When they returned to the United States in 1915 they settled in Franconia, in the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire, and later in South Shaftsbury, in southwestern Vermont. The Derry farm fell into disrepair in the years following the Frost family’s move to England. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. “Good fences make good neighbors.” The poet questions this. What has long served a purpose must be put in order and maintained tradition over change even if no practical purpose is served. The wall has been there longer than either of them. The neighbor, on the other hand, does not share the poet’s whimsical response to the task the lies before them. Whether you want ‘em or not you’ll always have ‘em.” While some are being torn down, others are being built up. Frost would later confess that “we always have walls - have always had them. That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,Īnd spills the upper boulders in the sun Īnd makes gaps even two can pass abreast.Īnd then there is the human element. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, It may only be nature attempting to restore its own sense of order. To each the boulders that have fallen to each.įor others, however, the wall has become an unnecessary obstacle interrupting free movement through the woods, one to be demolished, or at the very least, breached without consideration for its original purpose.Įven from the outset, the poet questions the necessity of a wall - “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Or, perhaps, he is not questioning the wall’s existence, but rather the forces, either natural or human, intent on its destruction. The wall itself also represents an allegorical mending, a bringing together of two individuals, as in “A Time to Talk,” to work together toward a common goal. Frost and Guay would meet in the spring to repair (mend) their shared wall, to reset in place the stones displaced by the frost heaves of winter or by hunters and others who sought passage through these woods. The “mending” of the wall served two clear and separate purposes. Neither owner constructed the original wall, yet both were responsible for maintaining it. It was (and still is) a physical expression of an arbitrarily drawn property line.

The wall separating the Derry farm from Guay’s property - “He is all pine and I am apple orchard - did not belong exclusively to either, and its existence was never meant to draw a distinct and sacrosanct physical boundary between the two properties.

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