The Full Text of “Mending Wall”
1Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
2That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
3And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
4And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
5The work of hunters is another thing:
6I have come after them and made repair
7Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
8But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
9To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
10No one has seen them made or heard them made,
11But at spring mending-time we find them there.
12I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
13And on a day we meet to walk the line
14And set the wall between us once again.
15We keep the wall between us as we go.
16To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
17And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
18We have to use a spell to make them balance:
19"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
20We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
21Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
22One on a side. It comes to little more:
23There where it is we do not need the wall:
24He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
25My apple trees will never get across
26And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
27He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
28Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
29If I could put a notion in his head:
30"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
31Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
32Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
33What I was walling in or walling out,
34And to whom I was like to give offence.
35Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
36That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
37But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
38He said it for himself. I see him there
39Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
40In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
41He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
42Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
43He will not go behind his father's saying,
44And he likes having thought of it so well
45He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."
The Full Text of “Mending Wall”
1Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
2That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
3And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
4And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
5The work of hunters is another thing:
6I have come after them and made repair
7Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
8But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
9To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
10No one has seen them made or heard them made,
11But at spring mending-time we find them there.
12I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
13And on a day we meet to walk the line
14And set the wall between us once again.
15We keep the wall between us as we go.
16To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
17And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
18We have to use a spell to make them balance:
19"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
20We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
21Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
22One on a side. It comes to little more:
23There where it is we do not need the wall:
24He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
25My apple trees will never get across
26And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
27He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
28Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
29If I could put a notion in his head:
30"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
31Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
32Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
33What I was walling in or walling out,
34And to whom I was like to give offence.
35Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
36That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
37But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
38He said it for himself. I see him there
39Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
40In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
41He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
42Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
43He will not go behind his father's saying,
44And he likes having thought of it so well
45He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."
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“Mending Wall” Introduction
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“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.
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“Mending Wall” Summary
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There is some force that doesn’t like walls. It causes the frozen ground to swell underneath a wall, and the wall's upper stones then topple off in the warmth of the sun. This creates gaps in the wall so big that two people could walk through them side-by-side. And then there are the hunters who take apart the wall—that’s something different. I often have to come and fix the spots where hunters haven't left a single stone in place, as they tried to flush out the rabbits that hide in the wall in order to make their barking dogs happy. No one has seen or heard these gaps in the wall being made. We just find them there in the spring, when it comes time to fix the wall. I reach out to my neighbor, who lives over a hill, and we find a day to get together and walk along the wall, fixing these gaps as we go. He walks on his side of the wall and I on mine, and we deal only with whatever rocks have fallen off the wall on our side of it. Some of them look like loaves of bread and some are round like balls, so we pray that they’ll stay in place, balanced on top of the wall, saying: "Don’t move until we’re gone!" Our fingers get chafed from picking up the rocks. It’s just another outside activity, each of us on our side of the wall, nothing more.
There’s no need for a wall to be there. On my neighbor’s side of the wall, there’s nothing but pine trees; my side is an apple orchard. It’s not like my apple trees are going to cross the wall and eat his pine cones, I say to him. But he just responds, "Good fences are necessary to have good neighbors." Since it’s spring and I feel mischievous, I wonder if I could make my neighbor ask himself: "Why are they necessary? Isn’t that only true if you’re trying to keep your neighbor’s cows out of your fields? There aren’t any cows here. If I were to build a wall, I’d want to know what I was keeping in and what I was keeping out, and who was going to be offended by this. There is some force that doesn’t love a wall, that wants to pull it down.” I could propose that Elves are responsible for the gaps in the wall, but it’s not exactly Elves, and, anyway, I want my neighbor to figure it out on his own. I see him, lifting up stones, grasping them firmly by the top, in each hand, like an ancient warrior. He moves in a deep darkness—not just the darkness of the woods or the trees above. He does not want to think beyond his set idea about the world, and he likes having articulated this idea so clearly. So he says it again: “Good fences are necessary to have good neighbors.”
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“Mending Wall” Themes
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Borders
At its heart, “Mending Wall” is a poem about borders—the work it takes to maintain them and the way they shape human interactions. The speaker and the speaker's neighbor spend much of the poem rebuilding a wall that divides their properties. As they do so, they debate the function of the wall and how it affects their relationship.
The speaker suggests that the wall is unnecessary, both practically and politically: in the speaker's mind, walls exclude people, injuring otherwise harmonious relationships. But the neighbor argues that walls actually improve relationships, because they allow people to treat each other fairly and prevent conflict. The poem doesn't fall too heavily on either side of the debate, ultimately allowing readers to decide for themselves which vision of human community is most convincing.
The speaker believes the wall isn't necessary, given the crops that the speaker and the neighbor grow: while cattle might wander over to graze in someone else's pasture, the speaker's apples aren't going to eat the neighbor's pine trees. More importantly, the speaker believes that walls actively damage people's relationships. This is because walls are likely to “give offense”—that is, to offend people with their implication of mistrust and exclusion.
The speaker thus asks the neighbor why they need to continue repairing the wall at all. In response, the neighbor says simply and repeatedly: "Good fences make good neighbours." He believes that a good neighbor establishes clear boundaries, and in doing so prevents problems from arising between people who live near each other. The neighbor seems haunted by the possibility of future conflicts. In fact, he seems to regard such conflicts as an inevitable part of life—and as such that it’s important to take steps to prevent them.
For the speaker, there's no reason to engage in such preventative measures because there are no conflicts between him and his neighbor—not even the seeds of future conflict. "Here there are no cows," the speaker says, literally referencing the fact that there aren't any cattle around that need to be penned in, lest they graze on someone else's property, and also figuratively suggesting that the speaker and the neighbor have no reason to be especially possessive of their lands. They aren't competing for resources, and should be able to live peacefully side by side. In this worldview, people are basically decent. It is building the wall itself that seems to the speaker most likely to cause conflict, by creating a sense of "us" vs. "them" and implying that the neighbors don't trust each other.
The speaker and his neighbor thus disagree over an issue so fundamental to human society and political thinking: they debate whether conflicts between human beings are inevitable (if preventable) or whether those conflicts are the result of misguided cynicism about the possibility of peace between people.
Yet though the speaker gets the most air-time in the poem, it's not entirely clear that the reader is supposed to take the speaker's side. Instead, the poem itself remains decidedly ambiguous—for all the speaker's complaints about the wall, the speaker is the one who sets the mending in motion by reaching out to the neighbor, and the poem even gives the neighbor the final word.
The poem thus asks its reader to decide for themselves who is right and who is wrong, and to make up their minds about the utility of walls, borders, and other political and physical devices that divide people.
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The Value of Work
As the speaker describes it, the work of “Mending Wall” is ritualistic: each year, the speaker and the neighbor walk along the wall together and repair the sections that have been damaged by frost or by hunters over the previous year. It is hard, taxing work: by the end, their hands are chapped from it. The difficulty of the work, and the need to renew it every year, makes the speaker question why—and whether—it’s necessary to keep rebuilding the wall. More broadly, the act of repairing the wall serves as an allegory for human labor. Though the speaker and the neighbor continue to rebuild the wall, the poem calls into question the value of labor for labor’s sake—and asks whether a different relationship to work might be possible.
At the heart of the poem’s meditation is a routine, even monotonous act: the speaker and the neighbor pick up rocks and put them back on the wall. The act is reminiscent of a famous myth, with which Frost—classically educated at Harvard—would likely have known intimately: the myth of Sisyphus. As a punishment for being crafty and deceitful, Sisyphus, the king of Corinth, was condemned to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a hill. When he reached the top of the hill, the boulder would roll back to the bottom and he would have to start over.
There is something Sisyphean about the work that the speaker and the neighbor do in “Mending Wall”: each year rebuilding the same wall—a wall that serves no practical purpose. For Sisyphus, the boulder rolls down to the bottom of the hill each time because the gods have decreed it. “Mending Wall” presents an equally futile but much less religious vision: instead of the gods, it is the frost that damages the wall over and over again, forcing the speaker and the neighbor to repair it over and over again. Nature itself, with its capacity to damage and destroy human artifacts, seems to defeat human ambitions, to force it to endless repeat the same futile projects without making progress.
Given that their task is repetitive and fruitless, the speaker suggests that they might be better off if they stopped repairing the wall altogether. But the neighbor insists that they keep doing so. And he may suggest that the work itself is good and valuable: it may not simply be the fence that makes “good neighbours,” but the act of rebuilding it, of working together for a common goal.
For the speaker, work is justified only by its results, or in this case physical products: the material and permanent difference it makes in the world. For the neighbor, however, work is justified as an end in itself, and that work (in his mind, at least) is part of maintaining a fair and livable society.
This might also serve as an allegory for endeavors like poetry: implicit in this debate is a question about the value of creative work—work that is simply beautiful, and that does not materially change or improve society.
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Change and Modernity
As the speaker of “Mending Wall” and the neighbor debate the political and practical purpose of the wall they’re repairing, the poem raises an implicit question about the possibility of change. The speaker argues that the neighbor’s belief—that fences are necessary to keep people from getting out of control—is out of date: the speaker compares him to an “old-stone savage.” But though his attitudes may be antiquated, the neighbor remains influential in the present—articulating a deeply held belief that it is necessary for society to restrain people in small ways to keep them from acting out in big ways.
The poem thus asks its readers to ponder whether the debate between the speaker and his neighbor will ever be resolved—and, more broadly, whether it is possible for society itself to change. The poem suggests that it is not: whatever the speaker’s objections to the activity, the speaker still rebuilds the wall.
Despite often using every-day, simple language, the speaker is clearly an educated, loquacious figure. The speaker is likely fluent in philosophy, precisely countering the neighbor by invoking the writings of Henry David Thoreau (in the reference to "cows"); the speaker engages in flights of fancy, musing that mythical "Elves" might be to blame for the wall's destruction; and the speaker uses a prestigious literary form—blank verse—in a rough but perceptible fashion to relate ideas to the reader.
By contrast, the neighbor is stern and old-fashioned. He says only one thing in the poem—and he then he says it again! His speech is direct and unpretentious. The speaker emphasizes this side of the neighbor’s character: his unwillingness to think broadly or deeply, or to interrogate his own ideas. Instead of thinking things through for himself, the neighbor depends on “his father’s saying[s]”—that is, he relies on received wisdom. As a result, the neighbor seems to the speaker to be “like an old-stone savage armed.” His work in rebuilding the wall resembles primitive forms of violence. He has not advanced beyond that primitive state, but rather preserves its violence in his insistence on constructing barriers between people.
By implicit contrast, then, the speaker is a more modern figure. The speaker fancies himself as someone who has been released from the “darkness” in which the neighbor moves—and found a more enlightened, peaceful way of life. Yet the speaker is the one who lets the neighbor know when it’s time to fix the wall. The speaker sets the repair in motion, even as the speaker insists it's not necessary.
Thus the speaker, unconsciously or not, has internalized the need for the wall—or, at least, has internalized the futility of pushing back too strongly against the neighbor and his deeply held beliefs. (And the speaker likely wouldn’t have a problem with a wall if there were cows around!).
The poem thus suggests that as long as people hold ideas like the neighbor’s, society itself will be captivated by them, unable to refuse the projects they inspire. It's hard to shake off the beliefs of the past and to implement change for the future.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Mending Wall”
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Lines 1-4
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 first four lines of “Mending Wall” establish the poem’s broad concern as well as its form. The poem opens with a mysterious assertion: there is some force that dislikes walls. It spends the next three lines describing the attempts of that force to topple a wall down: it sends frost underneath the wall, causing the ground to swell; when the summer sun later melts that frost, some of the wall's stones become dislodged, opening gaps wide enough for two people to pass through side by side. The force, the thing that “doesn’t love a wall” remains unnamed. The opening lines thus establish a question: the reader is invited to speculate about what the force is, and why it might oppose the very existence of a wall.
This mystery makes the lines feel weighty, as though the deepest mysteries of life are being explored here. But the language of the lines is simple and conversational: except for the compound word “frozen-ground-swell,” the lines contain no words longer than two syllables. These are common, everyday words that anyone might use, perhaps suggesting the universality of the themes that the poem will go on to explore.
There are literary devices at work in the lines, but their presence is pretty subtle. For example, these lines are in blank verse—a literary form with a distinguished pedigree in English poetry. (Both Shakespeare and Milton used it, for example). Although blank verse is an iambic meter, the poem’s first line opens with a trochee:
Something
A reader expects a first line to establish the poem’s meter, and for variations to that meter to come later. But Frost waits to establish his poem’s dominant meter until mid-way through the poem’s first line. As a result, the reader may be slow to identify the meter and to associate it with its prestigious history. Similarly, the first four lines of the poem contain assonance on an /i/ sound ("something," "is," "it," "spills," "in"), but this repeated sound is relatively distributed through the lines: though it binds them together sonically, it does so unobtrusively.
The relaxed, everyday diction gives the poem a casual feel: even as it enters into deep and complex questions, it does so in unpretentious language. It sounds like someone thinking out loud.
This extends to the poem’s use of enjambment and end-stop. “Mending Wall” uses enjambment and end-stop whenever it's convenient, simply following the flow of the speaker’s thought. Despite their use of punctuation, the first three lines of the poem are arguably enjambed and express the continuation of a single idea; only in line 4 does the reader encounter the poem’s first hard end-stop. The opening lines of the poem thus spill down the page, working at the pace of the speaker’s thought.
In this sense, the poem subtly suggests an affiliation with previous poets, like Wordsworth and Milton, who often let long sentences cascade across multiple lines of blank verse. However conversational the language here, the speaker is thus clearly cognizant of deep traditions in the history of poetry and offers subtle signals to readers that the speaker is extending and complicating those traditions.
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Lines 5-9
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. -
Lines 9-10
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.
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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."
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“Mending Wall” Symbols
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Frost
The frost—or as the speaker calls it, "the frozen-ground-swell"—is a mysterious, unsettling force in "Mending Wall." It acts in powerful and damaging ways, ultimately knocking over large sections of the wall each winter. But, despite its force, it's only doing the bidding of something else that remains undetectable; this "something" doesn't like walls, and as such "sends" the frost out to destroy them.
As the speaker notes, describing the gaps it makes in the wall, "No one has seen them made or heard them made." The frost and the strange force behind it thus occupy a complex position in the poem. Frost is a real force, a natural phenomenon. And yet it has a kind of supernatural quality in the poem, in having been sent by some powerful, absent entity. The reader might take both frost and this entity as a broader symbol for nature itself and for nature’s effects on human artifacts. The things that people make, the poem suggests, are fragile and temporary, when compared and subject to the grand forces of nature.
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Spring
The spring is traditionally a symbol of rebirth, and it works, in part, as a symbol for renewal in this poem: it's the time of year when the speaker and the neighbor repair the wall between their properties.
It's also important to recognize that in Christianity, the spring is associated with Christ's resurrection. Frost plays with this tradition in "Mending Wall." The renewal that the speaker and the neighbor take part in by rebuilding the wall is quite different from the Christian resurrection: it is the result of human work, rather than divine grace; it is temporary, not permanent; and it must actively be renewed each year.
In other words, "Mending Wall" takes a symbol that often has a strong religious flavor and strips away that religious content. The symbol becomes more complex and ambivalent: if spring symbolizes a temporary renewal or rebirth, it also implies that death and decay will arrive again. This, in turn, reflects the poem's broader thematic consideration of the value or point of work itself.
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Fences
A fence is a physical structure that divides two areas—in the case of "Mending Wall," two people’s property. It may be confusing that the neighbor uses the word "fence" here to describe what the speaker calls a "wall," but the speaker clearly uses the two words interchangeably. In any case, fences in the poem represent not simply the actual, physical border between the two subjects' land areas, but also the broader divisions between human beings. The poem debates the question of whether borders in general—be they fences between plots of land, or country boundaries on a map—encourage goodwill or mistrust between human beings.
Do borders separate people into an "us" and a "them," creating divisions where none need exist? Or is establishing clear boundaries essential to peaceful coexistence? It's ultimately up to the reader to decide.
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Cows
Cows are important symbols, in the American philosophical tradition, of the damage that one person might cause another. Henry David Thoreau writes: "Who are bad neighbors? They who suffer their neighbors' cattle to go at large because they don’t want their ill will,—are afraid to anger them. They are abettors of the ill-doers." Thoreau imagines a slippery slope: a small initial infraction leads to larger and more serious problems.
Here Thoreau isn’t concerned with literal cows, but symbolic cows: cows that symbolize the small injuries that, if left unchecked, might grow into more serious conflicts between people who live close to each other. Cows also suggest a certain selfishness and greed, as one may allow their own cattle to graze on another's pasture—taking another's resources for themselves.
The cows in "Mending Wall" function similarly. Though it's true that neither the speaker nor the neighbor seem to own cows, the speaker is concerned with something broader when announcing "here there are no cows." The lack of "cows" points to a lack of potential conflict—the speaker and the neighbor use their lands differently and don't compete for resources, meaning there's little danger of tension. They can live peacefully side by side, and thus perhaps don't need a wall between them.
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Darkness
The "darkness" that the neighbor "moves in" is not only a literal shade or shadow. In line 42, the speaker specifies that it is not the darkness "of wood only and the shade of trees." The speaker does not tell the reader, however, what kind of darkness it is. Most likely, it is a kind of symbolic darkness.
In western thought, darkness is often treated as a symbol for ignorance or error. (By contrast, light is a symbol for enlightenment and truth). Darkness also serves a symbol for history or the past; the past is often described as lost in darkness, in obscurity. The speaker may mean both at once: the neighbor is not only wrong and ignorant, but he also remains tied to obsolete, antiquated ideas—such as his "father’s saying" about good neighbors, which makes him "like an old-stone savage armed."
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“Mending Wall” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Enjambment
The poem's enjambments and end-stops are irregular. They fall where the speaker's thought demands them, rather than following a pre-determined pattern. This irregular pattern contributes to the poem’s conversational tone: for a reader, it feels as though the speaker is thinking out-loud, working things through, wrestling with the implications and questions that arise from the debate with the neighbor.
The enjambment in line 25 is particularly evocative, coming as it does after the word "across": as the thought spills over from one line to the next, the structure of the poem undermines the speaker's assertion that the apple trees won't cross over into the neighbor's "pines."
There are also fewer explicitly enjambed lines than there are end-stopped, perhaps reflecting the subject of the poem: each end-stop is like a little wall, while enjambments are the gaps being chipped out one by one. In a poem obsessed with boundaries, smooth, conversational enjambments are potentially thematically important: they provide the reader the experience at the level of overcoming such boundaries. They model, even if only momentarily, the experience of a world without walls.
Recall, however, that enjambment can be subjective; though we haven't highlighted these instances here for simplicity's sake, the first three lines of the poem are arguably better thought of as enjambed—as Frost draping long sentences across several iambic lines so that the reader experiences a pleasurable tension between the finite, contained unit of the line and the seemingly endless unit of a sentence that spills down and down the page. In this sense, "Mending Wall" might seem like one extended thought: the speaker gradually working through the implications of the opening line: "Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…"
Indeed, there are a number of locations in the poem where it is difficult to tell whether a line is enjambed or not. For instance, line 44 lacks punctuation at its end, though one would normally expect it there based on its syntax. Because the poem has used regular punctuation throughout, however, the lack of punctuation here seems unusually loud, like something the reader has to pay attention to. In this moment the poem closely mimics spoken English, which tends to extensively employ run-on sentences. And it again reflects the poem’s broader pattern of using enjambment, a poetic device, to better mimic ordinary speech.
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End-Stopped Line
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Caesura
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Refrain
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Allusion
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Metaphor
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Simile
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Polyptoton
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Epanalepsis
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Consonance
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"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
- Abreast
- Mending-time
- Offence
- Elves
- Old-stone
- Savage
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This compound word is Frost's invention, but it describes a recognizable and even commonplace natural phenomenon. In the winter, the water in the ground freezes and, as it does, it expands. This forces the ground itself up: a "ground-swell." The result of this "ground-swell" is often disruptive: it can buckle the asphalt paving of a road. Or, it might knock down parts of a stone wall.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Mending Wall”
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Form
"Mending Wall" does not follow a particular poetic form. It isn't a sonnet, for example, or a villanelle. Instead, it is simply a single stanza of 46 lines, written in blank verse.
Though the form of "Mending Wall" is therefore relatively simple, it is also interesting in the way that the form intersects with the poem's content. The long, uninterrupted stanza of the poem visually evokes the subject at hand: the block of text itself is a sort of wall of its own. In fact, if you were to tip the poem on its side and look at it horizontally, with the beginning of each line at the bottom and the ends of lines sticking up into the air, the differing line lengths look like the wall's uneven, gap-filled top. And the speaker's declaration that the wall isn't necessary comes in line 23—the exact center of the poem.
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Meter
"Mending Wall" is written in blank verse, a form with a prestigious pedigree in English literature. It is, for example, the meter of many of Shakespeare's plays; John Milton uses it in Paradise Lost, as does Wordsworth in the Prelude. It thus may not seem like a particularly promising literary form for a poem about life at the turn of the 20th century in New England. But for poets like Shakespeare, Milton, and Frost, the appeal of blank verse lies in its proximity to spoken English. It is the meter that most closely approximates the language’s natural rhythm and intonation. In the hands of a skilled poet, blank verse thus fades into the background: a reader may not even realize that a poem or a monologue is in meter.
Frost works in this tradition: though "Mending Wall" is a metrical poem, its meter is often imperceptible, and is certainly unobtrusive. It can most broadly be thought of as iambic pentameter, with most (though certainly not all) lines have ten syllables. Line 9 is an example of perfect iambic pentameter:
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
But Frost tolerates an unusually high number of metrical substitutions, some of them quite startling—if a reader is paying attention to the meter. However, few readers will be paying close attention: Frost uses these substitutions to keep the poem from feeling stilted and literary. Instead, the poem's many metrical substitutions help it capture the liveliness and variability of actual speech.
For instance, the poem's first line begins with a trochee before settling into an iambic rhythm:
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
In starting the poem with a trochee and then sliding gradually into iambs, the poem disguises its underlying rhythm—at a moment when the reader’s ear is trying to find that rhythm.
Though the poem is broadly in pentameter, many lines also do not have ten syllables; this creates lines of varying visual lengths. The entire poem is one long block of text, which looks kind of like a wall; if you were to turn the poem on its side, these differing line lengths resemble the wall's gap-filled top—full of holes were stones (syllables) have toppled off.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Mending Wall" is in blank verse. Though the poem does not have a regular rhyme scheme, it does contain occasional slant and perfect rhymes, which often serve to emphasize moments of particular literary intensity.
The speaker of the poem is clearly educated and fluent in literary tradition: when it suits the speaker's ends, the speaker is willing to forgo the poem’s unpretentious plainness in favor of a more elegant style. This happens, for instance, in lines 41 and 42, when the speaker rhymes "me" and "trees" in a couplet:
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.Rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter are also called heroic couplets—a form typically reserved for and associated with poems about heroic subjects, usually written by elite, educated poets. Frost switches briefly into the form precisely when his poem takes on an elevated, grand tone: connecting the speaker’s neighbor to a powerful and persistent force in human life.
However, most of the poem’s rhymes are slant rhymes: like "line" and "again" in lines 13 and 14. These slant rhymes tend to emphasize the way that the poem falls short of an expected and traditional literary grandeur.
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“Mending Wall” Speaker
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The speaker of “Mending Wall” is a person, likely a man (though, to be clear, this is not ever stated in the poem), who lives in rural New England on a farm with an "apple orchard." The speaker's farm seems to be relatively remote: the speaker mentions having only one neighbor, and their properties are separated by a stone wall that must be repaired every spring.
Since the poet, Robert Frost, was living on a farm in rural New Hampshire at the time the poem was written, some people have taken the speaker to be Frost himself, or a version of Frost. Certainly, the speaker seems—like Frost—to have a strong education in classical mythology and an awareness of the history of English poetry.
Although the speaker uses plain, everyday language throughout, the speaker is clearly capable of making allusions to classical myth (like the myth of Sisyphus) and using blank verse—one of the most distinguished literary forms in the history of English poetry. This suggests—though the poem does not confirm this suggestion—that the speaker is an interloper, a newcomer to the rural community where the poem takes place. By contrast, the neighbor seems to have lived there for generations.
The poem is thus infused with implicit tension—between urban and rural, the educated elite and the plain-spoken farmer. In this tense exchange, the speaker is not altogether a sympathetic character: some readers may find the speaker verbose and condescending. His arguments, too, border on the naively utopian.
By contrast, the neighbor speaks from a position of cynicism and practicality about human society. Readers are left to decide for themselves which of the two they trust and agree with.
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“Mending Wall” Setting
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“Mending Wall” is set in rural New England (it was even first published in a book called North of Boston). Its two characters, the speaker and the neighbor, likely live in an agricultural community—though whether either is a farmer remains unclear. The reader does know for certain that neither raises cattle: “Here there are no cows,” the speaker announces.
The poem takes place in early spring, after the winter frosts have damaged the wall between their properties. The speaker describes the frosts in detail—"the frozen-ground-swell"—as a mysterious force that damages and defeats human labor. For instance, the frost works in secret: "No one has seen them made or heard them made." The natural world that the poem describes seems hostile and powerful: a force that human beings have to counteract through diligent and difficult work.
The setting of the poem is reflected in its unpretentious language: the poet has worked hard to capture the sounds of a rural place, where flowery, ornate rhetorical habits are unnecessary and unwelcome. And it is reflected in the neighbor’s insistent, plain-spoken wisdom: "Good fences make good neighbours."
As the speaker suggests, this idea of the neighbor's has actually been handed down from generation to generation without the intervention of sophisticated urban elites and their, perhaps more modern, ideas: the phrase is "his father's saying."
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Literary and Historical Context of “Mending Wall”
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Literary Context
Robert Frost wrote “Mending Wall” in 1914, at the height of literary modernism. Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” were published that year—both of which are major modernist texts. Modernism is a broad and complicated literary movement. It responds to the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries by emphasizing the isolation that many people felt in a newly modern world. And it does so by breaking from traditional literary forms: modernist writers often write without meter, rhyme, or set form. Instead, they invent new forms; they bring together fragments and quotations; and above all, they seek to cultivate the same innovation and excitement in literature that they see in the world around them.
Frost’s relationship with modernism has been a subject of vigorous debate among scholars for many years. Frost’s early critics dismissed him as out of touch, even anti-modernist. “Mending Wall,” for instance, is set far from the bustling cities of early 20th century America. It uses a traditional form, blank verse—indeed, one of the most prestigious traditional forms.
But more recent critics have defended Frost and argued for counting him among the modernists. Though he is far from the most radical of the modernist poets, he nonetheless makes significant and subtle innovations in the forms he uses. These innovations are evident in “Mending Wall” in his pervasive metrical substitutions, which test the limits of blank verse, and in the irony that suffuses the poem. The poem does not resolve its debate for its readers, nor does it present a particularly trustworthy or admirable speaker. The old certainties have fallen away. Thus while “Mending Wall” may be distant from the pulsing heart of modernity, all the uncertainty and disorientation modernism involves are clearly evident in the poem.
Historical Context
“Mending Wall” was written in the early 1910s, in a transitional period in American life. Following a century of mass immigration and industrialization, the United States had become a substantially more diverse and populous place than it had been at its founding—and a substantially more urban place as well. The gentlemen farmers who founded American democracy had been supplanted by fractious urban political parties—alongside populist rural political movements. Further, the country had expanded from the Atlantic coastline all the way to the Pacific in recent memory: the frontier had been officially declared closed in 1890.
As these rapid changes took place, a set of tensions developed in the country: between urban and rural populations; between the educated elite and wide swaths of un- or under-educated people; between New England Protestants, who could trace their ancestors to the earliest Pilgrims, and more recent Catholic and Jewish arrivals.
Though “Mending Wall” does not specifically acknowledge this context, it is implicit throughout the poem. For instance, one might read the debate between the speaker and his neighbor as an expression of conflict between an urban and rural populations—and perhaps between an old New England stock and a newer crop of immigrants, laying claim to the country, trying to shape it line with their ideals.
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More “Mending Wall” Resources
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External Resources
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Sadie Stein on "Mending Wall" — The critic Sadie Stein discusses "Mending Wall" for the Paris Review.
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Frost Poetics — A group of scholars and poets debate Frost's "Mending Wall" at the Kelly Writers' House at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Was Robert Frost a Modernist? — Poet and critic Robert Pinsky considers whether Frost was a modernist.
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Robert Frost Reads "Mending Wall" — The poet himself reads "Mending Wall" aloud.
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Essays on "Mending Wall" — A series of essays on "Mending Wall" from the University of Illinois.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Robert Frost
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