Coleman Rohde

9/3/21

Mending Wall

Frost uses blank verse, juxtaposition, repetition, and imagery in order to effectively

communicate what he sees as the unnecessary prevalence of figurative walls of tradition that

separate people from each other. The blank-verse-esque nature of the poem serves to break

traditions of poetry. In the first line Frost states that “Something there is that doesn’t love a

wall”. The wall symbolizing tradition, as Frost asserts, is under attack from some fundamental

sense of the human spirit. Although much of the poem is in blank verse, in the very first line he

breaks the rules, almost boldly, by placing two stressed syllables next to each other with “there

is”. This serves to surprise the reader and force them to wonder why Frost broke with tradition as

he explains why walls often do more harm than good.

Frost uses repetition in combination with juxtaposition to highlight conflicting arguments

around the subject of walls that ultimately serve to sway the reader against needless tradition. For

example, Frost repeats the phrases “something is there that doesn’t love a wall” and “‘Good

fences make good neighbors’”. Every time the first phrase is used the second phrase follows

some time later. The first phrase essentially asserts that walls, needless tradition, is a limit on the

human spirit, whereas the second phrase asserts that walls establish important boundaries.

However, Frost also discusses how the walls that separate their orchards are unnecessary because

“He is all pine and I am apple orchard”. Thus Frost’s open ended statement with enough

repetition forces the reader to not only accept that there is something that doesn’t love a wall but

to question what exactly doesn’t love a wall, ingraining them in Frost’s ideology. His neighbor's

phrase, “‘Good fences make good neighbors’”, on the other hand is left at the end to reassert the
neighbors' ignorance as he fails to respond to Frost’s arguments at all. This juxtaposition, in

combination with the repetition of the two phrases serves to highlight the truth in Frost’s

message of the unnecessary status of these walls while degrading the neigbors argument that

“‘Good fences make good neighbors’”.

Frost also uses imagery in order to establish the brutishness of tradition against reason.

Frost says about his neighbor building the wall, “I see him there / Bringing a stone grasped

firmly by the top / In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed”. Frost’s neighbor, stuck in a

primal cognition, builds the wall like a caveman in an almost violent demeanor. Frost uses this

image of a caveman or “old-stoned savage” in order to develop in the reader’s mind an image of

his neighbor, and the ideas that come with him like “Good fences make good neighbors’” as

primal and thus unnecessary for modern humanity.