Robert Frost: “Mending Wall”

Are borders necessary or regressive? Are humans naturally driven toward greater connection and cooperation, or does some old, mistrustful instinct always hold us back? These are among the questions that haunt the edges of “Mending Wall” like shade in a springtime pasture. This early Robert Frost masterpiece first appeared in the book North of Boston (1914), and its tale of a wall dividing neighbors’ properties has been read both literally and figuratively ever since. With understated wit and a knack for crafty symbolism, Frost casts a cold eye on the real and figurative walls that divide us.

The poem’s narrative is simple—or seems so. The speaker and his neighbor meet in spring to repair the stone wall between their properties. Reviewing the damage that weather and hunters have caused, the speaker begins with a reflection:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

He doubts whether this particular wall is even necessary, dryly reminding his neighbor that their lands don’t need partitioning: “My apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.” The neighbor counters with a proverb: “Good fences make good neighbors.” Half-amused, half-provoked, the speaker “wonder[s] / If I could put a notion in his head” and force him to question his unthinking maintenance of the wall. But the speaker says nothing further, and the neighbor, pleased with his comeback, repeats it.

Because the neighbor gets the last word, it’s possible to read “Good fences make good neighbors” as the poem’s straightforward message. A more complex reading, alert to Frost’s ironic style, would side firmly with the speaker. In this view, the speaker nurses a healthy suspicion of barriers that serve no clear purpose; he is open to communication and new ideas, wary of anything that arbitrarily divides people: “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offense.” By contrast, the neighbor is a creature ruled by habit and cliché. The ending provides a good deal of evidence for this reading:

                                ... I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

“He moves in darkness” implies the darkness of ignorance, and the passage as a whole casts the neighbor as stubborn, incurious, trite in speech, and crude in manner. He repeats his comeback out of self-satisfaction, and he keeps repairing the wall—estranging his fellow human beings—out of rigid traditionalism. So unflattering is this portrait that it’s tempting to stop our reading there. It would be easy, in that case, to frame the poem as a tidy allegory of tolerance versus intolerance, openness versus repression, rationality versus irrationality, and so on.

But Frost is a poet who weaves ironies within ironies, and his poem beckons us toward even more-nuanced readings. Poet-critic Lawrence Raab finds shades of gray within the speaker’s attitude:

The poem doesn’t begin with “I hate walls” or even “Something dislikes a wall.” Its first gesture is one of elaborate and playful concealment, a calculated withholding of meaning. Notice also that it is the speaker himself who repairs the wall after the hunters have broken it. And it is the speaker each year who notifies his neighbor when the time has come to meet and mend the wall. Then can we safely claim that the speaker views the wall simply as a barrier between human contact and understanding?

True: the speaker acknowledges having “made repair” before even mentioning the neighbor, and when new gaps appear in the wall, he “let[s his] neighbor know beyond the hill.” He may not love the wall, but he actively collaborates in its preservation. Here we should note that Frost may not be voicing the poem as himself. He may be judging both speaker and neighbor, dramatizing their perspectives without fully embracing either.

Can we identify his own stance? As Raab points out, the “Something” that undermines walls in winter is frost; perhaps the poet Frost was punningly aligning himself with anti-wall forces. And everything in the poem indicates that, practically speaking, this wall is useless:

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

But what about the breezy comparison of wall-mending to “another kind of out-door game, / One on a side”? Two outdoor players with a barrier between them—this sounds a little like tennis, and Frost was a casual tennis player who used the sport in a famous metaphor about verse. The poet Rachel Hadas offers the following:

As an occasion for craft, besides being a guarantee of privacy, the wall is also crucial. Frost often compared free verse to playing tennis without the net—a remark which no one has ever interpreted as an attack on nets.

The wall in “Mending Wall” imposes an arbitrary limit. But like the rules of a game or poetic form, such limits can spark creativity and connection—as Hadas puts it, “the joint maintenance of form for its own sake ... so that wall-making also becomes ‘a time to talk.’” Hadas agrees with critic Richard Poirier: “[I]f fences do not ‘make good neighbors,’ the ‘making’ of fences can.”

Beneath all these layers of criticism there is Frost’s own commentary. In an author’s note in North of Boston, Frost wrote that the poem “takes up the theme where A Tuft of Flowers [sic] in A Boy’s Will laid it down.” He is referring to “The Tuft of Flowers” from his previous (1913) volume, especially to that poem’s closing lines:

‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’

The “him” is a fellow farmer who has mowed a field where the speaker now “turn[s] the grass.” Though the neighbor never appears in this poem, there’s a real sense in which the speaker is “work[ing] together” with him—in a shared field, on a shared project. Upon discovering a beautiful tuft of flowers his neighbor’s “scythe had spared,” the speaker feels an even deeper sense of communion with him, a shared delight in the “work” of appreciating the world. Although the speaker utters the final lines in solitude, they come “from the heart.”

If “Mending Wall” takes up the same theme without variation, then wall-mending must be a form of bonding, the joint renewal of something worthwhile. (As Raab reminds us, “the phrase ‘mending fences’ means to restore communication and neighborliness.”) But the tart, even sardonic tone of “Mending Wall” makes us feel the theme has shifted. Here the neighbors’ isolation seems greater and their bond weaker, even though they’re communicating face to face. More seems to be at stake than the rewards of work or the fun of an “outdoor game.”

*          *          *

Frost made a few other remarks about “Mending Wall” over the years. In his old age, he said it had been “spoiled” by being “applied.” This claim suggests a wistful desire to wall off the poem from real-world influence. Are we bound to respect that divide, or can we poke holes in it?

From the outset, the poem has been hard to separate from politics. Frost published it in England during the first year of World War I, a time of fierce European border disputes. Though we can’t reduce it to a political allegory, its ambivalence about boundaries does make a particular kind of sense in that context. For one thing, the poem’s apparent stakes are so low that we feel it must be hinting at something else. (Few readers care about rural stone walls, but many care deeply about lines on the map.) For another thing, the poem’s physical details—a wall dividing land, two landowners who cultivate different trees—make for easy geopolitical analogies. (Picture neighboring countries with different industries.) Even the poem’s season is balanced, like uncertain diplomatic relations, between a freeze and a thaw.

Frost doesn’t rail against artificial boundaries, but he does urge us to think before imposing them, to ask “What [we are] walling in or walling out.” If his true subject is global affairs—say, isolationism versus internationalism—his commentary is more memorable for being sly.

This restrained approach drew little controversy before the world wars, when Frost was a largely unknown writer. But by the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, Frost was an institution, and “Mending Wall” faced pressure to declare its allegiances. In particular, the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall—part of the “Iron Curtain” dividing capitalist Western from communist Eastern Europe—brought the poem fresh attention from both sides. For the Soviet Union, according to Raab, the “detachable statement” about good fences served as a rationale for rigid defenses. For Americans, according to Grzegorz Kosc in The Transatlantic Sixties (2013), the idealistic interpretation was self-flattering:

Though Frost warned against easy readings of the poem and explained that it locked together a nationalist and a “one-worlder” in an irresolvable tension, “Mending Wall” spoke to Americans as an unequivocally “wall-tearing” poem, expressing the universalist ideology of brotherhood of mankind that the West arrogated to itself...

Despite his warnings, Frost himself tried to serve the cause of tension reduction. President Kennedy, for whom he’d read a poem at the 1961 inauguration, sent him on a 1962 goodwill visit to the USSR that included a meeting with the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev. (Kosc calls this the “Frost-Khrushchev summit.”) Although the poet did his earnest best—charming the premier despite ill health, reading “Mending Wall” in Moscow—he could not allay the tensions that soon fueled the Cuban Missile Crisis.

This wasn’t his first foray into poetic diplomacy. A 1961 State Department trip had taken Frost to the divided city of Jerusalem, where, as biographer Henry Hart recounts, the poet offered the first line of “Mending Wall” to a group of kids who asked him to write something for them. Hart claims that “He could just as easily have written, ‘Good fences make good neighbors,’ since he also believed in the necessity of walls”—but he didn’t, in fact, choose that line. Moreover, according to Kosc, Frost exclaimed about Israel-Palestine divisions: “Stones and stones, and walls and walls, and barbed wire, wire, wire. The shame of it! That barbed wire was invented in America!” The poet died in 1963 without seeing any of these conflicts resolved.

The Berlin Wall lasted until 1989, when its fall amid a groundswell of protest and a broader Cold War thaw seemed to herald a victory for internationalism. In a landmark speech two years earlier, President Reagan had urged his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, to “tear down this wall.” History swings unpredictably; in 2016, a different Republican captured the White House with the slogan, “Build that wall!” The new president, an extreme nationalist determined to block migration from Central America, pledged to impose a coast-to-coast barrier between the United States and Mexico. Though construction of the physical wall soon stalled, border patrols turned back southern refugees en masse or confined them in dire conditions. Predictably, as Alexander Nazaryan reported during the 2016 campaign, “both supporters and detractors” of this new nationalism “have used Frost’s poem to their ends.”

And so, a poem from 1914 now holds a pocket mirror to international relations since 1960. But then, it has always glanced back at the history of human borders, barriers, and fortifications from Jericho onward. It seems doomed to perpetual relevance; the Washington Post recently quoted it in an article with the plaintive title “Walls are the foundation of civilization. But do they work?” At the same time, it seems designed to frustrate message seekers. Nazaryan calls it “a gorgeous act of equivocation”:

“Mending Wall” ends on the conviction about good fences making good neighbors. ... You know that the narrator doesn’t believe this, so why does he let it stand? Because some do not love walls, but others do, and always have. Hence the wall in Berlin, but also Hadrian’s Wall and the Great Wall of China.

This echoes one of Frost’s own late-life comments:

I could’ve done better for them probably, for the generality, by saying

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
Something there is that does.

Why didn’t I say that? I didn’t mean that. I meant to leave that until later in the poem. I left it there.

The aging Frost also reflected, “Maybe I was both fellows in the poem.” Frost’s qualifiers—“probably,” “maybe”—make mischief all over again. So ambiguous is “Mending Wall” that it seems to play games with us, volleying us first toward one interpretation, then another.

Still, words are never fully ambiguous, however poets might wish otherwise. “Something there is” in the poem’s rhetoric, some quiet subsurface pressure, that profoundly undermines the act of wall-making. Consider that “Good fences make good neighbors” really was a dusty proverb: it had appeared in the Dwights American Magazine, and Family Newspaper as early as 1846. This puts it at a quadruple remove from Frost’s own sentiments: it’s filtered through the speaker, the neighbor, the neighbor’s father, and whatever source the father got it from. Notice, too, that it ends on an unstressed syllable, making it less emphatic than “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” or the even stronger

            ‘... Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
            That wants it down.’

Those last two iambs, propelled by the line break, ring with authority.

Of course, the speaker chooses not to speak these lines aloud. Yet even that context might argue for their deeper truth. They seem to well up from the speaker’s intuition, carrying a “notion” he espouses but can’t or won’t express. If the tension between these men is unresolved, perhaps it’s not because their points are equally valid but because one knows more than he’s willing to say.

Regardless, the “notion” is expressed to us instead. The speaker puts it in our heads. Here is a powerful implicit retort to the closing line: as far as genuine connection is concerned, this wall has not “ma[d]e good neighbors” of the two men. Repairing it may be a bonding ritual, but even as the speaker participates, he says little, dislikes his neighbor’s mindset, and saves his real thoughts for another audience.

In confiding to us, he does not denounce walls; he doubts them. Doubt is what makes “Mending Wall” a poem and not an editorial—not the kind of writing with obvious applications. But it’s also what makes “Mending Wall” a subversive classic rather than a scrap of yesterday’s news.