An analysis of Mending WallThe speaker of Mending Wall allies himself with the insubordinate energies of spring, which each year destroy the wall separating his property from that of his neighbor: "Spring is the evil in me,” he said (CPPP 39). This alliance has the first effect of opposing the speaker to the fundamental conservatism of his neighbor beyond the hill, who, as everyone knows, never "conforms to his father's dictum": "De Good fences make good neighbors.” But the speaker's association with insubordinate natural forces should not obscure an important fact, which has been noticed quite often: it is he, and not the neighbor, who initiates the annual spring repair of the wall; moreover, it is still he, and not the neighbor, who follows the hunters who destroy the wall in other seasons and carry out the repairs. So if the speaker allies himself with spring's springtime malice and its insubordinations, he nevertheless also opposes them in his efforts to balance and hold in place the stones of the wall: "Stay where you are until turn their backs on us! " he said ironically to the stones. Here, in fact, the speaker sounds somewhat like those in Frost's earlier poems, "Rose Pogonias" and "October," each of which, at least in imagination, attempts to stop the forces naturally entropic and destructive of nature in the hope of achieving a momentary stay against confusion, for example, we read: We... middle of paper... balanced on the plane. scenic and thematic….We might also consider "Mending Wall" in light of what Frost says in his 1934 Letter to his daughter Lesley about the doctrine of inner form. hill" is very much on the side of conformity, the speaker of the poem (at least according to his own account) is very much on the side of formality - and here we should perhaps distinguish him from his speaker -. lies at the dialectical intersection of these two opposing terms, because as he says in "The Constant Symbol" about the "discipline(s)" of "within" and "without": "He who does not does not know both does not know either." Works Cited Richardson, Mark. The ordeal of Robert Frost: the poet and his poetics (Illinois). 1997