The title of "Mending Wall" is significant because it has two meanings, one literal and the other figurative. This adds a deliberate sense of ambiguity to the title. The poem's speaker and his neighbor are literally mending a wall. Every year they meet at the edge of their properties to engage in the task of repairing this stone wall. In this sense, the word mending functions as a verb. It refers to the clear action that is taking place.

On the other hand, you could read mending as an adjective. This gives the title a more figurative meaning. Read this way, it is the wall itself that is doing the mending. The speaker's neighbor holds the opinion that "Good fences make good neighbors". He feels that a wall can mend relationships between people. The speaker disagrees. However, it gets the reader to consider the function of a wall. As we read the poem, we are meant to ask ourselves if a wall can actually do any mending of its own.

Since the speaker does not seem to think so, there is an irony to this title. Walls, he feels, divide people. They actually serve to fracture relationships. Furthermore, nature itself destroys this wall every year, requiring that it be mended. Walls are not natural structures. Not all walls are made of stone either. There are also the walls that we erect between ourselves and speaking our true feelings. Indeed, the speaker does not tell his neighbor his true doubts about the necessity of their wall.

What is the subject matter and significance of "Mending Wall"?

"Mending Wall" is about the borders, literal and metaphorical, that separate nations and individuals. The speaker in the poem questions the idea that "good fences make good neighbors." The speaker's neighbor, who repeats this refrain, is described as moving "in darkness," meaning that he moves in ignorance, refusing to question the truth of the saying that "good fences make good neighbors." The speaker's neighbor is also described dismissively as "like an old-stone savage," implying that his opinions about walls and fences are, like him, primitive, or "savage."

In other parts of the poem, the speaker suggests that walls and man-made borders are not natural. Indeed, the wall between himself and his neighbor is destroyed by "the frozen-ground swell under it," and then by "hunters," and also, continually, by a mysterious "Something . . . that doesn't love a wall." The wall is destroyed repeatedly and inevitably, so that the speaker and the neighbor must continually, out of habit it seems, meet to repair it. It seems also that they only meet, ironically, when they come together to repair the wall meant to divide them. And each time they meet, the speaker's neighbor unthinkingly insists that "good fences make good neighbors." The speaker wants the neighbor to ask himself, "Why do they make good neighbors?" The question is partly rhetorical, and the answer that the speaker means to imply is that, simply, they don't.

To understand the significance of this poem, it is important to consider it in the context of the time in which it was written. "Mending Wall" was the first poem in Frost's 1915 collection of poems entitled, North of Boston. This places it, contextually, at the beginning of World War One, which began in 1914. This was a war fought over national borders, and a war which fundamentally changed the borders of Europe.

This poem might also have significance in a more modern context too. One of Donald Trump's key election pledges to the American people in 2016 was that he would build a wall between America and Mexico. If Robert Frost was still alive, he might want more people to ask of Trump's proposed wall, as the speaker asks of his neighbor in the poem, "Why (do walls) make good neighbors?"

What is the subject matter and significance of "Mending Wall"?

Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” is a narrative poem in blank verse. It subject matter is two neighbours in New England who each year walk the length of a stone wall between their properties in order to find places where the stones have fallen down and repair the wall by picking up stones of the appropriate size and inserting them in any gaps or loose areas.

Its significance in literary history has to do with the Georgian revival of narrative, often with rural themes, and return to traditional prosody as a reaction to modernism. In contrast to international modernism, Georgian poetics emphasizes regional roots, and thus Frost echoes the New England of Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, and other earlier American poets.

The wall itself and the tradition of mending it stand as emblems of the rituals that define local community.