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The tone of “Mending Wall” is at once bemused, gently ironic, and ultimately ambivalent. The bemusement arises from the speaker’s puzzled attitude toward the wall that he and his neighbor repair annually, working together to keep their properties separated. The speaker finds this logic contradictory and therefore absurd. Yet there is also something enjoyable about this absurdity. Indeed, the speaker seems to take pleasure in judging his neighbor for uncritically repeating hackneyed clichés about good fences making good neighbors. Such judgment enables the speaker to feel a sense of superiority, which he expresses when he describes his neighbor as “an old-stone savage” who “moves in darkness” (lines 40 and 41). Yet even as the speaker sees himself as more open-minded and progressive, there’s a gentle irony in the fact that he continues to help repair the wall every year, thereby maintaining the status quo. For all his enlightened skepticism, his actions are effectively just as backward as his neighbor’s. In the end, then, the poem is ambivalent about the true status of the wall. It may open with the speaker’s proverb of skepticism, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” (line 1). Even so, it’s his neighbor who gets the last word: “Good fences make good neighbors” (line 45).

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