Mending Wall Themes

Our speaker takes great pains to describe the setting of this New England countryside. He tells us right off the bat, "Something there is that doesn’t love a wall/ That sends the frozen-groun...

When the neighbor first says, "Good fences make good neighbors," we know that we’ve heard this saying before. When he echoes it at the end of the poem, we realize that this saying was passed...

There is definitely a disconnect between our speaker and his neighbor. They work together to mend the wall, but they don’t talk to each other as they go along. The speaker wishes to put a "no...

When we talk about "exploration" here, we don’t necessarily mean Christopher Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci. Our speaker explores uncharted waters as he begins to question why there needs to be...

There’s a whole lot of imagining and speculating in this poem. For example, from lines 30-37, our speaker imagines the thoughts his neighbor might think if he questions the necessity of his o...