Mending Wall / Robert Frost

Dry stone wall at Frost's farm in Derry, New Hampshire, 2009. Photo by Craig Michaud. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

"Mending Wall" is a poem by Robert Frost, published in 1914 as the opening selection in Frost's 2nd poetry collection, North of Boston.

"Mending Wall" has become "one of the most anthologized and analyzed poems in modern literature".

Mending Wall

Dry stone wall, Maltham, North Yorkshire, England, 2006. Photo by Immanuel Giel. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

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."

Form

The poem is a narrative written in blank verse.

Synopsis

Like many of the poems in North of Boston, "Mending Wall" narrates a story drawn from rural New England. The narrator, a New England farmer, contacts his neighbor in the Spring to rebuild the stone wall between their two farms.

The neighbor rebuilds the wall without question, quoting "Good fences make good neighbors," (a line listed by the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as a mid-17th-century proverb). But Frost's narrator questions the proverb, noting that neither his apple trees nor his neighbor's pine trees are likely to encroach on the other's property. He says, "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." He also observes, both at the poem's opening and again midway through the poem, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," referring to the forces of nature that bring a wall to decay and require it to be repaired and rebuilt. But the neighbor is not receptive to the narrator's doubts, repeating at the poem's close that "Good fences make good neighbors."

See also

• Other poems by Frost

External links

Text

• Mending Wall at the Academy of American Poets
• Mending Wall at the Poetry Foundation

About

• Frost's Early Poems: "Mending Wall" at SparkNotes
• On "Mending Wall" at Modern American Poetry