Poem Mending Wall By Robert Frost

"Mending Wall" is a poem by Robert Frost. It opens Frost's second collection of poetry, North of Boston,published in 1914. it has become one of the most analyzed poems in modern literature.

"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. As the men work, the narrator questions the purpose of a wall and his neighbor replies twice with the proverb, "Good fences make good neighbors".
"Mending Wall" deals with the distances and tensions between men.The poem also explores the role of boundaries in human society as mending the wall serves both to separate and to join the two neighbors. Frost also explores the theme of mischief and humor in "Mending Wall" but the neighbor seems quite serious about the work.

Text of the Poem

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 outdoor 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.” 

Summary

A stone wall separates the speaker’s property from his neighbor’s. In spring, the two meet and jointly make repairs of the wall. The speaker sees no reason for the wall for there are no cows to be contained, just apple and pine trees. He does not believe in walls for the sake of walls. The neighbor says an old adage: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The speaker remains unconvinced and harmfully presses the neighbor to look beyond the old-fashioned folly of such reasoning. His neighbor will not be moved. The speaker sees his neighbor as a person from an old era, a living example of a dark-age mentality. But the neighbor simply repeats the proverb again.