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“Mending Wall” consists of a single, long, unbroken stanza. On a visual level, readers might notice that the poem’s continuous structure abstractly resembles a wall. But arguably, more important than the poem’s visual appearance is how the poem is structured internally. On this level, “Mending Wall” exhibits qualities of both a lyric poem and a dramatic monologue. For one thing, the entire poem is told in the first person, following the speaker’s line of thinking. In this way, the poem’s structure strongly resembles verse written in the lyric tradition. Lyric poems tend to feature first-person speakers who narrate their thoughts and feelings as they unfold in real time. Yet even as the poem resembles a lyric poem, it also has qualities of a dramatic monologue. Dramatic monologues also feature first-person speakers. However, instead of describing their own thoughts as they unfold in time, the speaker of a dramatic monologue is more of a narrator. That is, they are a storyteller who recounts the events of a particular scene, though usually one in which he himself is involved, which often means that the speaker is unreliable.

To see how the poem blends lyric and dramatic traditions, it’s helpful to outline the poem’s “plot.” The poem begins in a lyric mode, with the speaker musing generally about the desirability of walls. He is personally skeptical about walls, though it quickly becomes clear that this skepticism arises in response to the annual ritual of wall-mending he shares with his neighbor. Every year, winter weather and roving hunters damage the wall dividing their property, and they must repair it in the spring. At this point, the speaker shifts into a dramatic mode to recount the most recent experience of mending the wall. The work was hard. Possibly out of irritation, the speaker made a passing comment about how the wall has no real use in their case, since neither man has livestock that needs containment. The neighbor responded with a cliché: “Good fences make good neighbors.” After recounting this exchange, the speaker retreats into his own thoughts, once again entering a lyric mode. The speaker describes at length how he wanted to justify his skepticism. Yet he remained silent, feeling that his neighbor was perhaps too backward to understand. The poem then ends in the dramatic mode, with the neighbor seeming to demonstrate his backwardness by repeating his nugget of proverbial wisdom.

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