Mending Wall | Poem Explanation | Robert Frost

About Robert Frost

Robert Frost (1874-1963) has been the most widely read American poet of this century. Though on the surface his poems seem to be simple, direct and easy-to-understand, they are complex, involved and not-so- easy to comprehend at the deeper level. The surface clarity of his poems invariably conceals their hidden complexity. A New England nature poet, Frost, ironically, was discovered in England when two of his first collections of poems A Boy's Will (1912) and North of Boston (1914) were published there. Though he is a nature poet, he is different from Wordsworth in that nature merely provides Frost with situations, images and metaphors which he sometimes uses symbolically. What gives Frost's nature poems their strength is the combination of vivid descriptive realism and a meditative quality, supported by his wit and wry humour, by which he drives home truths that are innate and hidden in the human heart. However, to capture their multiple meanings, a reader has to take a hard look at and probe deep into his poems.

Frost's 'Mending Wall' is a nature poem from North of Boston. The poem is based on a typical New England annual spring activity of farmers who mend the stone walls of farms after hunters and the frosts of winter have disordered and damaged them. But the poem slowly goes beyond this situation when it presents a conflict between the two attitudes expressed by the speakers therein. Whereas the farmer-speaker begins with the view: 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall' the neighbour insists on what his father has repeatedly told him, 'Good fences make good neighbors. The poem grows out of the tension between the narrator's enlightened voice and the neighbour's tone dictated by custom and convention. The poet thus uses a common enough situation to probe into the mysterious depths of human nature and motivation. The questions one has to answer at the end are: (a) is this only a regional poem? and (b) does the poet resolve the contraries that form the basis of the poem?

'Mending Wall' Poem

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."

Glossary

Line 9. yelping barking

Line 36. Elves supernatural beings, generally of human form but small in size (fairy-like beings)

Explanatory Notes

Line 1. Look at the word order of the sentence; normal syntax will be, 'there is something... that doesn't love a wall'. Put the words 'in nature' or 'in human nature' after 'something' and read the line again to find out the poet's meaning.

Line 23. Syntax. 'we do not need the wall (where it is)'.

Lines 28-29. This is an example of mixing up the casual and the serious; though the speaker's tone is light ('spring is the mischief in me') he is serious about putting a notion into the neighbour's head.

Lines 36-37. Note the difference between the first line of the poem and this statement. The addition of 'That wants it down' may refer to either 'nature' or 'human nature' suggesting that both nature and man are against all types of walls and so want them down.

Lines 36-38. Note the wry humour of the poet. He playfully suggests that perhaps the elves wanted the wall down but adds that elves who can go beyond any wall need not insist on the wall coming down. In fact, life without walls is the best way to live. The poet expects that this notion is understood by the neighbour.

Lines 38-45. The ending of the poem associates the neighbour's view about the need for good fences with his being a conventional, uncivilised man moving in darkness. The paradox implicit in this suggestion puts forth a question: are walls a product of civilisation or a product of the lack of civilisation?

Irony. The irony implicit in the situation is worth noting. If the speaker is not in favour of the wall, why does he invite the neighbour (lines 12-14) to mend it every year? Does the poet (not the speaker) approve of either of the two contrasting attitudes? How do you know? Note that the poet and the persona are different.