Poem: "Mending Wall" by Robert Frost

A modern demonstration of dry stone walling (Wikimedia)

The great 20th-century American poet Robert Frost spent nine years working a New Hampshire farm left to him (and his wife) by his grandfather. Early in the mornings during that period, he wrote many of his most famous poems. As Wikipedia gently puts it, "Ultimately his farming proved unsuccessful," and he returned to teaching. He owned other farms most of his life, but there's no indication that he "worked" them; they were homes and places to write.

By all accounts he wasn't much of a farmer. Nevertheless, his best poems are filled with images of country life, and especially of farming. Like Robert Burns in "To a Mouse," he takes humble events and activities and reflects on their deeper meaning in satisfying ways.

Here, he and a neighbor maintain a dry stone wall, and Frost (as narrator) takes the occasion as an opportunity to assert that nature opposes walls (and therefore separation), just as the neighbor insists, like his father before him, that "Good fences make good neighbors."

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MENDING WALL

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."

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SOME WORDS TO TALK ABOUT:

• abreast: side by side
• boulders: very large stones (he's exaggerating)
• cones: that is, pine cones
• frozen-ground-swell: Water expands when frozen; if wet ground under the wall freezes, it can "swell," causing it to push upward and damage the wall.
• grasped: held
• loaves: shaped like loaves of bread
• old-stone savage: a "caveman" of the Stone Age
• yelping: making excited noises (because a rabbit is trapped in the wall)

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QUESTIONS TO ANSWER:

Answer the following questions in your own words. Suggested answers are in the first comment below.

1. Name two ways that dry stone walls can be ruined.
2. How do the narrator and his neighbor divide the work?
3. Why does the narrator joke that the men need to "use a spell"?
4. Why does the narrator say that "we do not need the wall"?

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT:

These questions do not have "right" or "wrong" answers. They only ask your opinion.

1. What does the narrator mean when he says, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall"?
2. What are some larger meanings of the expression, "Good fences make good neighbors"?
3. Why does the narrator think that his neighbor is "like an old-stone savage"?