100 years ago Carl Sandburg wrote Mending Wall with the now
famous line Good Fences make good neighbors.
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: 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, But at
spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbor 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. 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. 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 And
eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, 'Good fences
make good neighbors'. Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could
put a notion in his head: 'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it 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, 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. 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 neighbors."
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