Mending Wall by Robert Frost

Robert Frost wrote a poem “Mending Wall” in 1914 as part of an anthology of poems, North of Boston. I recently wrote about a public art organization in Richmond called Mending Walls RVA. Mending Walls' mission is to bring together artists from different cultures and backgrounds to create murals to inspire healing and connection within communities. I discovered them through their collaboration with the Poe Museum. Their name was inspired by the Frost poem about two neighbors who meet every year in a pastoral setting to repair the wall between their properties. Mending Walls RVA takes inspiration in the narrator of the poem posing the question of what life could be like if we did tear down walls between us. This is a simplified statement of what these words mean to them, and I would encourage you to visit their site to learn more about how they interpret the words behind the poem.

Mending Wall
Robert Frost – 1874-1963

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.'

“Mending Wall” has been well analyzed over the past century and I don't seek to add any interpretations here of my own, however I've listed 2 resources if you'd like to read further about them. Enjoy the words and see what you think.

Analysis

LitCharts

Poets.org