By Robert Frost (1914)
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 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.”
Analysis
“Mending Wall” turns a yearly ritual of boundary repair into a conversation about order, tradition, and the unseen forces that undo them. Each spring, the speaker and his neighbor walk the property line, replacing fallen stones while debating why a wall is needed at all. The poem’s blank verse mimics their slow, deliberate labor, the rhythm of thought shaped by physical movement. Frost transforms rural realism into philosophical dialogue: habit becomes metaphor for the human need to define and defend space.
The neighbor repeats the inherited maxim, “Good fences make good neighbors,” while the speaker questions its wisdom. Yet both participate in the act of mending. Frost’s irony is gentle but exact—the very skeptic who mocks the wall also relies on it, for without the ritual there would be no meeting at all. The poem’s enduring fascination lies in this tension between separation and connection, rebellion and respect.
“Mending Wall” ultimately suggests that boundaries, whether social or emotional, are not merely divisions but structures that give shape to relationship. The gaps that “no one has seen made” hint at the natural pull toward change and openness, yet the wall’s reconstruction affirms continuity. Frost leaves the reader inside this paradox: what divides us may also hold us together.