Mending Wall

“Mending Wall” is written in blank verse, which means it does not rhyme. Blank verse appealed to Frost because of its casual tone, which is closer to spoken English than more rigid poetic forms like the villanelle or sonnet. Its meter is, loosely speaking, iambic pentameter, like the verse written by William Shakespeare and John Milton. Each line is made up of roughly five iambs, a metrical foot consisting of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. A typical line of “Mending Wall” scans like this, with the stressed syllables in bold:

We keep | the wall | be-tween | us as | we go

The poem has no line breaks; all 45 lines are contained in a single stanza. 

An aphorism is similar to a proverb, but tends to be terse and laconic rather than flowery or clever. Like proverbs, they are handed down from generation to generation. The neighbor in “Mending Wall” uses aphorism prominently: “Good fences make good neighbors” (Lines 27 and 45). Like the wall, the sentiment was created long before the neighbor was born.