by Robert Frost Try it: Mending Wall Poems He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.” He will not go behind his father’s saying,Īnd he likes having thought of it so well Not of woods only and the shade of trees. In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,īut it’s not elves exactly, and I’d ratherīringing a stone grasped firmly by the top Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. “Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.” There where it is we do not need the wall:Īnd eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. We wear our fingers rough with handling them. “Stay where you are until our backs are turned!” We have to use a spell to make them balance: To each the boulders that have fallen to each.Īnd some are loaves and some so nearly balls No one has seen them made or heard them made,īut at spring mending-time we find them there. Where they have left not one stone on a stone,īut they would have the rabbit out of hiding, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,Īnd spills the upper boulders in the sun Īnd makes gaps even two can pass abreast. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, There have always been walls, such as: the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, and the Berlin Wall.įrost reminds us there are some that do not love walls, but there are also those that do. There seem to be contradictions as the narrator remarks that a wall would only be necessary if there were cattle to keep in place, except “here there are no cows.” He continues: He requires it to be done once a year as if civilization hinges on this shared act of making barriers. If hunters come along and undo the wall, the narrator fixes it. It is interesting to note that it’s the narrator and not the “old-stone savage” across the way who told his neighbor the wall needed mending. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”Īs the poem moves quickly into metaphor, this line is repeated and the mischievous narrator suggests that perhaps elves have been responsible for dismantling parts of the wall. In the first line, the poet-narrator communicates famously his hesitation of the job ahead: There is at once a contrast of two very different people on the same task to repair the stone barrier between their farms. “The secret of what it means,” he said, “I keep.” Of his poem “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost acknowledged, “People are frequently misunderstanding it or misinterpreting it.”
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