"Mending Wall" Video

• Video Transcript:

“Mending Wall” is the first poem in Robert Frost’s second book of poetry, North of Boston. Published upon Frost’s return from England in 1915, the poem was inspired by his experience as a farmer in rural New Hampshire, where Frost often walked the property line with his French-Canadian neighbor, Napoleon Guay. The poem’s most famous line, “good fences make good neighbors,” was a popular adage of the time, and one that Guay frequently uttered to Frost during their walks.

Despite the eventual failure of his farm, Frost associated his time in New Hampshire with a pastoral sensibility that made its way into many of his poems, including “Mending Wall.”

Frost’s poem does not consist of stanzas, but rather contains forty-five lines of verse written in the first person. Its conversational tone works to establish the main relationship in the poem: that between the speaker and his neighbor, who have different ideas about what makes a person a good neighbor

Every year, the two men walk the length of the wall, looking for damage they can repair together. While Frost’s speaker views the wall as an archaism and admits to a mischievous need for his neighbor to see the futility of the wall, his neighbor repeatedly insists that “good fences make good neighbors.”

The speaker offers many reasons for his belief that walls like this one are old-fashioned. First of all, the very act of mending the wall seems to be in opposition to nature; while the neighbors repair the wall annually, nature has a way of making it fall apart. Moreover, as the speaker points out, there is no real purpose for the wall, since neither one of the men keeps livestock. If there is no danger of the speaker’s apple trees eating the neighbor’s pine cones, he quips, why maintain the wall at all?

Underlying Frost’s account of the two neighbors’ differing outlooks on their shared fence is a question: are borders necessary to maintain relationships between people? Although the speaker cannot see it, the adage repeated by his neighbor (“good fences make good neighbors”) is ironically borne out in the men’s amicable relationship. Because of the wall, the two neighbors are able to maintain independent identities and opinions while also fostering friendly discussion. In the end, Frost seems to say, good fences do indeed make good neighbors.