MENDING WALL

               MENDING WALL

            

Written in 1914, Mending Wall is a poem in blank verse that remains relevant for these uncertain times. It involves two rural neighbors who one spring day meet to walk along the wall that separates their properties and repair it where needed.

The speaker in the poem is a progressive individual who starts to question the need for such a wall in the first place. The neighbor beyond the hill is a traditionalist and has, it seems, little time for such nonsense.

'Good fences make good neighbors,' is all he will say.

We all have neighbors, we all know that walls eventually need repairing. Walls separate and keep people apart, walls deny right of passage and yet provide security. Despite the need for such a barrier, the opening line - Something there is that doesn't love a wall, - implies that the idea of a wall isn't that straightforward.

Robert Frost, in his own inimitable way, invites the reader into controversy by introducing mischief into the poem. The speaker wants to put a notion into the head of his neighbor, to ask him to explain why is it good walls make good neighbors, but in the end says nothing.

A wall may seem useful in the countryside as it could help keep livestock safe and secure and mark a definite boundary. But a wall that separates village from village, city from city, country from country, people from people, family from family - that's a completely different scenario.

Robert Frost's poem can help pinpoint such issues and bring them out into the open.

The title of the poem Mending Wall is ambiguous as the word ‘mending’ can be used as a verb and an adjective. When used as a verb, it signifies an act involving the speaker and the neighbour where they mend the wall. But when used as an adjective, “mending” implies a distinguished relationship that the speaker and his neighbour share which they are trying to mend.

Mending Wall

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 neighbour 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 neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? 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 neighbours."