| 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: | 5 |
| 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, | 10 |
| 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. | 15 |
| 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. | 20 |
| 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 | 25 |
| 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 | 30 |
| 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, | 35 |
| 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. | 40 |
| 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.”
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