MENDING FENCES

MENDING FENCES

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
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.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Robert Frost


The saying means that when neighbors get together to repair a wall, it creates a social situation where each works for the good of both. It also helps keep their livestock on their own property, which is a neighborly thing. But in the poem, there is no livestock, and there are areas with only trees where the speaker doesn't think a wall is needed. The neighbor, however, insists that there should be a wall nevertheless.

It seems that the speaker would like the wall to come down ("something there is that doesn't love a wall..."), but the neighbor sticks to his father's old proverb, appearing at one point dark and savage, somewhat threatening. Even as the speaker tries to make light of the wall and jokes about it keeping out elves, the neighbor repeats the phrase insistently.

Here you have two people with different opinions about the wall -- one who wonders and thinks about "why", and the other who is stuck in old tradition and doesn't question the necessity of the wall, probably not even understanding his own motives.