The Mending Wall

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in this poem. As well as that it states one of the greatest difficulties of our time: whether national walls should be made stronger for our safety, or whether they should be let down, since they impede our progress toward understanding and eventual common humanity.
"Mending Wall" can also be considered a symbolic poem. In the voices of the two men the younger, capricious, "modern" speaker and the old-fashioned farmer who replies with his one dogged sentence, his inherited aphorism. Some may hear the opposition of two forces: the zeal of revolt, which challenges tradition, and the spirit of restraint, which insists that customs must be upheld, built up and continually rebuilt, as a matter of principle.
The poet himself looks down upon such symbolic analysis. He denies that the poem says anything more than it seems to say. The dispute is the heart of the poem. It answers itself in the paradox of people, in neighbors and competitors, in the antagonistic nature of man.
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