Summary of Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall"

 One of the masterpieces of Frost is "Mending Wall". In the poem we get   the notion of the two farmers - one young progressive farmer and another old conservative farmer. The young progressive is probably the young poet. He is giving arguments against keeping any wall or boundary with the plot of the old conservative farmer who is his neighbor .The old conservative farmer is in favor of the wall or boundary and he is giving arguments in the favor of his notion of keeping and mending the wall.The young liberal farmer is the speaker of the dramatic monologue. He talks about how every spring he and his old conservative neighbor get together and repair the wall and express their conflicting attitudes towards the existence of the wall . The young progressive speaker speaks out his thoughts about the meaninglessness of keeping and mending the wall.

He is also reproducing the thoughts and ideas of his conservative old yankee neighbor about the necessity of keeping and mending the wall.The young liberal farmer doesn't feel the necessity of

keeping the wall but every spring he comes to his land for mending the wall with his old conservative farmer because he believes in co-operation and peaceful co-existence.


               So, the poem is a dramatic monologue which begins with a references to the speaker,s own progressive and liberal notion, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall". And ends with the words of wisdom of the old conservative neighbor that "Good fences make good neighbors".From this we get the impression that the poet though a liberal progressive thinker is drawing our attention to the wisdom of keeping and maintaining the wall.The wall here is symbolic.It symbolizes the boundary between man and man , and also between nations. It also symbolizes the conflict love for the tradition of the forefathers and the hatred of the tradition.The message suggested in the poem is this that for the sake of peaceful co-existence, we have to accept things which we don't like.There is also another message - we have to  live together in peace with our different ideas.We have live with contradictions and peace lies in accepting life with all its limitations and contradictions.Against the backdrop of New England Frost is projecting the contradiction of human life and the necessity of compromise for peaceful co-existence. Human beings can't be like the  birds and the trees that want a borderless world. We are unlike the birds and trees. So, for peace we have to think of a world with borders.