The Narrator In Robert Frost's Mending Wall

The point of this inquiry is not to consider whether the readers of “Mending Wall” prefer one of the two neighbors more than the other. The point is to inquire whether Robert Frost does—and what his preference says about him.

The speaker in a poem often reveals more about himself than he does about the person of whom or to whom he is speaking. The reader of “Mending Wall” discovers more about the narrator than about the neighbor he is talking about, and by extension, the reader learns something about the author of the poem. When a writer picks up a pen, he necessarily opens an artery of his heart, whether he wishes to or not.

One cannot read “My Last Duchess,” for example, without finding out more about the narrator than the narrator intends. The Duke thinks he is only describing his duchess when, in fact, he is describing himself as well. Readers of poems like “My Last Duchess” and “Mending Wall” find themselves preferring one

One cannot read “My Last Duchess” or “The Bishop Orders His Tomb,” for example, without concluding that Browning has little respect for individuals like the Duke of Ferrara and the Bishop of Saint Praxed’s Church. Nor can one read “Mending Wall” without concluding that Robert Frost has greater respect for the narrator than for the narrator’s neighbor.

In “Mending Wall,” the speaker and his neighbor share a stone wall that separates their property. Except perhaps as a demarcation of property lines, the wall has no actual functionsince the neighbor grows pines and the speaker has an apple orchard. Neither has cows or other animals to threaten the other’s property. But in spite of the wall’s general uselessness, the two men meet each spring to replace upper boulders that have fallen as a result of groundswells or careless hunters who sometimes leave “not one stone on a stone” as they and their yelping dogs pursue the hapless