Throughout the poem we are unsure who the person telling the story is. Is it a narrator or is Robert Frost himself? The line “That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it” supports the idea that it is Robert Frost telling the readers the story. Frozen-ground-swell brings the image of frost to my mind and this may be a pun on his own name. He may be implying that it is he himself that does not love the wall and so it may be Frost talking throughout the poem.
Lines 3, 4 and 5 are all examples of how Frost uses the technique of imagery to set the poem in. “And spills the upper boulders in the sun” creates the image of the broken wall creating a mess in the New England sun. In this line it is the word ‘spill’ that creates this image in our minds. Frost has also used sibilance in the third and fourth line in the words ‘sends’, ‘sun’ and ‘spills’.
”The work of hunters is another thing” implies that it is not a human action that has broken the wall. This supports the idea mentioned earlier that the ‘something’ in the first line is a natural something.
The line “To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean“, refers back to the gaps in the wall that were last mentioned in line 4: “And makes gaps even two can pass abreast”. This shows Frost amplifying his thoughts on the gaps for emphasis. Frost uses line 10 to create a sinister mystery with who or what makes the gaps in the wall. The first 8 lines are all regular in rhythm; they are all in iambic pentameter. Line 9, which reintroduces the gaps in the poem, itself has gaps in its rhythm. This is an example of Frost’s marriage of form and concept.
The poem contains irony, and we first glimpse this in line 12: “I let my neighbour know beyond the hill”. Throughout the poem, Frost argues and questions the necessity of the wall, but in line 12 we are told that it is Frost himself that goes to his neighbour telling him that the wall needs to be repaired yet again. Perhaps he goes to the neighbour to break the isolation between them and because he looks forward to seeing his neighbour. However, line 15, “We keep the wall between us as we go” tells us that while they are mending the wall they stay on their opposite sides and only put up the stones that have fallen on their sides. This may be based on custom or tradition and we come to learn that the neighbour does not like to change traditions or customs so Frost may be keeping to his side to avoid annoying his neighbour.
There is also humour in the poem, which is shown in lines 18 and 19. These lines bring a light-heartedness tone to the poem, but the lines could also be perceived as sarcastic and mocking. Frost playfully suggests that they use a magic spell to balance the stones on the wall.
“Oh, just another kind of outdoor game”. This line makes the poem have a more conversational tone, the word ‘oh’ does this, but it is also a gap filler. The line may mean that Frost thinks that the wall is unnecessary and that him and his neighbour only build it to pass time, or maybe as an excuse to meet up. The word ‘game’ in this line also suggests that mending the wall may be some sort of competition between the two neighbours.
Frost’s opinion is strongly yet subtly shown in line 21: “One on a side. It comes to little more”. This tells us that Frost thinks that mending the wall is a pointless exercise and to him it is nothing more than a game. This could be seen as slightly insulting to the neighbour, as the neighbour take the process of building the wall quite seriously and does not question or joke about it.
From line 22 Frost’s argument against the wall becomes quite clear. He does not see any reason to have the wall between him and his neighbour, for “He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across…” This is Frost arguing against the wall, he does not believe it is necessary to have the wall because they have nothing on their two properties that would interfere with each other. Again, Frost uses this opportunity to mock his neighbour; he states the obvious by saying that his apple trees would not get across and his cones.
The neighbour’s response to Frost’s humorous argument is “Good fences make good neighbours.” Here, the neighbour is stating that there is a moral principle behind mending the wall, but what he says is contradictory. His argument is that they will be better neighbours if they have their own space privacy and separate lives. However, this does not sound like the base of a friendship, but more like respect.
In line 28, Frost says, “Spring is the mischief in me”. This metaphor may be an apology for his argumentative behaviour. It may also mean that Frost is more affected by the season than his neighbour is. Frost’s mood is lightened by the spring unlike his neighbour's.
At line 33, Frost starts to become more questioning of the wall. Before he was arguing for the necessity of it, but perhaps he came to see that the wall meant a lot to the neighbour and that maybe the neighbour did have a good reason after all. He shows this by being questioning: “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or out”. This line also hints that building walls without reason makes Frost suspicious. Line 35 contains the word ‘offence’. Did Frost mean for this word to be a pun, or is merely coincidental?
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” is repeated in line 36. Unlike, the first time we saw this line, the something now refers to a human something. Frost belittles his neighbour by saying that it could be elves that destroy the wall, but it also seems as if Frost is urging his neighbour to give a reply back to his comment. This shows that Frost very much wanted to hear his neighbour's views on the wall.
Line 39 begins to mock the neighbour by using a simile and comparing him to ‘an old-stone savage’ who holds a stone in each hand while mending the wall. This creates the amusing image in our mind of a cave man holding two rocks in each hand building a wall but with no thoughts running through his mind about why he is building it. The next line, “He moves in darkness as it seems to me”, implies that he does everything because he is told to it or has done so for a long time and no longer questions the point of it. The word ‘darkness’ in this line is a metaphor for his ignorance.
Line 44 suggests that the neighbour is mending the wall because his father had done it, and because it had become tradition. The neighbour lives in the shadow of the past. He is not questioning, doesn’t dare let himself question the words of his father.
Line 45 shows Frost mocking his neighbour once again, he treats his neighbour like a child with the line: “And having thought of it so well he says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’” Frost says it in such a way that he makes it seem like the neighbour likes the sound of the proverb and makes him sound clever and that is why he repeated it.
The significance of the repeated line ‘Good fences make good neighbours’ is that it ‘fences’ us into the poem. The repeated line “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” also fences us into the poem. The fact that these two lines are saying two very different things, in fact almost opposite opinions, is also significant. The poem starts with one side of the argument and ends with the other.
There are many themes to this poem, but essentially they all come down to the same conclusion: whether it is necessary (or unnecessary) to have a wall to separate two friends, or two countries, or religions, or sexes. Robert Frost often uses universal themes in his poems but uses rural imagery and rural life to convey his ideas.
Frost also uses imagery in his poems, and ‘Mending Wall’ is no exception. The first nine lines set the image of rural New England life. There is also an example of imagery in the structure of the poem. The poem has no verses, it is one long stanza, a ‘wall’ of words and this creates the image of a long solid wall. The different lengths of the lines could also represent the gaps in the wall.
The whole poem is written in blank verse, which is non-rhyming but in iambic pentameter. The poem contains a lot enjambment which is one line running into the next. In the poem there are five colons, which cause a pause while reading the poem. These pauses are like the gaps in the wall.
I think that the message that Frost was trying to send out in this poem, was that in society we create too many barriers amongst ourselves. These metaphorical barriers stay in place for a long time, in some cases for centuries, and these barriers are present for each new generation and eventually people stop asking why the barriers are there, what good do they do, who sets them and most importantly who will break them?