What Does Mending Wall Mean

There are two kinds of people in this world. There is the person who has the ability to open their mind to every possibility, and there is the person who thinks everything is like a shotgun house. A bullet from a shotgun goes through the front door and out the back door without scraping edges or marking the walls. The straight and narrow path of the bullet represents the mind of a person who has no capacity to change or grow. Frost characterizes these two types of people in his poem, “Mending Wall,” paired with symbolism and repetition to create the idea that without questions there is no room for change.
Frost uses symbolism in this poem to generate the fact that tradition is sometimes meant to be challenged. The wall that separates the two
“Once again” creates repetition by showing how the two men come together when the wall begins to prove the need to patch the damage time has worn onto it. The speaker does not understand why his neighbor cannot see that there is no rationalization in the wall they have lodged between themselves. Frost supports this idea when he states, “He is all pine and I am apple orchard. / My apple trees will never get across / and eat the cones under his pines, I tell him” (lines 24-26). The trees in this epitaph imitate the speaker’s misunderstanding as to why his neighbor cannot see that there is no rationalization in the wall they have lodged between themselves. Desperation is created as the speaker begs his fellow neighbor to accept the need for eradicating the mocking wall. There are gaps in the bricks the wall is built out of that also
Repetition is found as the neighbor claims, “Good fences make good neighbours” (27, 45). A broken record is what comes to mind as that saying is used over again. Motive and contempt can be seen where the speaker states, “He will not go behind his father’s saying, / And he likes having thought of it so well” (43-44). The speaker shows contempt here as he explains how his neighbor glorifies the fact that he stands so firm behind a saying he remembers his father telling him so long ago. The neighbor shows motive behind the epitaph he enjoys repeating over again when he declares it to be his father’s saying which holds sentiment, but also proves again the age of such a tradition and the need for a change of heart. The neighbor makes himself out to be a person incapable of change and his only wish is for the tradition to stay standing, as steady as the wall he continues to repair over and over