Mending Wall
Robert Frost
1874 to 1963
Track 1
Reconstruct the poem by dragging each line into its correct position. Your goal is to reassemble the original poem as accurately as possible. As you move the lines, you'll see whether your arrangement is correct, helping you explore the poem's flow and meaning. You can also print out the jumbled poem to cut up and reassemble in the classroom. Either way, take your time, enjoy the process, and discover how the poet's words come together to create something truly beautiful.
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"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
What I was walling in or walling out,
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
And to whom I was like to give offence.
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
And he likes having thought of it so well
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
My apple trees will never get across
He said it for himself. I see him there
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
I have come after them and made repair
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
If I could put a notion in his head:
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
We keep the wall between us as we go.
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."
The work of hunters is another thing:
And on a day we meet to walk the line
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
And set the wall between us once again.
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.