Contrasting the Mending Wall with Other Poems in North Boston by Frost"Mending Wall"' is the opening poem of Frost's North of Boston. One of the dominant moods of this volume, established forcefully in such important poems as "The Mercenary's Death," "Domestic Burial," "The Black Cottage," and "A Servant to Servants," and carried forward through some of the pieces minor, arise from the tension of having to maintain balance on the precipitous edge of hysteria. With "La Montagna" and with "Cento Collari", "Mending Wall" opposes such visions of human existence; to put it more precisely, to existences shaped by the neurotic visions of central characters such as the wife in "Home Burial", the servant in "A Servant to Servants". “Mending Wall” dramatizes the redemptive imagination in its playful phase, guided with confidence and assurance by a man who has his world under full control, who in his serenity rides his realities, without being shocked by them into a traumatic response. The place of "Mending Wall" in the structure of North of Boston suggests, in its stark contrasts with the dark tones of some of the volume's major poems, the psychological necessities of sustaining supreme fictions. The opening lines evoke the shy posture of the shrewd, imaginative man who understands the farmer's words in "The Mountain": "All the fun is in how you say a thing, "There's something that doesn't like a wall, That sends a wave of frozen ground underneath And overturns the upper boulders into the sun, and creates gaps that even two can pass abreast. It doesn't take more than one reading of the poem to understand that the speaker is not a country primitive who is easily frightened by the normal processes of nature, he knows very well what it is "that doesn't like a wall" (frost, of course). His fun is in not naming it, and in not naming scientific truth he manages to manipulate the uncompromising facts in the world of the mind where all things are flexible. The artful vagueness of the phrase “Something there is” is enchanting and magical, also suggesting the muted tones of reverence before the mystery of nature. And the speaker (who is not at all reverent towards nature) consciously works to deepen that sense of mystery:The work of the hunters is something else:I came after them and repaired