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.
I've included line 26
because it finishes the thought. I have always seen these lines as containing the best
argument for the speaker's side. There is a genuine and sweetly humorous interaction
between the two men. Here they are, doing what they do every year, and they are, rough
as the work is, having a little bit of boyish fun together. It's this feeling of brief
camaraderie that prompts the speaker to suggest this about walls,
mischievously:
'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.'
Unfortunately, the
neighbor is not convinced by the arument nor the little fun they've shared and would
prefer to keep things just as they've always been.
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