Mending Wall
BY ROBERT FROST

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 offense.
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 is one of those poets who is loved even by people who don’t consider themselves “poetry people.” His language is simple, using the natural rhythms of speech; and his imagery is vivid, memorable, and direct. Amy Lowell (reviewing North of Boston, the 1914 collection in which “Mending Wall” appeared), observed that Frost was a poetic outsider. He “writes in classic meters, and uses inversions and cliches whenever he pleases, those devices so abhorred by the newest generation.” At the same time, she noted that the way he used classic meters would “set the teeth of all the poets of the older schools on edge…. [he] goes his own way, regardless of anyone else’s rules.”
 
“Mending Wall” is a wonderful example of Frost’s work and craft. It’s a blank verse monologue set in the New England countryside Frost loved. It’s springtime, and the speaker and his neighbor meet to mend the stone wall that divides their properties. They walk along the wall, putting back the stones that have fallen during the winter months. And the speaker wonders what it is that “doesn’t love a wall,” that uses the winter’s “frozen ground-swell” to topple the stones. The stones themselves don’t seem to love a wall: “We have to use a spell to make them balance.”
 
The speaker’s wondering soon goes deeper. What is this wall for? They don’t keep cows, just apple and pine trees. But the neighbor repeats what his father before him said: “good fences make good neighbors.” The speaker keeps pushing the question. Is that really true? Do fences make good neighbors? Who is being walled in? Who is being walled out? And who exactly is it who “doesn’t love a wall”—and will that one “take offense” at this insistence on rebuilding the wall?
 
For the speaker, the wall is more than a wall. It’s a metaphor - it means something, something big. But the neighbor won’t come along on this flight of fancy. He refuses to see the wall as anything but a wall; he rejects the metaphor. And briefly we see him not as a curmudgeonly New Hampshire farmer, but as “an old-stone savage armed,” moving “in darkness.” We glimpse something ancient, primitive, and dangerous. The poem ends with the task of mending wall still ongoing, and the neighbor proudly repeating his words: “Good fences make good neighbors.”
 
As Frost understood it, metaphor was not simply a poetic device. We all live by metaphors whether we are aware of them or not. Poetry is critical because it can teach us to recognize and question those images which shape how we understand the world. “Unless you are at home in the metaphor,” he wrote, “unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.”
 
Frost’s poem was published in 1914, on the eve of World War I. More than a hundred years later, it feels fresh, contemporary—even controversial. And it always has. Poet and scholar Austin Allen has written that Frost “does not denounce walls; he doubts them. Doubt is what makes ‘Mending Wall’ a poem and not an editorial… it’s also what makes ‘Mending Wall’ a subversive classic rather than a scrap of yesterday’s news.” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/150774/robert-frost-mending-wall)