“Mending Wall” is the opening poem in Robert Frost’s collection of poems North of Boston (Frost 11-13). The collection was first published in 1914 when the poet was forty years old, revealing two decades of development of poetic elegance (Wallace 2). Unlike the other poems in the book, “Mending Wall” playfully presents the mind of a man who is both imaginative and shrewd, and provides a sharp contrast to other darker poems in this collection. The poem was written in the trivial colloquial form (Gioia 186). The monologue narrative style of the writing is essentially a poignant feature of the book North of Boston. The poem, “Mending Wall”, presents dominance of separateness and solitude in modern life (Wallace 2), as well as the conflict between the observer and the observed. The speaker and his neighbor present a stark contrast, creating a tension, which becomes the crucial theme in the poem. The importance of “Mending Wall” lies in its narrative form that pioneered in modern English poetry (Gioia 186). The poem innovatively makes use of rhythms in narration (Gioia 185). This essay analyses the poem “Mending Wall” and presents the narrative mode a distinguishing feature of the poem, as well as creates a separateness of ideas creating island personalities between two neighbors, which is the essence of modern life as portrayed by Frost. Boundaries are important to Frost. The author identifies the presence of the inherent separateness of man from society, nature, and other inanimate objects (Wallace 1). The poem is a clear exposition of what may happen when the walls that separate individuals are brought down and if an encounter occurs. Patricia Wallace points out that the essence of Frost’s poems is their individualistic aura that separates “us”, the readers, from poet, and one would never feel the poem if one assumes that Frost is part of the communal “us” (2). In a way, “Mending Wall” is a “self-defining poem” , where Frost separates himself from society (Wallace 2). The separation between the speaker, the poet, and the other is distinctly shown right from the beginning of the poem: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall / That wants it down” (Frost 11). Thus, Frost insists on the separateness of his poetic voice even though Frost is aware of the difficulty of differentiating between the “other”, yet retaining one’s own identity. The act that is described in the first stanza of the poem is simply an action and does not entail any act of courage. However, as the poem moves further, Frost drops his teasing tone and adopts a different tone: I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in the darkness, as it seems to me Not of woods only and the shade of trees. (Frost 11) The voice of the poem shifts once we reach the central part. The poem becomes introspective and it no longer mimes the slow movement of the neighbor. The poem turns on the reflection of the speaker as he imagines the neighbors in a different light and realizes how different they are from each other. The speaker presents the neighbor as a distant other who is metaphorically described as “an old savage stone” (Frost 11). It appears to the speaker that the neighbor is engulfed in a shadow and darkness. The more he confronts the dar