The narrator thinks it is a completely unnecessary tradition to get together with his neighbor every spring and mend the stone wall that divides their two properties. As the narrator notes, neither of them has livestock that can wander over to the other person's property and do damage. The narrator has apple orchards, and the neighbor grows pine trees:
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.
The narrator asks why the neighbor states that "good fences make good neighbors." The narrator also implies he would be just as happy without a wall, saying "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."
In contrast to the narrator, the neighbor believes doggedly in repairing the wall. He learned from his father that "good fences make good neighbors," and he has no interest in questioning why this is so. He clings stubbornly to the tradition simply because it is a tradition that has been passed down to him from his forebears.
“Mending Wall” by Robert Frost describes the annual spring ritual in which the speaker and his neighbor work together to rebuild any portions of the fence separating their properties that were damaged during the winter months.
When the speaker mentions to his neighbor that they don’t need the wall at a certain point, the neighbor replied, “Good fences make good neighbors.” This shows that the neighbor believes it’s important to have a physical boundary that separates him from the outside world.
The speaker, on the other hand, remarks that he thinks it’s important to consider what one is “walling in or walling out.” This shows that the speaker perhaps thinks the wall is unnecessary since neither man owns livestock that could graze across the property line. He thinks the neighbor’s attachment to the wall represents a psychological barrier rather than the actual need for physical separation.
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