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The Wall

The most important symbol in “Mending Wall” is, unsurprisingly, the wall itself. But though it may seem obvious that the wall is symbolic, it’s less evident what exactly it symbolizes. On the most basic level, the wall marks the division between two neighboring estates. In this way, the wall’s physical existence is symbolic in the sense that it represents a legal boundary between separate parcels of private property. Yet despite its legal significance, the wall is made of physical materials, which makes it vulnerable to damage and degradation from hunters and winter weather. In this regard, the wall also symbolizes the limits of legal abstractions in the face of concrete reality. The reality of the wall’s vulnerability, in turn, forces the speaker and his neighbor to gather every spring for mending, which points to yet another tension in the wall’s symbolism. Though built to divide their properties, the wall also seems to be one of few occasions for the speaker and his neighbor to get together and speak. The wall thus comes to symbolize good neighborly relations. If we readers remain attuned to these competing symbolic meanings, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine the wall’s true value.

Gaps

In the opening section of the poem, the speaker discusses the gaps in the wall that divides his property from that of his neighbor. Winter weather is a major cause of such gaps. When the ground freezes, it swells and “spills the upper boulders in the sun, / And makes gaps even two can pass abreast” (lines 3–4). Then there are the hunters who pass through, dismantling parts of the wall in pursuit of game. But though the speaker understands how damage happens to the wall, he maintains that there is something mysterious about how they show up year after year, no matter what (lines 9–11):

                    The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.

The mysterious quality of these gaps symbolizes something important about the nature of human relationships that the speaker hasn’t quite fully understood. Like the wall, relationships require regular maintenance. People easily drift away from one another without consistent communication. Gaps of silence can grow, causing misunderstanding and resentment. In fact, we can see this happening in the poem. Even as the speaker and his neighbor meet to mend the fence, their relationship is full of gaps in communication that demonstrate just how far away they are from each other socially, emotionally, and intellectually.

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