Opposing Reckless Defense of Walls in Mending WallThe speaker in "Mending Wall" questions his neighbor's sound assumption that "good Fences make good neighbors. Perhaps what he opposes is not so much the feeling itself as the refusal or inability of the other to think for himself, to "go beyond the words of his father ". Just so; we must try to move beyond the apophthegm-like opening line of “Mending Wall,” carefully testing the gradations of tone as we go. Is it the proverbial authority of “something that exists…” that makes the assimilation of “something” to the speaker so natural? Once this equation is established, the reader joins the speaker in sympathizing with this mysterious “something” and therefore in opposing the neighbor's thoughtless defense of the walls. Frost causes subtle and drastic changes to the sound of a phrase like “good fences make good neighbors.” " By the end of the poem, this line has acquired a certain stupidity of a slogan. Similar turns of the screw affect the opening line, when we add the darker phrase "who wants him to come down" and again when the speaker refuses to name the antiwall "something". "Elves" is the closest thing to it, but "They're not exactly elves, and I prefer/He said it for himself- "Elves may not mean Tolkien's slender things but darker forces of the wood, for the next image is of darkness. The neighbor is seen as subtly threatening, "an armed savage of old stone" . Yet it was this man who defended the boundaries The seemingly relaxed and leisurely pace of the poem made us lower our own boundaries and forget who is on which side No matter how evasive the irony. of the speaker undermines any confident interpretation, Poirier is surely right when he makes the following point: . . . a man who can only sadly repeat “good fences make good neighbors” - . . .it is not he who initiates the construction of the fence. Rather, it is the much more fiery, lively, and “mischievous” speaker of the poem. While admitting that they don't need the wall, he is the one who every year "lets my neighbor over the hill know" that it's time to do the work anyway, and who will come out alone to fill the gaps made in the wall by hunters.