Mending Wall, By Robert Frost

"Mending Wall" is a poem written by Robert Frost. The poem is about two neighbours that come together annually to fix a wall that divides them. The boundaries in this poem are both physical and mental. The wall physically keeps them apart and the old man's ignorance limits the neighbour from saying what he thinks should happen, therefore is the mental boundary.

'There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am all apple orchid.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."'

The persona uses imagery to show that the old man is ignorant, saying that he is like a primitive caveman:

'I see him there,

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

he moves in the darkness as it seems to me,'

He also uses 'Pathetic Fallacy':

'Spring is the mischief in me,'