Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay
Welcome to the land of symbols, imagery, and wordplay. Before you travel any further, please know that there may be some thorny academic terminology ahead. Never fear, Shmoop is here. Check out our...
Form and Meter
Frost writes this poem in blank verse, meaning that it doesn’t rhyme (sad), but it does have interesting structure stuff going on. The poem loosely follows an iambic pentameter structure. Let...
Speaker
Don’t mind our speaker. He’s just going through a rebellious phase. Pinning him down is a tricky task. He seems to be getting a little antsy in life. He’s just spent a snowy winte...
Setting
Read this poem, and then close your eyes. What do you see? Perhaps you see a New England countryside, muddy and green after a spring rain? Do you see an ancient, crumbling rock wall running alongsi...
Sound Check
"Mending Wall" sounds and feels like the experience of shouting into an empty barn and seeing startled birds fly up, or of hearing the barn’s wooden walls creak and shift a little. The poem a...
What's Up With the Title?
The title reflects on the famous wall at hand, and refers to the ritual that our speaker and his neighbor undergo every spring to fix this wall. That’s all well and good, but we have a few qu...
Calling Card
This San Francisco-born poet loved the New England countryside, and many of his poems dwell in the eerie quiet of the woods. He lived on a farm in Derry, New Hampshire for much of his life, so he w...
Tough-O-Meter
Even if we’re not quite sure who continues to destroy the wall, and even if we don’t know specifically what our speaker wants, we have a pretty good fix on what is going down in this po...
Brain Snacks
Sex Rating
Despite the eerie calm that distinguishes this poem, you might have to work hard to come up with a romantic subtext.