Frost typically ends his sentences at the end of a poetic line, but four times he punctuates the end of a sentence in the middle of a line. What...

In the poem “Mending Wall,” Frost uses iambic pentameter with no rhyme scheme and a single continuous verse without separate stanzas as his form. With this pattern, he mirrors both the imperfections of the stone wall and the casual conversation the two neighbors have as they walk along their property line. The mid-line sentence breaks come in lines 9, 22, 31, and 36. The poem can be broken into five thematic or focal sections in this manner: lines 1-4, lines 5-11, lines 12-24, lines 25-38, and lines 38-45. Therefore, the sentence breaks are not used as section breaks—again, perhaps as indications of the conversational style used to tell the story. With a little imagination, one could also make the case that the mid-line breaks feel like stones falling off the wall itself.