Mending Wall Analysis

Welcome to the land of symbols, imagery, and wordplay. Before you travel any further, please know that there may be some thorny academic terminology ahead. Never fear, Shmoop is here. Check out our...

Blank Verse Frost writes this poem in blank verse, meaning that it doesn’t rhyme (sad), but it does have interesting structure stuff going on. The poem loosely follows an iambic pentameter st...

Don’t mind our speaker. He’s just going through a rebellious phase. Pinning him down is a tricky task. He seems to be getting a little antsy in life. He’s just spent a snowy winte...

Read this poem, and then close your eyes. What do you see? Perhaps you see a New England countryside, muddy and green after a spring rain? Do you see an ancient, crumbling rock wall running alongsi...

"Mending Wall" sounds and feels like the experience of shouting into an empty barn and seeing startled birds fly up, or of hearing the barn’s wooden walls creak and shift a little. The poem a...

The title reflects on the famous wall at hand, and refers to the ritual that our speaker and his neighbor undergo every spring to fix this wall. That’s all well and good, but we have a few qu...

Rural New England Landscape and AbsenceThis San Francisco-born poet loved the New England countryside, and many of his poems dwell in the eerie quiet of the woods. He lived on a farm in Derry, New...

(2) Sea LevelEven if we’re not quite sure who continues to destroy the wall, and even if we don’t know specifically what our speaker wants, we have a pretty good fix on what is going do...

President John F. Kennedy once says of Frost, "He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding." (Source)Frost was co-valedict...

GDespite the eerie calm that distinguishes this poem, you might have to work hard to come up with a romantic subtext.