This poem describes the reasons of why people do not always get things done, as they dwell in the past and never experience the present. For example, "the one wall becomes two walls, the speaker's wall a philosophically differentiated structure, the neighbor's wall a mere landmark of past clichés- (Kearns). The elves that Frost refers to "may not mean willowy things out of Tolkien but darker forces of the wood, for the next image is one of darkness. The neighbor is viewed as subtly menacing, "an old-stone savage armed."" Yet this man has been the one to defend boundaries. The apparently relaxed and leisurely pace of the poem has made us lower our own boundaries and forget who is on what side-(Hadas). The overall theme of the poem is if people concentrate on the present at a low stress level, life is a lot better than when they do the exact opposite. .
"At such times Frost's blank verse recalls "Tintern Abbey," in which Wordsworth describes those "hedgerows hardly hedgerows" in eloquently unruly lines. In any case, here "as at a number of moments in "Mending Wall" "metrical and rhythmical patterns work in a kind of loosely running counterpoint characterized more by "formity" than by "conformity," as Frost might say. By contrast, when Frost imagines the reconstruction of the wall as the two men labor, the rhythm and meter of his lines coincide quite exactly: .
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; .
And on a day we meet to walk the line .
And set the wall between us once again. .
We keep the wall between us as we go. .
Here, end-stopped lines are the rule: grammatical and rhetorical units more or less confine themselves to their prescribed ten-syllable boundaries. And there is little or no rhythmical variation against the basic iambic grid, which reasserts itself in these lines rather as the wall it- self is "reasserted." Other such examples of Frost's metrical dexterity in this poem might be given, but these two suffice to suggest how tightly integrated in "Mending Wall" are form and theme-(Richardson).
