Question

Describe the speaker’s attitude toward the wall in “Mending Wall.” How is this different from Frost’s attitude about structure in poetry?

Answer 1

The speaker in “Mending Wall” is skeptical and mildly amused about the wall. He questions its necessity ("Something there is that doesn't love a wall"), sees nature and simple practicalities undermining it (spring and frozen ground, apple trees that “will never get across”), and treats the ritual of rebuilding it as a kind of pointless habit he tolerates more than believes in. His tone is conversational, ironic, and probing: he wants to ask the neighbor why they keep the barrier, and he clearly finds the neighbor’s proverb ("Good fences make good neighbors") unexamined and a little hollow.

Frost himself, however, values structure in poetry. He often insisted that form and meter are necessary constraints that shape thought and feeling; his poems typically use traditional metrical patterns (Mending Wall is written largely in unrhymed iambic pentameter/blank verse) and controlled diction even while sounding colloquial. In other words, while the poem’s speaker doubts and toys with the idea of a literal wall, Frost as a poet keeps and prefers the “walls” of poetic form — he sees disciplined structure as the means by which meaning is made, not an arbitrary or merely defensive barrier.