24 pages • 48 minutes read
Mending Wall
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Form, Meter, and Rhyme Scheme
“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.
Aphorism
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. It was handed down to him by his father and he accepts it as true, without thinking much about its purpose or considering its meaning. Unlike the speaker, the neighbor has no drive to examine the sentiment further; rather, he is content with simply knowing and falling back on it, he “likes having thought of it so well” (Line 44). Both the wall and the aphorism serve as convenient barriers to further conversation.
Enjambment
Enjambment is a poetic device in which a sentence or thought is carried on across line breaks. Frost uses it to emphasize the casual, conversational voice of his speaker. For example, in “To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, / No one has seen them made or heard them made,” the splitting of the sentence across two lines mimics a person’s train of thought. Enjambment creates the illusion that the speaker is composing the poem as he goes (Lines 10-1).
Frost also uses enjambment to play with words and hint at multiple meanings. “My apple trees will never get across,” the speaker says in Line 25. In the context of apples being equated with civilization (see: Symbols & Motifs), this line might mean the speaker feels his more educated worldview will never “get across”—that is, be understood—by his neighbor. Frost then continues the rest of the sentence in the next line, clarifying that his apples won’t “get across” the wall, thus swerving the sentence in a different direction.
Conversely, Frost sometimes uses end-stops—where the end of the line and the end of the thought occur in the same place—as a way of mimicking the barriers and walls the poem is focused on. “We keep the wall between us as we go,” the speaker states, simply and conclusively (Line 15). The statement is strong, complete, and apparently unable to be crossed: just like the wall.
Unlock all 24 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Robert Frost
