Reading Mending Wall

Robert Frost's 'Mending Wall' contains one of the most quoted lines in American poetry: 'Good fences make good neighbors.' Coffee mugs, real-estate advertisements, and inspirational posters have taken up the line, usually as praise for privacy. The poem itself does something considerably stranger: it puts the line in the mouth of a character the speaker mistrusts, and it repeats a competing line twice: 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall.'

The speaker and his neighbor meet each spring to walk the stone wall between their farms, replacing rocks that winter frost has heaved out of place. The speaker cannot see the point. His neighbor's response is not an argument but a recitation — an inherited saying, repeated as if repeating it proved it. The speaker imagines the neighbor as 'an old-stone savage armed,' moving in 'darkness not of woods only.' The image is not affectionate.

The irony is that the poem gives the speaker the last observation but the neighbor the last word. 'Good fences make good neighbors,' the neighbor repeats, and Frost lets the sentence close the poem. Generations of readers have taken this ending as endorsement. A closer reading finds Frost enacting the very problem he is describing: how a comfortable saying, repeated without examination, outlives the questions raised against it. The poem is not praising fences. It is watching them win.