24 pages • 48 minutes read
Mending Wall
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Themes
The Building (and Destruction) of Barriers
The most widely accepted reading of “Mending Wall” sees the eponymous wall as representing the barriers people build and maintain between each other. Sometimes these barriers are literal, like Frost’s example of property boundaries between neighbors. These physical lines can be much grander in scale too, like the borders between countries. “Mending Wall” has found special relevance in these scenarios. President Ronald Reagan may have alluded to it in his famous 1987 speech encouraging Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, and the poem saw a resurgence in popularity in response to the Trump Administration’s proposed border wall between the United States and Mexico. Historically, it has been used to bolster arguments on both sides of debates about nationalism, international borders, and immigration.
However, the barriers between people can be mental, too. The speaker sees himself as more playful, more educated, more flexible, and more civilized than his neighbor. He sees pointless barriers between people as time wasters at best, harmful at worst. While Frost may seem at first to sympathize with the speaker, he is careful not to weigh the scales too heavily in his favor. There is something to be said for the neighbor’s more conservative approach, for his dedication to hard work and reliability and his respect for tradition. Most compelling, Frost suggests, is the neighbor’s idea that goodwill for others is fostered by healthy boundaries. Is the maintenance of distance between people not only a positive, but crucial aspect of functional human relationships? Or, like the speaker thinks, should we be unafraid and eager to become closer to one another? This is the central question of the poem.
Ultimately, the poem challenges the reader to sit with an uncomfortable reality: that nobody can win an argument in which both sides bring valid points. The wall is both the barrier between the men and the force that brings them together, but unfortunately, they cannot find common ground between their ideologies.
Parallelism and Mirroring
In geometry, parallel lines share the same plane, but never meet. They always remain a fixed distance apart. Similarly, the two men in “Mending Wall” “meet to walk the line” and “keep the wall between [them] as [they] go,” “one on a side” (Lines 13, 15, and 22). They walk alongside each other, passing gaps which could easily admit them, but never cross paths.
Importantly, this wall is not unbreachable. Hunters go through it (Lines 6-9). Perhaps the speaker has himself hopped over it at some point; he knows there are spaces wide enough to allow two people to pass through side-by-side (Line 4). These gaps represent areas where the men could find common ground literally and metaphorically, but they refuse to meet. Paradoxically, by keeping the wall between them they mirror each other, though they are philosophical opposites.
Frost underlines this theme of mirroring and parallelism with rhetorical devices like anaphora, where a certain word or phrase is repeated for poetic effect. Frost uses anaphora several times to reinforce the parallelism in the poem (e.g. “And some are loaves and some so nearly balls,” Line 17), “Walling in or walling out,” Line 33).
He also repeats certain words or echoes and reduplicates phrases (e.g. “To each the boulders that have fallen to each,” Line 16). This repetitive language not only reinforces the mirroring, but also emphasizes the inflexible worldviews of the men, who each repeats the phrase summarizing his worldview (“Something there is […],” Lines 1 and 35; “Good fences […],” Lines 27 and 45). Both men’s opinions cannot be changed—if anything, by the end of the poem they have only entrenched themselves further. In meeting and speaking with each other, a supposedly collaborative activity, they have only rebuilt the “wall” between them.
Interestingly, “between” can indicate both something shared and something separating, e.g. “something’s come between us” versus “an understanding between two people.” The wall brings the men face to face with each other, connecting them, but also separating them. They remain, as it were, on opposite sides of the mirror.
The Foibles of Human Nature
Frost addresses the idea of personal space through the interaction between the speaker and his neighbor, a relationship that reveals that community is possible when individuals can rely on some distance from one another. The image of the wall draws attention to the human capability to find comfort in separation and distance: It creates a defined space with clear boundaries. At the same time, the gap in the wall offers the speaker and his neighbor a reason to come together and bond, an action that takes place with ease, thanks in part to the knowledge that the wall, once repaired, will continue to keep them apart. This contradiction—separation leading to togetherness, and togetherness leading to sepeartion—is one foible of human nature that both puzzles and amuses the speaker of Frost’s poem.
When the speaker and his neighbor attempt to repair the crumbling wall by lifting “boulders that have fallen” (Line 16), the reader is presented with another human foible: the tendency to persist even when a situation is futile. In Line 11, the speaker acknowledges that it is during “spring mending-time” that he observes the broken wall, and the mention of spring and the cyclical nature of the seasons implies that repairs are needed annually. The speaker understands that the boulders he lifts will likely tumble down again, but he completes his task anyway.
In Line 21, the speaker calls the repair of the wall an “outdoor game,” lending a playfulness to the poem’s discussion of human contradiction. The speaker’s treatment of the foibles of human nature is, on the one hand, gentle and compassionate, and, on the other hand, provocative: “Spring is the mischief in me” (Line 28). Even the tone of the poem reflects a two-sided experience of the wall and the act of mending it, which suggests that the duality of human nature is simply a part of life.
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By Robert Frost
