Mending Wall (Part 1)

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 pleasure 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 thee

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set 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 fine 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.

Robert Frost(1874 - 1963)