Do you like to keep yourself separate from others, needing your own space? Or do you feel we put too much distance between one another? Frost explores both views.
Like many of Frost’s poems, Mending Wall is set in the countryside, focusing on two men who have met up to mend the wall that separates their land. This is an annual job – “spring mending-time”, and requires them to repair the damage that nature has spent the rest of the year inflicting upon the man-made structure:
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. (1 – 4)
Interestingly, it is the narrator of the poem who approaches his neighbour to remind him that it is time to complete the task – “I let my neighbour know” – as later in the poem he is the one who questions the need to have such a wall between them.
Irony in Mending Walls
There is great irony in the way the two men are brought together by a task that will keep them apart, and the lexical choices stress that they never actually work together. Instead, they each complete the work on their own side of the wall, never meeting or co-operating:
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each... (14 – 15)
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. (21 – 22)
The speaker is clearly aware of this irony, and of the essentially pointless nature of the task: not only does it need doing “once again”, emphasizing that all the work they do every year will be undone by the following spring, but the speaker seems unsure whether they really need the wall at all:
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. (23 – 26)
In other words, both men only have trees rather than animals which need a boundary to stop them from straying, and the speaker’s sarcastic tone indicates his impatience with the whole situation.
Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
Meanwhile, his neighbour refuses to even discuss the wall, simply stating every time questioned that “Good fences make good neighbours.” The end of the poem reveals that this is his “father’s saying” – the neighbour is traditional in outlook, and as his family have always had a wall here, so he will continue to maintain that custom. The speaker sees this as ignorance, and a refusal to move forward and acknowledge that times have changed:
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... (38 – 41)
The American Dream
The neighbour is, of course, following the idea of the American Dream: his own patch of land, carefully defined and delineated, upon which he may work hard to ensure his own future. For the speaker of the poem, however, the possibility of human interaction and co-operation is more important:
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. (32 – 35)
A Compromise?
So are we free to make up our own minds here which neighbour is right? After all, the two key repeated lines in the poem are those which represent the viewpoint of each man: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” and “Good fences make good neighbours”. The poem is written in first person, making it hard not to sympathize with the views of the speaker and his annoyance at his old-fashioned neighbour, but ultimately by acknowledging both views the poem suggests a middle ground is possible: perhaps that occupied by the wall itself.
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