Mending Wall

A meditative lyric poem on the boundaries between people, “Mending Wall” was first published in 1914 in North of Boston, a collection of poetry by the American poet Robert Frost. “Mending Wall” is one of Frost’s most popular and anthologized works. It exemplifies the themes which came to define his poetry. Set in a rural American wood, its honest, colloquial tone belies a psychologically deep and ambiguous reality. The poem’s most quotable lines exhort two apparently contrasting worldviews: the isolationist “Good fences make good neighbors” versus the more inclusive “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.” Suggesting the inherently contradictory, or at least complicated, nature of man, the poet offered, "Maybe I was both fellows in the poem” (Burnshaw, Stanley. “Robert Frost’s Contrarieties.” The Academy of American Poets. October 9, 1990,). He later added, “I've got a man there; he's both [of those people but he's man--both of them, he's] a wall builder and a wall toppler. He makes boundaries and he breaks boundaries. That's man” (Monteiro, George.