Mending Wall

The main theme of Robert Frost’s Mending Wall is very universal. It is a story about him and his neighbor, and how the only time they ever meet is in the Spring when it comes time to fix the wall that divides their property. The funny thing is, no one has touched the wall , as he points out in lines 9-10 when he says “The gaps I mean, / No one has seen them made or heard them made”. Yet without fail, the gaps are there year after year.

His neighbor seems to think the wall is essential, repeating the phrase “Good fences make good neighbors” (line 45). The narrator thinks it is silly, seen in lines 23-26, when he tells his neighbor that his trees are not going to eat his neighbor’s trees. So he asks himself, “Why do they make good neighbors?” (line 30). Obviously, something disagrees with his neighbor, as he points out in the opening line, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”.

This “something” could be viewed in a few different ways. The first few lines of the poem refer to ways that nature breaks down their man-made wall. When the ground swells in the winter, the wall becomes unstable, and parts of it collapse. However, it could also be interpreted to say that the something referred to is in fact God. At the end of the poem he mentions a sort of darkness that his neighbor moves in, one that is not just a physical darkness. He compares the man to a savage, as if he is evil, and one who doesn’t let people in. He seems unfriendly and unwelcoming, and shutting himself off from the world. Some power is trying to tear down the wall between him and others, but he refuses to let anyone near him, including perhaps that higher power.