all walls are unnecessary and we should demolish them.

Q. 2. Explain ‘Good fences make good neighbours’ and something there is that does not love a wall’.

Ans.: The poem ‘Mending Wall’ presents a clash between two viewpoints. The one is that ‘good fences make good neighbour’ and the other is there is something that does not love a wall’. The first view is expressed by the poet’s neighbour. The Poet has an orchard of apples. His neighbour has a farms of pines. There is a wall between them. But every year, some portion of the wall falls down. Every year at the beginning of spring season they meet and mend the wall. But the poet says that there is no need of a wall between two farms. Poet grows apples and his neighbour has pines. Trees cannot intrude, trees cannot trees pass as animals can. He says that there could be a need of wall only if they had cows or other animals. But neither he nor his neighbour has cows. So there is no need of a wall between their farms. The Poet wants his neighbour to understand his point of view but the latter repeats, again and again, his father’s saying: ‘Good fences make good neighbour’. His behaviour is to some extent, parrot-like. He does not want to understand what the poet is saying. His repetition of the same line shows that man is often a prisoner of traditions.

The other viewpoint is held by the poet he says that not only he but there is something in nature that does not love a wall. It is some mysterious power, perhaps God, that makes the wall fall every year. This mysterious power makes the frozen ground swell under it and causes it of fall. The idea behind these lines is that there is no need of a wall. All these walls are man-made. All these are unnatural because they divide. This poem makes a plea to demolish all kinds of walls whether they are religious, racial, political or national. Thus, the poem presents a sharp contrast between the two viewpoints.

Question-Answer (Short Type)

Q.1. Who are the two neighbours in the poem ?

Ans.: The two neighbours in the poem are two farmers. One of them is the poet himself. He grows apple in his orchard and his neighbour grows pine. There is a wall that divides these two farms. These two neighbours present a sharp contrast between the two points of view. One view is of the poet who wants to demolish the wall. He does not want to mend the wall because he thinks that wall is a symbol of discrimination as it divides. But his neighbour advocates the idea of raising wall. He says that good fences make good neighbours. Thus, by giving the example of two neighbours the poet brings out the difference between the nature of one man and the other.

Q.2. What is the ‘Mending time’?

Ans.: The onset of spring is the mending time described by the poet for dislodged wall. At the onset of spring, every farmer of New England mends his demolished wall. The Poet himself fixes a date in the spring season to mend the wall. On the fixed date, they mend the wall. He says that spring season fills him with mischief. He feels that there is no need of a wall between them.

Q.3. What are the signs in the poem which show that nature does not love a well?

Ans.: The poet begins the poem with the line: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”. What the poet means to say is that there is some mysterious power in nature that does not like raising walls between neighbours. This power makes the ground swell under it. As a result of it, some upper boulders of the wall fall on the ground and create a wide gap. Sometimes, the cause of wall fall is known. It is done by hunters who are after rabbits. But sometimes, it is unknown. Some supernatural force creates a gap in the wall. No one has ever seen them being made. But with the onset of spring, when they meet to mend the wall, they notice these gaps. All these things show that nature doesn’t love a wall.

Q.4. Explain the simile is used in the poem for the tasks of mending the wall?

Ans.: The Poet says that the task of mending a wall is the same as that of an outdoor game in which there are only two players, one on each side. By using this simile, he brings out the idea that there is no need of a wall between the two farms. This process is nothing more than a game especially at a place where wall is useless.

Q.5. What impression do you form of the speaker and why?

Ans.: The speaker is a person who is a lover of humanity. He makes a plea to demolish all kind of barriers. In his view all walls that divide are unnecessary. The speaker says that these walls are not made by God, but by man. Walls are a barrier between man and man. They are a symbol of savage thinking and darkness of heart. The speaker advises us to demolish all kind of walls. By examining his point of view, we can say that the poet is a great lover of humanity.

Q.6. Explain the line, ‘He is all pine and I am apple orchard’.

Ans.: The Poet says that he has an apple orchard and his neighbour has a farm of pine trees. There is a wall that divides both these farms. The Poet says that there is no need of wall between their farms. One has grown pine on his side and the other has an apple orchard. Trees cannot trees pass into other man’s farm. He says my apple tree will not get across into his farms to eat the cones under his pines. Trees cannot intrude as cows can, so there is no need of a wall.

Q.7. Give examples of the speaker’s sense of humour.

Ans.: The speaker of the poem has a very good sense of humour. Humorously , he tells that his apple trees will not get across into the neighbour’s to eat the cones under his pine trees. He also gives a humours description of stones. He says that some stones are flat like breads and some are round like balls. He makes fun of his neighbour saying that he looks like an old-stone savage while carrying a big stone.

Very Short Question Answers

1. What, according to the poet, are the causes for walls breaking down? Answer :- The poet says that there is something in the world that does not love a wall. In winter heavy frost disturbs wall and the stones at the top of the walls are thrown down, and gaps are created. Again, hunters does not like walls. To drive rabbits out of their hiding places the hunters deliberately create gaps in walls. The mischievous elves are also responsible for causing damage to the walls in winter.

2. Give a brief account of the argument about walls between Frost and his neighbour. Answer :- The wall between Frost’s apple orchard and his neighbour’s pinewood suffers damage during the winter. Next spring, he and his neighbour meet to repair it. Walking along, each on his side of the wall, they replace the fallen stones. Frost says to his neighbour that his apple trees could not eat the pine cones of the latter. Frost feels that repairing the wall is meaningless. But his neighbour replies that good fences make good neighbours. Frost feels like pointing out that neither of them had cows and that is another reason for pulling down the wall. But the neighbour repeats the old maxim which he learnt from his father.

3. Why does Frost say that his neighbour “moves in darkness”? Answer:- While repairing the wall between their estates Frost suggested to his neighbour that the wall was unnecessary. After all, his apple trees could not eat his neighbour’s pine cones. But the neighbour insisted that good fences make good neighbours. Watching him come up to the wall, carrying a big stone in each hand the poet felt for a moment that he was like a savage armed with weapons of the stone – age. Then it struck Frost that his neighbour’s savage like appearance was not merely physical. His views about the necessity for walls shows that his mind was also in darkness. He could not think of breaking barriers between men to maintain universal brotherhood.

4. Bring out the significance of the title ‘Mending Wall’. Answer:- When we read the poem superficially, it is merely an account of two New England farmers, one of whom wants to build a boundary wall between their respective properties. According to him “Good fences make good neighbours’. The other, the poet himself, does not consider the fences at all necessary at that particular place. But the poem is not as simple as that. The fence or wall here has s symbolic significance. It also symbolizes national, racial, religious, political and economic barriers which divide man from man and come in the way of mutual understanding and universal brotherhood. ‘Mending Wall’ is a symbolic poem in which the poet symbolizes the conflict between the new trend of bringing down barriers between men and nations and the old view that for good neighbourly relations fences and walls are essential.

Short Answer Type Questions

Q. Why did Robert Frost write Mending Wall? Answer:- “Mending Wall” was published in the North of Boston in 1914. The poem speaks of how self-isolation provides a sense of protection, but at the same time prevents personal growth and growth in relationships.

Q. What does the title mending wall mean? Answer:- T he word “mending” is used as a verb in Mending Wall by Robert Frost. The title refers to the task that the speaker of the poem and his neighbour perform in repairing the wall between their two farms. Each spring brings “mending-time,” so the speaker calls on his neighbour and they meet to mend the wall.

Q. How does the speaker feel about the gaps in the wall? Answer: – Since the gaps tend to grow, the speaker seems to believe that there is some aspect in the world “that doesn’t love a wall. Nature “sends the frozen-ground-swell under it” so that the rocks on top spill off and fall on the earth.

Q. What is the irony in Mending Wall? Answer:- The greatest irony in the poem “Mending Wall” perhaps is that even when the speaker realises that there should be no wall between the neighbours he continues to help build the wall. As the poem progresses, the speaker discusses how all kinds of natural forces, including the land and animals, conspire every winter to knock down the wall.

Q. What is the conflict in Mending Wall? Answer:- The tension in “Mending Wall” grows as the speaker gradually exposes himself as he portrays a native Yankee and responds to the regional spirit he embodies. The opposition between observer and observed— and the tension created by the observer’s awareness of the difference is crucial to the poem.

Q. Does the wall separate the two neighbours or bring them closer together? Answer:- No, it unites the two neighbours. The wall acted as an instrument to get them together, as they would meet to mend it annually.

Q. What does the wall in the Mending Wall symbolize? Answer:- The wall in the poem’ Mending Wall’ symbolizes two points of view from two separate persons, one from the speaker and the other from his neighbour. The wall not only serves as a divider in the separation of the estate but also acts as a barrier to friendship and contact

Q. What is the message of the Mending Wall? Answer:- A generally accepted theme of the poem “The Mending Wall” concerns the self-imposed obstacles preventing human contact. In the poem, the neighbour of the speaker pointlessly tries to rebuild a wall in spite that the fence is detrimental to their land more than it benefits anyone. Yet the neighbour is still persistent in his maintenance

Q. What does the neighbour say in mending wall? Answer:- The favourite saying of the neighbour is “good fences make good neighbours.” The neighbour of the speaker is of the view that neighbour should have fences. He seems to think there should be separation. To prevent confrontation, he would rather stay away from his neighbour. He says again”Good fences make good neighbours.”

Q. What does something there is that doesn’t love a wall mean? Answer:- The speaker says “there is something that doesn’t love a wall” at the very beginning to create an atmosphere of mystery and to refer to someone who is a mysterious entity , person or force attempting to crack the wall. Literally, what this means simply is that nature (the speaker says) doesn’t like walls. He says Nature doesn’t like being hemmed in.

Q. What is the tone of the poem Mending Wall? Answer: – Mending wall is written in several tones. The tone is enigmatic at the beginning of the poem,’ something there is that doesn’t love a wall’. Frost then creates a relaxed tone in the line’ we meet to walk the line and set the wall between us once again’.

Q. How would you describe the poet and his tone in Mending Wall? Answer:- Mending Wall explains the story of two neighbours exchanging thoughts and talking about the wall that needs to be mended. Not only is the wall literal but it is also metaphorical. People placed barriers between them and others when they didn’t need to. The tone is marked by the narrator’s frustration when he sees the wall broken.

Q. What argument does the speaker give to convince his neighbour that they do not need the wall? Answer: The speaker speaks that they don’t need a wall because their fields are of two different kinds. The neighbour’s field has pine trees, while the speaker has an apple orchard.

Q. What is ironic about the speaker in Mending Wall for helping to maintain the wall? Answer:- The speaker in “Mending Wall” tries to maintain the wall, but he does not see any point in having a wall. One grows pine trees and the other apple trees, so there’s no need to divide because, as the speaker says, “My apples will never get across and eat the cones under his pines.”

Q. Who initiates the mending of the wall? Answer: -The speaker of the poem is the one who initiates the mending of the wall. As the poem begins the narrator contemplates the fact that there is something mysterious that just doesn’t want walls to exist.

Q. How do the hunters damage the wall in mending wall? Answer:- By knocking down parts of the wall, the hunters kill hiding places for the rabbits, making it easier for their dogs to catch them. Unlike the natural forces of destruction, these hunters are the freezing and thawing of the land, which also damages parts of the wall.

Q. How does the poem’s form relate to its meaning Mending Wall? Answer:- The form of “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost is stichical rather than stanzaic. The word “stichic” means that the poem consists of continuously written lines of equal length rather than divided into different stanzas. The meter of the poem in blank verse . The poem contains a total of 46 lines.

Q. What is the major metaphor in mending wall? Answer:- The wall is the main metaphor in this poem. It comes down to representing differences among people, things that hold them apart.

Q. Where does the mending wall take place? Answer:- Like many North of Boston poems, “Mending Wall” narrates a tale taken from rural New England. The narrator, a farmer from New England, makes contact with his neighbour in the spring to rebuild the stone wall between their two farms.

Q. Why does the mending of the wall by the speaker and his Neighbour appear to be an outdoor game? Answer:- The speaker here implies that making a wall isn’t natural; after all, the only man constructs boundaries. Repairing this wall is but a “kind of outdoor game” for him and his neighbour that they play annually as they seek to balance the rocks from either side.

Q. What are the contrasting views presented in the poem Mending Wall? Answer:- The poem, “Mending Wall,” deals with the speaker and his neighbour’s two opposing views. Fraternity and empathy are the two essential factors in living a harmonious life, according to the Poet. He doesn’t like walls that divide from one another.

Q. Who is the speaker in the poem Mending Wall? Answer:- The poem “Mending Wall” is about two rural neighbours who had a wall dividing them. The speaker is the owner of an apple orchard, as the lines read, “He is all pine and I am an apple orchard.

Q. Why does the poet consider the spring season mischievous? Answer:- The spring is the mischievous time of year because the gaps in the wall are found during spring. The poem is about two neighbours who have a wall between their land. They have an agreement to meet once a year and maintain the wall, fixing any gaps that have developed in it over the course of the year.

Q. Why does the speaker repeat the following two lines Something there is that doesn’t love a wall Good fences make good neighbours? Answer:- The lines “something there is that doesn’t love a wall” and “good fences make good neighbours” are repeated. The speaker dislikes having the wall between the two fields. He feels needless, citing the fact that the wall begins to collapse as proof that it should not be there.

Q. Why do the two neighbours continue to repair the wall every spring if they don’t necessarily believe that they should? Answer:- One reason the neighbours keep mending the wall every year in spring is that they do so to mend and preserve their friendship.

Q. What I was walling in or walling out meaning? Answer:- As the poet says’ walling in or walling out,’ he attempts to articulate a dilemma in which he is. He contemplates as he wonders what role the stone wall actually serves between him and his neighbour. He is unsure who he properly blocks or allows.

Discover more from Smart English Notes

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

Analysis of “Mending Wall “by Robert Frost Essay

In the poem “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost narrates a story of two neighbors meeting to rebuild the stone wall, a traditional routine for them every spring. The speaker communicates with the neighbor by continually questioning the legitimacy of the wall. Although the persona appears to engage in a monologue at some point, the central theme of human interaction is apparent. The building of the walls conveys an important message about human life regarding relationships in society. Traditionally, humans are social beings yet they cultivate discrimination based on various aspects. While the conventional belief is that separation promotes good relationships, the truth is that it kills human relationships. Hence, the speaker is disturbed so much by the idea of having to mend the wall every spring even though they have no cattle to restrain from wandering on the farm. Understandably, the speaker and the neighbor have some differences shown by the types of crops on their farms. The speaker has apples while the neighbor has pines on his farm. Thus, the crops symbolize their difference which can either be racial, religious, based on gender, or any other significant feature.

The structure of the poem provides both emotional and philosophical content. First, the poem is written in the form of a short story where the speaker recounts one remarkable event in his life related to the tradition of wall-building during the spring season. Here, the speaker seems to remember the happenings due to annoyance and bitterness for lack of reasonable explanation to justify wall building. Hence, the speaker’s observance of nature reveals his philosophies about life. The speaker does not believe in boundaries in human relations, yet the traditions he believes are archaic and compel him to conform. Unfortunately, the speaker’s position about discrimination in society is ambiguous as he mildly protests, but continues to build the wall anyway, which is ironic. Notably, the symbolism in the poem is conspicuous and helps depict the theme. The wall symbolizes boundaries or segregations in the society that are long-held by the community, yet no one can give a valid reason for their continued existence.

I can connect quite well with the poem, given my historical understanding of racial discrimination in America. The building of the wall is allegorical of acceptance of discrimination in society. For instance, in the late 19th century, discrimination in schools was legalized by the Supreme Court ruling that validated the idea of “separate but equal.” Still, there are numerous gaps in society, such as gender-based wage gaps, leadership, economic, and health disparities. Some find no issue with such segregation the same way the neighbor believes walls are necessary for good relationships as he repeats the phrase “walls make good neighbors.” The expression also marks the end of the poem, meaning the issue was not resolved, allowing it to continue as a routine. Overall, the poem depicts human nature that has accepted and normalized boundaries and differences in society without trying to find solutions.

Frost, R. (n.d.). “Neither out far nor in deep” The Literature Network . Web.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, November 1). Analysis of "Mending Wall "by Robert Frost. https://ivypanda.com/essays/analysis-of-mending-wall-by-robert-frost/

"Analysis of "Mending Wall "by Robert Frost." IvyPanda , 1 Nov. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/analysis-of-mending-wall-by-robert-frost/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Analysis of "Mending Wall "by Robert Frost'. 1 November.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Analysis of "Mending Wall "by Robert Frost." November 1, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/analysis-of-mending-wall-by-robert-frost/.

1. IvyPanda . "Analysis of "Mending Wall "by Robert Frost." November 1, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/analysis-of-mending-wall-by-robert-frost/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Analysis of "Mending Wall "by Robert Frost." November 1, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/analysis-of-mending-wall-by-robert-frost/.

• “Mending Wall” Poem by Robert Frost Through Political Lens
• Should South and Korea Become One? Mending the Rift
• SBIRT in Relation to Tobacco Use in Adolescents in Pembroke Pines, FL
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: Poem Analysis
• The Impact of Change in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
• Satire in Voltaire’s Candide
• The Story “Tiny, Smiling Daddy” and the Poem “Barbie Doll”
• Analysis of “In My Eyes He Matches the Gods”

Robert Frost

Mending wall.

#1914 #AmericanWriters #NorthOfBoston

Liked or faved by...

Other works by Robert Frost...

They leave us so to the way we too…

He would declare and could himself… That the birds there in all the ga… From having heard the daylong voic… Had added to their own an oversoun… Her tone of meaning but without th…

She drew back; he was calm: “It is this that had the power.” And he lashed his open palm With the tender-headed flower. He smiled for her to smile,

The old dog barks backwards withou… I can remember when he was a pup.

We dance round in a ring and suppo… But the Secret sits in the middle…

One of my wishes is that those dar… So old and firm they scarcely show… Were not, as ’twere, the merest ma… But stretched away unto the edge o… I should not be withheld but that…

The witch that came (the withered… To wash the steps with pail and ra… Was once the beauty Abishag, The picture pride of Hollywood. Too many fall from great and good

Whose woods these are I think I k… His house is in the village, thoug… He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with sn… My little horse must think it quee…

The little old house was out with… In front at the edge of the road w… A roadside stand that too pathetic… It would not be fair to say for a… But for some of the money, the cas…

A head thrusts in as for the view, But where it is it thrusts in from Or what it is it thrusts into By that Cyb’laean avenue, And what can of its coming come,

Something inspires the only cow of… To make no more of a wall than an… And think no more of wall—builders… Her face is flecked with pomace an… A cider syrup. Having tasted frui…

Wind the season-climate mixer In my Witches’ Weather Primer Says to make this Fall Elixir First you let the summer simmer, Using neither spoon nor skimmer,

The clouds, the source of rain, on… Offered an opening to the source o… Which I accepted with impatient s… Looking for my old skymarks in the… But stars were scarce in that part…

The bearer of evil tidings, When he was halfway there, Remembered that evil tidings Were a dangerous thing to bear. So when he came to the parting

I’ve known ere now an interfering… Of alder catch my lifted axe behin… But that was in the woods, to hold… From striking at another alder’s r… And that was, as I say, an alder…

English Studies

This website is dedicated to English Literature, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, English Language and its teaching and learning.

“Mending Wall” by Robert Frost: Critical Essay

The catchphrase “Good fences make good neighbors” in “Mending Wall” has become associated with Frost, who used it to describe a wall he erected between his orchard and his neighbor’s fields.

“Mending Wall”: Introduction

Table of Contents

            The catchphrase “Good fences make good neighbors” in “Mending Wall” has become associated with Frost, who used it to describe a wall he erected between his orchard and his neighbor’s fields. In the poem “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost consistently emphasizes that there is something opposing the wall both have constructed, whether it be hunters or something else. He articulates this notion with the line, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” (Lines 1). While Frost doesn’t outright refute his neighbor’s suggestion, his reflections in “Mending Wall” suggest that walls, especially those between individuals and nations, are established to hinder affection or contact between people and serve no other purpose.

“Mending Wall” and Real Walls”

Walls between nations serve to interrupt contact and create an air of mystery about them among other nations. A prominent example is the Great Wall of China, which stands out. Unlike a singular wall, it is comprised of a collection of short walls scattered over an estimated length of approximately 8,850 kilometers or 5,500 miles. Construction was suggested around 200 BCE during the Qin Dynasty, with the primary goal of keeping Mongol nomads away from China. The wall underwent various additions and modifications during different periods, with the latest occurring during the Ming Dynasty in the 14th to 16th century. Constructed from soil, stones, bricks, and incorporating massive boulders at certain locations, the wall also features fortifications and guard posts at intervals of every four miles. This structure is relevant to Frost, as like the Chinese, his friend also visits him, and they both take walks, as he mentioned.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

 And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again. (Lines 12-14)

The reason is that Frost is outgoing, but his neighbor believes in the adage “good fences make good friends” (Line 45), a sentiment shared by the Chinese, who historically did not engage in open contacts with other nations (Rosenberg). The Great Wall of China stands as a tangible example, preventing China from fostering intimate relationships with any other country until relatively recently.

“Mending Wall” and “The Berlin Wall”

The Berlin Wall also served a similar purpose, keeping Eastern Berliners and Western Berliners separated for over 28 years. It was a physical division of West Berlin from East Germany, constructed on August 31, 1961. Unlike the gradual construction of the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall’s creation was rapid and unexpected, mirroring the surprising nature of its eventual destruction. After World War II, the Aallied powers divided Germany into four zones, and Berlin faced a similar fate. However, as relations between the USSR and other powers deteriorated, Berlin also became a focal point for division. On August 31, 1961, amidst rumors of the USSR potentially annexing East Berlin, soldiers and construction workers entered East Berlin in trucks and jeeps just after midnight. While Berliners slept, they swiftly erected a wall with concrete and bricks, creating a barrier that separated people who had lived together for centuries. Stretching around a hundred miles, the Berlin Wall underwent four phases of repair, evolving from a simple fence to a complete wall (Rosenberg). Many families and relationships were severed, prompting several attempts to breach the wall, echoing Frost’s sentiment when he says, “There where it is, we do not need the wall” (Line 24).

“Mending Wall” and Contemporary Era

In the contemporary era, nations no longer rely on physical walls but rather strict regulations, such as the U.S. immigration system, to control the influx of people and individuals. While the means have shifted from visible walls to invisible barriers of laws, rules, and regulations, the underlying purpose remains the same – preventing people from meeting and getting to know each other. In the United States, immigration issues evoke cultural and economic anxieties among locals, fueled by media portrayals that sometimes depict immigrants as an economic burden (Fix and Jeffery). Although the U.S. immigration policy articulates clear goals of promoting family reunification, cultural diversity, and economic homogeneity, it is divided into legal and illegal sections, creating complexities for individuals. Despite immigrants often contributing significantly to the U.S. economy, Frost sees the issue differently. His questioning, “If I could put a notion in his head: / Why do they make good neighbors?” (Lines 29-30), resonates as true in this context. For Frost, the immigration department becomes the barrier to good neighborly relations, preventing families, even those without proper documentation, from uniting and establishing lasting connections.

“Mending Wall”: Conclusion

Frost’s neighbor’s assertion that “good fences make good friends” (Line 45) holds truth, but it is also evident that excessive walling and fencing can foster a biased approach, diminishing affection, reducing contact, and undermining confidence and trust among the public. This sentiment is portrayed by Frost in “Mending Wall.” The Great Wall of China effectively isolated China from the world for an extended period, and the Berlin Wall kept Berliners separated for over 28 years. Similarly, the U.S. immigration policy forces many neighbors to part ways permanently, severing their connections. However, Frost may overlook the political and contextual nuances that surround each instance of walling and fencing. Each structure serves specific requirements and is influenced by the demands of the time. Even in Frost’s poem, the distinction between walling and fencing implies that the U.S. immigration policy, while creating barriers, may not be as severe as the extensive walls erected by Ancient China and the USSR. Frost acknowledges that there are different motivations and timings behind these structures, recognizing that they don’t all carry the same implications.

“Mending Wall”: Works Cited

• Fix, Michael E.&  Jeffrey S. Passel. “Immigration and Immigrants: Setting the Record Straight.” 2013. Urban Institute. 16 July 2013  <http://www.urban.org/publications/305184.html>. Accessed 16 July 2023.
• Frost, Robert. “Mending Wall.” 18 July 2007. n. d. Writing. <http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/frost-mending.html>. Accessed 16 July 2023.
• Lentricchia, Frank. “Robert Frost: A Critical Analysis of “Mending Wall”. 28 September 2009. 16 July 2013 <http://studentacademichelp.blogspot.com/2009/09/robert-frost-critical-analysis-of.html>. Accessed 16 July 2023.
• Rosenberg, Matt. “ The Great Wall of China .” n.d. Geography. <http://geography.about.com/od/specificplacesofinterest/a/greatwall.htm>. Accessed 16 July 2023.
• Rosenberg, Jennifer. “ The Rise and Fall of The Berlin Wall (2).” n.d. History 1900. <http://history1900s.about.com/od/coldwa1/a/berlinwall_2.htm>. Accessed 16 July 2023.

“Mending Wall”: Relevant Questions

• Comparative Analysis: How do the themes and symbolism in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” resonate with the construction and implications of the real walls such as the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China?
• Social and Political Impact: In what ways did the physical walls like the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China influence social dynamics and relationships, and how does this align with Frost’s exploration of interpersonal boundaries in “Mending Wall”?
• Evolution of Walls: Considering the Berlin Wall’s relatively recent history in comparison to the ancient Great Wall of China, how has the concept and construction of walls evolved over time, and does Frost’s perspective in “Mending Wall” provide insights into the enduring aspects or changing nature of these structures?

Related posts:

• Humanity in “The Cabuliwala”
• “A Room of One’s Own”: Virginia Woolf
•  “The Dead” and “The Metamorphosis”: Modernist Life
• Feminism in Argentina: Short Stories

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Mending Wall — Analysis Of Robert Frost’s Use Of Literary Devices In Mending Wall

Analysis of Robert Frost’s Use of Literary Devices in Mending Wall

• Categories: Mending Wall Robert Frost

About this sample

Words: 1320 |

Published: May 14, 2021

Words: 1320 | Pages: 3 | 7 min read

Works Cited

• Chelliah, S. “The Poetic Art and Vision of Robert Frost with a Focus on His Pragmatic View of the Relationship between Man and Nature: A Brief Analysis.” Language in India, vol. 17, no. 11, Nov. 2017, pp. 98–112. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=126488938&site=eds-live&scope=site.
• McNair, Wesley. “Robert Frost and Dramatic Speech.” Sewanee Review, vol. 106, no. 1, Winter 1998, p. 68. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=prf&AN=541482&site=prclive&scope=site.
• Morrissey, L. J. “‘Mending Wall’: The Structure of Gossip.” English Language Notes, vol. 25, no. 3, Mar. 1988, p. 58. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=4971124&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr. Karlyna PhD

Verified writer

• Expert in: Literature

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

4.5 pages / 1980 words

2 pages / 887 words

3.5 pages / 2123 words

7 pages / 3276 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Mending Wall

Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall" is rich in symbolism, as the poet uses various elements to convey deeper meanings and themes. One of the key symbols in the poem is the wall itself, which represents barriers and divisions [...]

The poem "Mending Wall" by the prominent American poet Robert Frost has often been viewed as one of his favorite pieces of verse. The basic context of this poem concerns the construction of a stone wall between two neighbors and [...]

Robert Lee Frost, a prominent American poet born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, California, left an indelible mark on literature with his profound exploration of rural life and human relationships. Among his notable works, [...]

In the poem “Mending Wall”, Robert Frost uses language and paragraph structure in order to develop controversial ideas about the necessity of change and stirring rebellion, and about maintaining individuality. One of the [...]

I cannot talk about whether Frost was very good with the shovel in the field, but only with the pen in his hands. Robert Frost conceived his poem Mending Wall in his time as a farmer, on the occasions when he met his neighbor to [...]

The title year of George Orwell's most famous novel is nineteen years past, but the dystopian vision it draws has retained its ability to grip readers with a haunting sense of foreboding about the future. At the heart of many of [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free