The speaker in Frost's "Mending Wall" is a provocateur, questioning the wall's purpose, chiding his neighbor about it, yet he is the one more concerned about its repair.
“Something there is that doesn't love a wall”
The speaker of Robert Frost's “Mending Wall” begins by claiming that there is something out there in nature that doesn’t seem to agree that a wall should remain in tact. It might be the earth itself: that “something” “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 frozen earth bolts upward and then shrinks in the warmth of the sun and the rocks that form the wall go toppling down, leaving big “gaps” in the wall.
“Hunters” are another problem; they go about knocking down every rock in some places as they follow their dogs trying to sniff out rabbits. The speaker is so concerned with mending of his wall that he has followed after those hunters repairing it as they destroy it.
But the opening line does not refer to the natural ground-swell or the hunters; it refers to other causes that the speaker cannot name, but about which he is curious. They are always there, these places where the rocks have fallen off for no apparent reason, and they must be mended.
“And on a day we meet to walk the line”
So the speaker calls his neighbor, and they arrange to meet and mend the wall. As they go about their mending, his neighbor stays on his side and the speaker stays on his own, and they exchange rocks across the wall that belong to each other.
Then the speaker describes the ritual, what he rocks look like, “some are loaves and some so nearly balls.” And they are sometimes difficult to get back into place. The speaker has a little fun by saying, “We have to use a spell to make them balance: / ‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’’ He mentions that their fingers get “rough with handling them.”
“Oh, just another kind of outdoor game”
The speaker at his point, possibly out of boredom, remarks that this process is little more than an “outdoor game” like tennis or badminton: “One on a side.” It’s not more important than an outdoor game, because his neighbor’s property has only pine trees and his own property has only apples trees.
And so the speaker chides his neighbor by saying, “My apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines.” To this his neighbor says, "Good fences make good neighbors." The speaker admits that he is being playful, “Spring is the mischief in me,” but then he seems to turn more serious, when he muses on putting a certain idea into the neighbor’s head: the speaker would like to know “"Why do they make good neighbors?”
“But here there are no cows”
He could understand the need for fences if they had cows that might wander onto the other’s property and do damage, but since neither has any livestock, it seems questionable to keep a wall between them. If building walls were up to the speaker, he would want to be sure it was worth walling something in or out, plus he would want to ask his neighbor about it to make sure he wouldn’t be offending him. Because these walls don’t seem to want to stay repaired, the speaker repeats his opening line, “Something there is that doesn't love a wall," to which he now adds, “That wants it down!"
"Good fences make good neighbors"
The speaker, again mischievously, wants to say to the neighbor, maybe it’s elves that keep bringing down this wall. But he leaves off the “elves” part, wishing hat the neighbor would respond with such a colorful notion. But the neighbor repeats, "Good fences make good neighbors." The speaker thinks his neighbor lacks a sense of humor and is so set in his ways that he can’t “go behind his father's saying.”
The speaker would like to make this mundane spring ritual more fun by having a lively chat with this neighbor, but he cannot get the neighbor to cooperate, so he has do all the musing himself.
