"Mending Wall"

I have no idea why the poem is not called “Mending the Wall” since the two men meet once a year to mend THE wall between them. The speaker sees no need for the wall since . . . . Look for the speaker’s stipulations as to why a wall might logically be built. BTW, if you have never been to New England or other places where this type of wall is common, imagine a stone wall that is not mortared. Since large stones, small stones, stones of all shapes and sizes, are all over the place in New England, farmers of earlier times often stacked stones on top of each other to contain livestock; maybe they still do. People around Mississippi used split rails like that, so you can see those all around MS still.

But the point is not that the wall is stone, but the fact that the wall is there for no reason really. At least, that is what the speaker says. The neighbor just says, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Frost did not actually invent that sentence since there are versions of that adage in many cultures, or so I read. It sounds like something Benjamin Franklin would have said, but then he ripped off many of his sayings, too. ANYWAY, this poem was popular in a time when the Berlin Wall was both the physical and mental separation between communism and capitalism. But that one was brought down in response to the fall of communism. So we thought maybe the age of big walls was over. Hmmm. Apparently not. Why do we build walls? That was the question that the speaker wondered all throughout the poem; but he is somewhat complicit, too, right? After all, he helps the neighbor put the stones back in place after winter.

We can’t solve the problem of big physical walls in this discussion. But Frost was probably equally concerned with the invisible walls we ALL build. Sometimes we build walls to protect ourselves; sometimes we are afraid or embarrassed, and walls can keep others out. Or maybe we see another person or another group as the OTHER, the person not like us. And those walls shoot up so fast that we can hardly see them rising up out of the ground. Or out of our own psyche. Read the poem again, and think about this last type of wall. It might give you a new perspective of the poem or maybe something much more important than a poem in lit class.