Mending Wall

1914 poem by Robert Frost
the Chalk Circle album

"Mending Wall" is a poem by Robert Frost. It opens Robert's second collection of poetry, North of Boston, published in 1914 by David Nutt, and has become "one of the most anthologized and analyzed poems in modern literature".

Like many of the poems in North of Boston, "Mending Wall" narrates a story drawn from rural New England. The narrator, a New England farmer, contacts his neighbor in the spring to rebuild the stone wall between their two farms. As the men work, the narrator questions the purpose of a wall "where it is we do not need the wall" (23). He notes twice in the poem that "something there is that doesn’t love a wall" (1, 35), but his neighbor replies twice with the proverb, "Good fences make good neighbors" (27, 45).

Despite its simple, almost folksy, language, "Mending Wall" is a complex poem with several themes, beginning with human fellowship, which Frost first dealt with in his poem "The Tuft of Flowers" in his first collection of poems, A Boy's Will. The poem considers the contradictions in life and humanity, including the contradictions within each person, as man "makes boundaries and he breaks boundaries". It also examines the role of boundaries in human society, as mending the wall serves both to separate and to join the two neighbors, another contradiction. "Mending Wall" also plays with the theme of seasons as recurring cycles in life, and contrasts those cycles with both physical and language parallelism as the men walk along the wall, each to a side, and their language stays each to a side.