Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” describes a spring ritual in which two rural neighbours walk the boundary between their properties and rebuild the stone wall that winter has damaged. The speaker finds the work almost playful, calling it “just another kind of out-door game,” but he also questions its purpose: his apple trees and the other man’s pines cannot harm each other, and there are no cows to keep in or out. He wants to ask what he is walling in or walling out. The neighbour, however, only repeats his father’s saying, “Good fences make good neighbours.” The mood is wry and thoughtful, with something lonelier underneath. Frost sets the speaker’s doubt and humour against the neighbour’s comfortable, unexamined routine, and leaves the reader feeling that the real barrier between the two men may be larger than the wall they are repairing.
Mending Wall — Summary
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 neighbour 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 neighbours.’ Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: ‘Why do they make good neighbours? 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 neighbours.’