- 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 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
neighbours.”
