Mending Wall Poem Summary and Analysis
The poem ‘Mending Wall’ is written by American poet Robert Frost. It was published as the opening poem in Frost’s second collection of poetry, ‘North of Boston’, in 1914. The poem is set in rural New England, Frost’s residence at the time, and is inspired by the rhythms and rituals of daily life there. The poem explains how the speaker and a neighbour meet every spring to repair a stone wall between their houses. This procedure raises several crucial considerations throughout the poem, as the speaker analyses the reason for human borders and the worth of human labour.
“Mending Wall” is a poem on boundaries, the labour it takes to keep them up, and how they define social interactions. The speaker and the speaker’s neighbour spend the majority of the poem repairing the wall that separates their homes. They discuss the role of the wall and how it impacts their relationship as they go. Both of them differ in their perception of the wall’s requirement, but continue to build it along and repair it as they every year, even while they deliberate upon their differences in opinion.
The speaker claims that the wall is superfluous, both practically and politically: barriers, according to the speaker, isolate individuals, causing harm to potentially peaceful relationships. However, the neighbour claims that barriers really promote relationships by allowing individuals to treat each other properly and avoid confrontation. The poem does not take sides in the discussion, leaving readers to determine for themselves which image of human society is most compelling.
Considering the crops that the speaker and the neighbour cultivate, the speaker argues that the wall is unnecessary: although cattle may stray across to graze in somebody else’s field, the speaker’s apples will not eat the neighbor’s pine trees. Furthermore, the speaker feels that barriers actually harm people’s relationships. This is because walls are more likely to “give offense” – to insult individuals by implying distrust and alienation.
As a result, the speaker questions why they even need to keep fixing the wall. The neighbour responds simply and repeatedly: “Good fences make good neighbours.” He argues that a good neighbour creates firm boundaries and, as a consequence, avoids conflicts from occurring between neighbors. The neighbour seemed to be frightened by the prospect of potential conflict and he appears to consider such confrontations as an unavoidable part of life, and thus deems it critical to take precautions to avoid them.
There is no cause for the speaker to undertake such precautions since there are no disputes between him and his neighbor; there are no seeds of a future conflict as well. “Here there are no cows,” the speaker continues, referring to the fact that there aren’t any cattle nearby that need to be caged up should they graze on someone else’s property, but also implying that the speaker and the neighbour have no cause to be overly territorial of their properties. They are not contending for resources and should be able to coexist harmoniously. People are essentially good in this perspective. Building the wall directly appears to the speaker to be the most likely source of conflict, since it creates a sense of “us” vs. “them” and implies that the neighbours don’t trust each other.
Thus, the speaker and his neighbour differ on a fundamental problem in human society and political thought: whether conflicts between people are unavoidable (or not preventable), or whether those disputes are the product of misplaced scepticism about the prospect of harmony between people.
According to the speaker, the task of “Mending Wall” is ritualistic: every year, the speaker and the neighbour go along the wall together and mend the portions ruined by frost or hunters. It’s exhausting labour, and by the end, their hands are blistered. The complexity of the task, as well as the requirement to repair it every year, causes the speaker to wonder why it is essential to keep rebuilding the wall. In a broader sense, the work of mending the wall is a metaphor for human labour. Although the speaker and the neighbour continue to repair the wall, the poem questions the worth of the effort and labour put in for the sake of keeping the wall intact, and wonders if an alternate solution to work is attainable.
Despite the fact that the speaker receives the greatest focus throughout the poem, it is not entirely clear that the reader is expected to side with the speaker. Rather, the poem remains very ambiguous and despite the speaker’s concerns about the wall, it is the speaker who initiates the repair by reaching out to the neighbour, and the poem even gives the neighbour the final word.
Therefore, the poem invites the readers to determine for themselves who is correct or wrong, as well as to consider the value of walls, borders, and many other political and physical barriers that separate people.
