MENDING WALL
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 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.”

There’s the line you remember.

It’s a deep, deep poem, on so many levels — as is living life and doing almost any routine chore, especially ritually as in this case.

And then I twist it all up and try to apply it to the Berlin Wall?

Yeah, I’m guilty. Every time I read this poem, I think of the cowboys mending the fence (Remington?), the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, the walls the patriots used to shield and hide them as they peppered Gen. Gage’s troops on their retreat from Lexington and Concord, Humpty Dumpty, the Wailing Wall, and every fence I’ve ever labored to build or repair.

Damn that Robert Frost! He’s invented a brain worm!

– Frederic S. Remington (1861–1909), The Fall of the Cowboy, 1895; Oil on canvas, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas 1961.230

Other analyses:

Sparknotes analysis
Poetry @ Suite 101 analysis
An article in The Atlantic claiming Sarah Palin misunderstands the poem

The first time I heard that poem I was a young school kid in Idaho, on the great northern desert, the sagebrush plain, where potato and “dry farming” of wheat were big deals. Rocks? We got ours, smoothed over, from the Snake River. Oh, there were some stones out on the plains, but not many. One of my classmates asked from where had all the stones come to make the fences, and why were they such sharp, angular stones?

In New Hampshire and much of New England, before the land could be farmed it had to be cleared, first of trees, and then over and over, of the rocks the glaciers had left behind in their retreat, torn from the mountains and left to vex and break the plows of European-style farming. There is some great metaphor in the fence-building and maintaining for the conquest of the land, such as it was then.

Today, if you drive through New England you’ll see those fences stretching through forested areas. Since 1910 the land has grown back to forest as farming became less able to support local farmers, and as local people turned to other occupations. Now forests isolate old farmhouses from each other, and people retreat to them for solitude. Often the people don’t really know their neighbors at all.

Maybe Frost knew more than he said. Maybe he said a lot more than he knew. Maybe that’s the irony.