In Robert Frost's "Mending Wall," the speaker and the speaker's neighbor meet each year to mend a stone wall that separates their properties. Through the speaker, the reader learns the annual maintenance is, in the speaker’s mind, unnecessary because the wall does not serve a practical purpose. The speaker also reveals the annual tradition of mending the wall is important to the neighbor not for the wall itself, but for what the neighbor believes the...
In Robert Frost's "Mending Wall," the speaker and the speaker's neighbor meet each year to mend a stone wall that separates their properties. Through the speaker, the reader learns the annual maintenance is, in the speaker’s mind, unnecessary because the wall does not serve a practical purpose. The speaker also reveals the annual tradition of mending the wall is important to the neighbor not for the wall itself, but for what the neighbor believes the wall represents.
The speaker's attitude toward this annual tradition seems to range from bemusement to irreverence. The speaker questions not only the purpose of the shared annual labor, but also the neighbor's rationale for continuing the tradition in the face of the lack of practical need for the wall's continued existence. The speaker wants to make light of the tradition, even pondering suggesting that elves are responsible for the yearly damage to the wall, but in the end acquiesces to the neighbor’s determination to follow the tradition.
The speaker's neighbor, on the other hand, does not seem to question the tradition. Rather, the neighbor dogmatically follows the platitude, “Good fences make good neighbors,” a saying the speaker attributes to the neighbor’s father. For the neighbor, the wall and the annual mending both represent traditions to be followed for their own sake, not for their practical purposes. Further, the tradition of annually mending the wall seems to represent to the neighbor a necessary tradition for maintaining their relationship as neighbors.
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