Mending Wall Info!

-not really used-

1. MENDING WALL ANALYSIS

The Wall/Fences
Symbol Analysis
The wall is the shining star of this poem. It unites our speaker and his
neighbor, but separates them as well. As we hear the neighbor speak
the proverb twice ("Good fences make good neighbors"), we start to
consider all of the wall-like structures in our life: fences, gates,
boundaries, lines, etc. The wall serves as a canvas upon which a lot
of complex ideas about the ways in which people, and their
relationships with others, are painted and discussed.
• Line 13: The wall is ironic because, even though it separates the
speaker from his neighbor, it also brings them together every
year.
• Line 14: "The wall" is present throughout the poem as an extended
metaphor for the division that exists between the speaker and
his neighbor.
• Line 16: "To each" is a parallelism, as its repetition emphasizes the
fact that the speaker and his neighbor are on opposite side of
the wall.
• Line 21: "Another kind of out-door game" becomes a metaphor for
the wall-mending process
• Line: 27: The proverb "Good fences make good neighbors" is also a
cliché; we hear it all the time.
• Line 27: The proverb "Good fences make good neighbors" is a
paradox when you contrast it with the first words of the poem,
"Something there is that doesn’t love a wall." In the first case,
barriers are good things; in the second, they are not.
Line 35: "Offence" is a pun – it sounds like "a fence."


Nature and Tradition
Symbol Analysis
Nature seems to act as the third wheel in this poem – the silent
character swirling around the speaker and his neighbor. Although he
doesn’t explicitly describe the landscape, we see it very clearly, and

2. we seem to know what the seasons are like in this part of the world.
Similarly, tradition seems to be the silent subject over which the
speaker and his neighbor wrestle. The neighbor upholds his
ancestors’ way of life, while our speaker questions this philosophy.
• Line 5: "Hunters" are a metaphor both for the speaker and for us
(the readers), all of whom try to get at something (even if we
don’t know exactly what that something is).
• Line 25: The apple trees are momentarily personified, as the
speaker claims that they will never wander across and eat the
pine cones on his neighbor’s property.
Line 51: The speaker uses a simile and likens his neighbor to "an old-
stone savage armed," or a caveman ready for battle.


Mending Wall: Rhyme, Form & Meter
We’ll show you the poem’s blueprints, and we’ll listen for the
music behind the words.

Blank Verse
Frost writes this poem in blank verse, meaning that it doesn’t rhyme
(sad), but it does have interesting structure stuff going on. The poem
loosely follows an iambic pentameter structure. Let’s get our hands
dirty and break down this architecture. Counting is always a good
way to begin. We know that the poem has 46 lines, making "there
where it is we do not need the wall" (line 23) the dead center of the
poem, which is the exact point at which we figure out that our speaker
isn’t so gung-ho about the wall that he mends. 

The majority of the
lines in this poem have 10 syllables (in true iambic pentameter
fashion), but we can find ten lines which have eleven syllables. When
we encounter these lines, they momentarily throw our internal rhythm
off kilter, and make us pay extra attention to the lines themselves. An
example of this comes in line 8, when the speaker says, "But they
would have the rabbit out of hiding." The eleventh syllable here

3. seems to parallel the actual act of trying to force a bunny out of his
hole. The last syllable of this line falls off the edge of the poem in the
same way that a bunny falls out of its hiding place when it’s pursued
by ferocious dogs. 

Frost repeats two lines in this poem. Can you
tell which lines they are? You guessed it: "Something there is that
doesn’t love a wall," and "Good fences make good neighbors." The
repetitions of these lines, as well as the repetition of certain phrases
throughout the poem, emphasize the whole "this is my side of the
argument, and that’s your side of the argument" theme. The poem is
not broken into stanzas, which makes the poem itself look visually
like a rock wall turned on its side. We can see the "gaps" in the wall
when we look at the way that the line endings form an imperfect line
all the way down the page.
Mending Wall Setting
Where It All Goes Down

Read this poem, and then close your eyes. What do you see?
Perhaps you see a New England countryside, muddy and green after
a spring rain? Do you see an ancient, crumbling rock wall running
alongside an apple orchard and some tall pine trees? Or, maybe you
see two men in the distance, kneeling in the mud, trying to fit little
boulders into the spaces of the rock wall. You might also hear the
distant sound of hunters and their dogs chasing after a little bunny
rabbit. As you walk along, the sun filters through the treetops and
bathes everything in shadows which shake with the breeze. Do you
smell those pine trees?

This is not a place where ferocious
animals dwell. In fact, dogs and humans are the most ferocious
creatures here. We can assume that the winters here are pretty rough
and snowy, so we can’t blame our speaker for wanting to get out and
about in the spring. We would want to walk the whole length of a rock
wall, too, if we’d been cooped up in our little house all winter long.
The leaves are so thick above our heads that things get a little dim in
these woods. This is not suburbia, folks; this is genuine country,
where neighbors live miles from one another. We don’t know about
you, but we’re starting to feel just a wee bit lonely.

4. Sound Check
Read this poem aloud. What do you hear?

"Mending Wall" sounds and feels like the experience of shouting into
an empty barn and seeing startled birds fly up, or of hearing the
barn’s wooden walls creak and shift a little. The poem also sounds
like we are in the middle of the woods, hearing nothing but the leaves
rustle in the trees. Yes, siree, this is a quiet poem. The hunters and
their noisy dogs are a far-off memory when the speaker tells us about
them, and the their supposed noise only helps to intensify the poem’s
silent nature. In fact, we can’t help but feel little lonesome, simply
because there is such an absence of sounds, people, places, and
things. 

The presence of the spell, "Stay where you are until our
backs are turned," makes us hear the two repeated lines –
"Something there is that doesn’t love a wall" (1, 36) and "Good
fences make good neighbors" (lines 27, 46) – in a more spell-like
way. Coupling those repetitions with the quietness which lurks
throughout the rest of the poem compels us to ponder that age-old
question: "If a wall falls in the forest and no one is around to hear or
see it fall, does it actually fall?" Work on that for us, will you?
What’s Up With the Title?


The title reflects on the famous wall at hand, and refers to the ritual
that our speaker and his neighbor undergo every spring to fix this
wall. That’s all well and good, but we have a few questions about this
seemingly self-explanatory title, Mr. Frost. For example, why didn’t
you call the poem "Mending the Wall" or "Wall Mending?" The title,
"Mending Wall," makes us think that this wall is a supernatural thing
with healing powers which magically mend any broken thing that you
give it. 

We also can’t help but think about the medical connotation
at the heart of the word "mend," as in "I’m on the mend," or "my

5. wound is mending well." The title also sounds to us like a short-hand
message left on our speaker’s front door, explaining his whereabouts
to people who happen to visit while he’s away (kind of like a "gone
fishing" sign). Whatever the case may be, the title draws our attention
to the star of the poem, the wall. Perhaps you’ve seen this wall in
other hits, such as "Humpty Dumpty" and Wall-E… hehe. The –ing
ending of "mending" makes us think that the mending process is in
the works, and it gives the title a little momentum and movement (like
the little round stones that keep falling out of the wall).


Robert Frost’s Calling Card
What is the poet’s signature style?

Rural New England Landscape and Absence
This San Francisco-born poet loved the New England countryside,
and many of his poems dwell in the eerie quiet of the woods. He lived
on a farm in Derry, New Hampshire for much of his life, so he was
well acquainted with the work that country life demands. Tasks like
apple picking, mowing, milking, sewing, digging, mending, and
building are prominent throughout Frost’s poems. Frost’s easy
language complements these descriptions of farm life. 

By "easy,"
we don’t mean "the opposite of difficult." Rather, we mean that Frost
captures people’s natural rhythms of speech. If we overhear
someone say, "My apple trees will never get across/ and eat the
cones under pines," (lines 25-26), we won’t necessarily think, "Oh,
they’re speaking in poetry." Instead, we’ll probably chuckle and say,
"No, your apple trees probably won’t!" Unlike many of his
contemporaries who experiment with language in all kinds of crazy
ways, Frost doesn’t try to jar his readers in such a way. He wants his
readers to think about the universal ideas that he kicks around, and to
hear the meaning of the poem unfold as they read it.

It may come
as no surprise to us that Frost loses many family members and loved
ones in his lifetime, outliving several of his children and his wife. He is
no stranger to grief and loneliness, and struggles with suicidal

6. tendencies for a time. His poems seem as much about what is
discussed and what is present, as they are about what isn’t talked of
and what is absent. For example, the speaker begins "Mending Wall"
by saying, "Something there is that doesn’t love a wall." It is precisely
this something, this unknown ghostlike thing, that lurks in almost all of
Frost’s poems. Even as our speaker and his neighbor go about the
quiet task of mending their wall, we feel that, at any minute,
something drastic can happen, or some thing can appear.

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Even if we’re not quite sure who continues to destroy the wall, and
even if we don’t know specifically what our speaker wants, we have a
pretty good fix on what is going down in this poem: There’s a wall that
either needs mending, or tearing down. What’s so great about this
poem is that we can simply walk into it, and revel in the mysterious
quietness that inhabits the dark woods. The language makes us feel
as if we’re staring into a crystal clear creek.
President John F. Kennedy once says of Frost, "He has bequeathed
his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will
forever gain joy and understanding." (Source)
Frost was co-valedictorian of his high school class with his future
wife, Elinor Miriam White. (Source)

Frost was a very nervous little boy, and was home-schooled for much
of his childhood. (Source)
When asked what the intention behind "Mending Wall" is, Frost
responded:

"In my Mending Wall was my intention fulfilled with the characters
portrayed and the atmosphere of the place? […] I should be sorry if a
single one of my poems stopped with either of those things—stopped
anywhere in fact. My poems—I should suppose everybody's
poems—are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the

7. boundless. Ever since infancy I have had the habit of leaving my
blocks carts chairs and such like ordinaries where people would be
pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark. Forward, you
understand, and in the dark. I may leave my toys in the wrong place
and so in vain. It is my intention we are speaking of—my innate
mischievousness."(Source)