Summary of mending wall
Answers
Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” is a meditation told from the perspective of a landowner who joins his neighbor in repairing the stone wall that divides their properties. As the speaker notes in the opening line, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” He notes the different forces at work against the wall, including the “frozen-ground-swell” that surges upward, scattering the stones from below, as well as hunters who strip away the stones to draw rabbits out of hiding.
As a result, every spring brings “mending-time,” and so the speaker calls on his neighbor and they meet to mend the wall. They walk along the wall, each man on his own side, fixing the broken spots as they go. They raise the fallen stones, some like bread loves and others like spheres that wobble and threaten to fall.
The speaker then makes an observation: his neighbor’s lot contains only pine trees; his own, only apple orchards. The wall is thus unnecessary, for there are no animals to contain or keep out. When the speaker mentions this fact, his neighbor simply replies, “‘Good fences make good neighbors.’”
Filled with the mischief of springtime, the speaker persists. Noting again the wall’s uselessness, the speaker says, “‘Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out.’” When the speaker repeats the dictum of the opening line, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” it seems that the speaker himself is an agent of that “something.”
The neighbor raises a stone in both hands, “like an old stone-savage armed”; to the speaker’s eye, “he moves in darkness.” Finally, the neighbor responds to the speaker’s objections, deferring again to his beloved saying, passed down from his father: “‘Good fences make good neighbors.’”