The Closet Professor

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 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.’

About this Poem

We might interpret this piece of family wisdom as meaning: having clear boundaries between ourselves and others leads to healthy relationships between neighbors because they won’t fall out over petty territorial disputes or ‘invading each other’s space’. For instance, we may like our neighbors, but we don’t want to wake up and draw the curtains to find them dancing naked on our front lawn. (Although, that’s according to who your neighbor is. I’ve had a few that I wouldn’t mind dancing naked in my yard.) There are limits. Respecting each other’s boundaries helps to keep things civil and amicable. However, does this mean that Frost himself approves of such a notion?

“Mending Wall” is frequently misinterpreted, as Frost himself observed in 1962, shortly before his death. “People are frequently misunderstanding it or misinterpreting it.” But he went on to remark, “The secret of what it means I keep,” which doesn’t really clear up the matter. However, we can analyze “Mending Wall” as a poem contrasting two approaches to life and human relationships: the approach embodied by he speaker of his poem and the approach represented by his neighbor. It is the neighbor, rather than the poem’s speaker, who insists: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The phrase has become like another of Frost’s sentiments: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, / I took the one less travelled by.” This statement, from “The Road Not Taken,” is often misinterpreted because readers assume Frost is proudly asserting his individualism, whereas in fact, the lines are filled with regret over “what might have been.”

“Good fences make good neighbors” is actually more straightforward: people misinterpret the meaning of this line because they misattribute the statement to Frost himself, rather than to the neighbor with whom the speaker disagrees. As the first line of the poem has it, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”: this, spoken by the poem’s speaker, clearly indicates that Frost does not agree with the view that “good fences make [for] good neighbors.”

It is also worth noting that this line, “Good fences make good neighbors” did not originate with Frost: it is first found in the Western Christian Advocate (13 June 1834), as noted in The Yale Book of Quotations.