Mending Wall: Themes

The Paradox of Borders

Using the story of two neighbors and the wall that divides their properties, Frost explores the paradoxical ability of borders to both separate and bring together. Throughout the poem the speaker maintains a skeptical attitude toward walls as symbols of exclusion. He introduces his skepticism in the opening line, where he states, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” This utterance is admittedly ambiguous. What, for instance, is the “something” that doesn’t love a wall? And what is it about a wall that this something doesn’t love? The speaker vaguely gestures at an answer when he points to the fact that the wall between his and his neighbor’s properties isn’t functional, since neither of them keeps livestock. Here, it seems that the speaker objects to walls without a specific, pragmatic function. Later, however, the speaker suggests that his skepticism has a more abstract origin (lines 32–34):

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.

In other words, he sees walls as emblems of division that function at once to include and exclude. Yet for all this skepticism, it’s notable that the wall is precisely what has brought him and his neighbor together. The mending of their shared wall offers a rare opportunity for them to gather and talk. In this way, though the speaker scoffs at his neighbor’s clichéd wisdom, there seems to be some truth to the latter’s repeated proverb: “Good fences make good neighbors” (lines 27 and 45).

The Labor of Human Relationships

The poem emphasizes the wall between the speaker and his neighbor, but what’s really at stake is the quality of their relationship with each other. Every year, when spring returns, these men come together to mend whatever damage the wall has sustained over the course of the winter. As the speaker emphasizes, the repairs require grueling physical effort: “We wear our fingers rough with handling [the boulders]” (line 20). As they proceed along the wall, each on their own side and working together to replace the fallen stones, the men engage in conversation. Significantly, verbal communication seems more difficult for them than the physical labor. We get a sense for this difficulty in the strange way Frost represents their dialogue. The speaker directly quotes the speech of his neighbor, but he merely paraphrases his own words. At another point, the speaker quotes his own lengthy meditation on the status of walls. However, it turns out he never actually spoke those words aloud, preferring to continue the conversation in his own head. These men have major gaps in their communication that they are failing to repair, even as they work together to mend the gaps in the wall.

The Persistence of the Status Quo

Challenging the status quo is a formidable task. Frost illustrates this theme through the central ambiguity of his speaker, a man who questions the wall’s purpose and yet still shows up annually to repair it. The speaker consistently maintains a skeptical attitude toward the wall. Twice he makes the general claim that, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” (lines 1 and 35). He also asserts that the specific wall between his and his neighbor’s properties is pointless and even absurd (lines 23–26):

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.

Later, the speaker expands on this complaint, meditating how walls necessarily function as mechanisms of exclusion. Furthermore, the fact that his neighbor seems to have no qualms with the wall creates a point of tension for the speaker, who uses this difference of opinion to bolster his own sense of superiority. Whereas the neighbor is apparently stuck in an outdated mode of thinking, the speaker sees himself as open-minded and forward-thinking. Yet despite all his resistance to the wall, the speaker still shows up to repair the wall. In fact, according to his account, he’s the one who initiated the most recent mending job (lines 12–14):

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.

In the end, the speaker proves no more willing than his neighbor to challenge the wall, and so the status quo prevails.

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