Mending Wall-Robert Frost

The boundaries in the poem 'Mending Wall' by Robert Frost are physical, emotional, mental and moral. The physical boundaries are the wall itself and the winter that stops it from staying up. The emotional and mental boundary is the reluctance to stop fixing the wall in the man opposite Frost. The moral boundary is the obligation to come together to fix the wall.

The fact that the two men only come together to fix a wall that is to keep them apart is an example of situational irony. The writer is sarcastic about the other man’s traditional ways and believes that they do not need a wall,

‘There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. 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 writer uses similes and allusions to make the reader understand what he is trying to express. The writer believes that the mending of the wall is just another game and that the traditional neighbour is fixed in his old ways, almost like a caveman.

‘Oh, just another kind of out-door game, One on a side. It comes to little more:’
‘Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me’