American Poet: Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”, Essay Example

Deep Wisdom in Walling

The human impulse to break down barriers and to move into any neighboring location without restraint may be as old as humanity itself.  Walls of any kind invite intrusion.  It may not be violent, or even actually after anything at all; it is simply that the wall indicates a space established for a reason and set in place to maintain something apart, and that is all the challenge any person requires to want to violate it.  This occurs even in the tame circumstances of the walls between neighbors, which may appear to be unnecessary symbols of ownership and space.  They are not; they go to a need in humanity as fundamental as that which seeks to break through them.  In “mending wall”, Robert Frost powerfully asserts that human relations are only successfully achieved when borders are in place.

As a poem, “Mending Wall” could not fulfill this purpose, or even exist as a poem of any depth, without a conflict or debate at its core.  Frost supplies this in the person of the narrator, who is musing on the rituals of mending he and his neighbor undergo to annually repair the wall between their properties.  The gaps themselves are either the work of hunters, or some other agent: “No one has seen them made or heard them made” (Frost line 10).  This does not appear to greatly concern the narrator, yet there is a mystery here he should not, it is felt, ignore, along with an incentive for repair he does not attribute to his neighbor.  The neighbor seems to know that breaches in a wall inherently validate the existence of it; the narrator does not grasp this.

The poem’s contrasting ideologies are further emphasized by the stances of the two protagonists.  The narrator, doing the work with his neighbor, is restless, and he suggests that some strange, unknown element clearly does not like walls.  The element, however, is himself.  He is the mischief-maker he alludes to, as he quite candidly reflects, “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know/ What I was walling in or walling out” (Frost lines 32-33).  Compliant as he may be with the neighbor, the narrator exhibits a kind of peevishness, or annoyance, in this statement.

What escapes the narrator completely is that he himself is the reason for the wall, as his neighbor, who would gladly admit to being so himself, is also the reason.  The neighbor’s motives puzzler the narrator: “He moves in darkness as it seems to me” (Frost line 41).  Moreover, this person merely repeats his father’s adage that good walls make for good neighbors, which the narrator takes as mindless tradition.  The implication is that there is solid folk wisdom at play in the words which escape the narrator’s comprehension, and what matters is that the neighbor is misunderstood.

This goes to the heart of the poem’s meaning; what else, then, would divide the men, were there not a tangible wall between them in place to ensure civility and mutual respect?  This subject of walls is, as noted, primal within humanity, and Frost’s simple poem, in regarding an ordinary stone border between two ordinary people, encompasses a great deal more than that.  It affirms that there are untold layers of mystery within human beings, which in turn may easily provoke conflict and misunderstandings.  Through the basic construct of a stone wall, an essential civilizing agent is set in place because human relationships demand parameters.  Unsaid in the poem, but equally crucial, is that freedom is not denied; walls may be crossed, when consent is given.  However, it is necessary that the border be there, to do what human beings usually cannot do well: maintain the needed distance for relationships to be conducted with consistent, mutual respect.

Works Cited

Frost, R.  “Mending Wall.”  Poets from the Academy of American Poets,  Academy of American Poets Website.  Retrieved from  http://www.poets.org