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“Mending Wall” takes place in the countryside in spring. The poem’s geographical location isn’t entirely clear, though it’s safe to assume that Frost was thinking about New England. After all, he spent most of his adult life living in and writing about this part of the United States. More to the point, “Mending Wall” is one of the first poems in Frost’s second collection, titled North of Boston. But arguably more important than the geographical region is the poem’s narrower setting at the intersection between two properties. Physically manifested by a wall, the line that marks the division between two properties becomes, for the speaker, the source of a philosophical quandary. If such a dividing line serves to keep the two sides separate, does that separation lead to better relations or to increased isolation? The speaker’s neighbor clearly thinks the former, which he expresses with the clichéd proverb, “Good fences make good neighbors” (lines 27 and 45). For his part, the speaker is skeptical. He recognizes that it’s difficult to give up such dividing lines once they are in place, and that they may create unnecessary types of division. In this sense, borders inevitably give rise to border thinking, a logic that plays out concretely as the speaker and his neighbor mend their shared wall from opposite sides.

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