"The Pasture," published in 1913, displays Frost's first-person amiability as well as his delight in a homeowner's country chores. In familiar farm surroundings, he speaks from the farmer's point of view in an easy iambic pentameter. His diction, containing seven contractions in eight lines, is the simple wording of an ordinary, earth-centered fellow. The pattern of masculine end-sounds, rhyming abbc deec, is characteristic of Frost, who ties the relaxed, confident quatrains together with a disarmingly uncomplicated repetition and rhyme.
In identical meter but without rhyme, "Mending Wall," written in 1914 after Frost's visit to the Scottish highlands, ventures beyond mundane observation to muse over the effects of stone boundaries on relationships. In neighborly fashion, the speaker joins a next-door landowner (identified as Frost's French-Canadian neighbor, Napoleon Guy) at an appointed time to "walk the line," a seasonal chore that calls for repairing the damage to the land by rabbit hunters and winter heaving — the alternate freezing and thawing above the frost line. The reference to the inevitability of destruction alludes to Matthew 24:2 ("There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down"), Christ's prophecy that Herod's temple in Jerusalem will eventually fall.
In an offhand parable, the speaker mischievously challenges a prevailing attitude toward neat divisions, expressed in the homespun revelation that "Good fences make good neighbors." To the speaker's way of thinking, an orchard poses no hazard to a pine woodlot, but the neighbor persists in the tradition of replenishing fallen stones. The forceful action suggests that tradition is an adversary not easily overthrown.
