Mending Wall

An interpretation of Robert Frost’s poem
“Mending Wall”

This poem discusses the relationship that two neighbors build year after year while they repair the wall which separates their two properties. This wall needs to be fixed every year due to the damage caused by nature and other external elements that acts on their own benefits, as hunters. All are factors that contribute to what bringsthe wall to collapsing. The narrator, who personifies one of the neighbors, cannot understand the need of mending a wall year after year, when, in fact, there is nothing to protect, but merely some trees. This pines and apple orchards, which stand both side of the wall, in no way, can represent a threat. Nevertheless, the neighbor turns a deaf ear to the reproaches of the narrator and persists insaying that the wall is helping to keep the neighborhood bond: “Good fences make good neighbors”.
“Mending Wall” is the first poem from the second book that Robert Frost published with the name of North of Boston. It has a relevant autobiographic aspect because the poem is related with the friendship he built with a Canadian while he was living in Hampshire. The period that Frost lived in thatlocation was one of the happiest in his life. Most of his utterly poems reflects a peaceful and bucolic atmosphere imbued with sensitivity. The poem is the result of long and fruitful walks with his friend, who ironically was the responsible for the most renowned line of the poem: “Good fences make good neighbors”. Nonetheless, it would be more accurate to say that he was who used frequently thisadage, and inspired the poet to borrow it for his poem. In fact, the origin of this popular proverb can be dated around the XVII century.


The poem depicts how the nature behaves, with a kind of rejecting reaction against the presence of the wall:
“Something there is that does not love a wall,
that sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulder in the sun”.
Every yearthe boulders fall and leave big gaps that the neighbors have to refill again for rebuilding the wall time and time again, which inevitably will fall down over and over again. In some way, the poet tells us that to build wall is an action against nature. It could be interpreted as the agony that lies in human relationships. The ties of these two persons refer to the different relationships thatpeople create among them, but also with their environment. It is an ambivalent space where it is possible to explore the dialogue of closeness and distance, an affinity and a poetic confrontation of a community which restlessly tries to get closer, but inevitably fall apart. This ambivalence looks
obvious in the narrator’s attitude; he is, indeed, the one who checks the wall, warns the neighborand gets the wall fixed up, in spite of his apparent opposition.

We can perceive this duality of mixed emotions in the depiction of both characters. Thus, in a sense, when the narrator, who is the one who demands communication, is confronted with the wall, he is, paradoxically, the one who has a more negative attitude and who creates more aggressiveness. Therefore, he builds a wall with hiswords that make communication impossible, as we can see in these lines:
“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”
It is also the narrator who concludes that the wall is an exclusive element and who thinks of accepting or rejecting someone:
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in orwalling out”
Before going to the final conclusion, I would like to focus on the rich and subtle imagery suggested in this poem. The title of this poem, “Mending Wall”, refers to the expression “mending fences”, a saying which, if is not commonly used today, it was in the past when it referred to restoring relationships. The line which gives structure to the poem “something there is that doesn’t...