Answer:
The main theme in Robert Frosts poem Mending Wall is a comparison between two lifestyles: traditions and a common sense. The author gives us a picture, illustrating two neighbors, two distinct characters with different ideas about what precisely means to be a good neighbor. So they build and repair the wall between them each spring after destructions, made by nature and hunters. They do it every time, over and over again, so the speaker puts the question if they need this wall at all. Frost is drawing habit and traditions on one side and logics and reasoning on another. The speaker thinks that even nature itself does not want this wall to exist, referring all the destructions they find each time to nature’s will to get rid of this wall as nature “sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, / And spills the upper boulders in the sun.” Narrator is more open and flexible, than his “old-fashioned” neighbor, and sees things in a different way. The speaker seems to us as a friendly person, who would want much more communication and friendship with his neighbor, than a separation and estrangement, caused by blind following the traditions without even thinking of if it still takes place in their situation. As their property is all trees, so there is nothing that could cross one’s board. The narrator sees a need for a wall “where there are cows,” or somewhere else, but not in their households.
Poem Mending Wall does not have a rhyme and written in blank verse and has no stanzas, even though it has a very interesting structure. The author’s intention is to give this poem a conversational form, making it sound as natural speech. He is not using any fancy words here. Frost makes it on purpose, giving this poem a look of a very common story, so each reader may refer it to his own life situation.
Mending the Wall has forty five lines of first-person narrative. Poem is written in an iambic pentameter form and, mostly, there are ten syllables per line, but we also can find lines with eleven syllables. There are ten of such lines in this poem. Even though it has no rhyme, the reader can notice that Robert Frost is using a subtle internal rhyme and the assonance in some ending terms like “wall”, “hill”, “balls”, “well” and others. Robert Frost demonstrates here his mastery in irony, metaphors and figurative language, and symbolism.
The poem starts with “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” making readers to concentrate their attention on the one of two arguments, taken place in the poem. This first argument belongs to the narrator, and he sticks with it till the end of the poem. The first four lines tell us about how nature itself doesn’t like a wall and sends disasters and push upper boulders down. So we see, that the wall itself is not natural, that’s why the nature is against wall’s existence.