When hunters come through and take the stones down to find a hiding rabbit for their excited ("yelping") dogs, the narrator will come out by himself and fix the wall.
Otherwise, he waits for the annual springtime wall mending ritual with his neighbor. Because the wall divides their property, it seems only fair that they mend it together. However, the narrator is protesting against mending the wall at all. He questions whether they need the wall—a wall is helpful to keep in cattle, but neither of them have cattle. One grows pine, and the other grows apple trees. Because it is unnecessary, the narrator calls the wall-mending ritual a "game."
The neighbor will not hear him, however, simply doggedly repeating a saying he heard from his father: "Good fences make good neighbors."
The narrator wishes he could get his neighbor to think and ask questions:
I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours?..."
Repairs to the wall are normally made each spring by both the narrator and his neighbor. But the narrator also finds himself repairing sections of the wall by himself when they've been toppled over. This happens after inconsiderate hunters have passed through the narrator's land, chasing quarry with their yelping dogs. They remove stones from the wall in order to get a rabbit to emerge from its hiding place so the dogs can get at it.
The gaps in the wall, however, are a different matter. The narrator hasn't the faintest idea how they get there. But every spring he and his neighbor set out to mend them. The narrator is responsible for those boulders that have fallen on his side; and his neighbor's responsible for those that fall on his. It's all rather tedious and laborious and more than a little pointless, or so the narrator thinks. But his neighbor is much too set in his ways to agree, believing firmly that "Good fences make good neighbors." And so the annual ritual goes on, spring after spring.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall
No comments:
Post a Comment