Mending Wall by Robert Frost: Subject: Themes: Context

MENDING WALL by ROBERT FROST
Subject: The speaker describes how he and his neighbour carry out annual repairs on the wall that
separates their properties, and questions the need for the wall’s existence.
Themes: Rural life, work, country people, the past, tradition, relationships, communication.
Context: • Frost had often walked along the boundary of his farm (where he lived 1900-1911) with his
New Hampshire neighbor, a French-Canadian called Napoleon Guay, and repaired the wall
between them. ‘Good fences make good neighbours’ was a phrase Guay often used.
• The issue of boundaries was something Frost explored in his poetry: he chose to work
within traditional forms and challenged himself to express his unique ideas within their
constraints. He felt that having clear parameters facilitated the creative process by forcing
the poet to find novel ways of accommodating their ideas to existing frameworks. He can
therefore be regarded as someone who simultaneously embraced and challenged tradition.
Form & • The poem is 45 lines of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). The regularity of its
structure: metre can be seen as reflecting the sense of ritual associated with rural traditions.
• Frost’s use of caesura and enjambment makes the poem flow like natural speech, while the
lack of rhyme scheme prevents it from taking on a sing-song quality. The poem’s
graphological form also mimics the appearance of a wall due to its lack of stanza breaks.
Language, imagery & metaphors:
• The inverted syntax of the opening line – ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall’ – makes it sound
like a riddle or a proverb, and alerts us to the speaker’s playful frame of mind.
• The speaker’s observation that ‘No one has seen [the gaps] made or heard them made’ and the
connotations of witchcraft attached to the ‘spell’ needed to make the stones balance suggest that there is
some supernatural force at work in the mysterious breaking of the walls. Frost implies that nature
objects to manmade boundaries and strives to overcome them.
• One of the poem’s central themes is differences in perception. Frost’s juxtaposition of images of
different crops in the line ‘He is all pine and I am apple orchard’ provides a reminder that, as humans,
we are all separated from one another by our subjective identities, and we cannot help but see the world
differently. What the speaker sees as a ‘wall’, with its connotations of division, his neighbour sees as a
‘fence’ – an innocuous way of demarcating one’s territory. The fact that everything in life can be
viewed from multiple perspectives is illustrated by the contradictory adages ‘Something there is that
doesn’t love a wall’ and ‘Good fences make good neighbours’.
• The wall in the poem can be interpreted metaphorically as representing the communication barriers that
exist between individuals and social groups. Throughout the poem, it acts as a symbol of psychological
division: the line ‘We keep the wall between us as we go’ can be seen as a metaphor for the way
humans place boundaries around themselves and their communities, and the image of the process by
which some unseen force ‘spills the upper boulders in the sun’ suggests that these walls are not natural.
• Yet Frost simultaneously implies that such boundaries serve an important social function by allowing
individuals to claim their own place in the world. It is important to note that the wall in the poem
actually facilitates social contact between the speaker and his neighbour and that, despite his apparent
dislike of the wall, it is the speaker himself who reminds his neighbour that the wall needs to be
mended: ‘I let my neighbour know beyond the hill’. Frost thus uses the metaphor of the wall to explore
the tension between the human need for connection and the desire to protect our own interests.
• Besides exploring the theme of boundaries and communication difficulties, Frost uses the story in
‘Mending Wall’ to question the wisdom of accepting rules and traditions without interrogating their
purpose. While the speaker points out that the wall does not serve any real purpose (‘we do not need the
wall’), his neighbour clings to ‘his father’s saying’, claiming that: ‘Good fences make good neighbours’.
Frost’s uneasiness regarding the unquestioning acceptance of tradition is reinforced through his
description of the neighbour brandishing two rocks ‘like an old-stone savage armed’. This simile
represents him as primitive, and its connotations of war suggest that social divisions lead to conflict.
Tone:
• The speaker’s tone is playful, mischievous, musing and conversational as he wonders where the gaps in
the wall come from and notes the wall’s pointlessness. It becomes increasingly reflective and
philosophical as he ponders the wisdom of blindly adhering to traditions.

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