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.”

In lines 23–27, the speaker makes explicit the reason for his skepticism about the wall that divides his property from his neighbor’s property. The speaker has already indicated his general suspicion about the usefulness of walls. Indeed, the poem famously opens with the somewhat ambiguous statement, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Though it’s clear enough that the speaker sees walls as inherently problematic, it isn’t clear what the “something” that doesn’t love a wall might be. With these lines, however, the speaker explains that the particular wall dividing his and his neighbor’s properties is unnecessary because it has no functional purpose. Essentially, it’s just a symbolic marker of a legal boundary that separates the speaker’s apple trees from the neighbor’s pines. Struck by the absurdity of this situation, the speaker mentions his reservation to his neighbor. For his part, the neighbor responds with clichéd, proverbial wisdom: “Good fences make good neighbors.” Thus, the two men have different perspectives on the need for the wall. Note how Frost subtly emphasizes this difference in perspective through the strangely disjointed representation of the men’s dialogue. Whereas the speaker paraphrases his own words, he directly quotes the words of his neighbor.

“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 offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.”

These lines (30–36) contain a speech the speaker thinks about making, but which he ultimately keeps to himself. In this unspoken speech, the speaker works out some of the more philosophical reasons behind his skepticism about walls. What instigates his speech is his negative reaction to the neighbor’s seemingly uncritical reliance on proverbial wisdom. The speaker launches his response by revisiting the logic he shared earlier in the poem. Essentially, because neither he nor his neighbor keeps livestock, there’s no reason for a physical structure. Without such a practical function, the speaker indicates that walls become symbolic forces of inclusion and exclusion, always walling something in and something else out. To clinch his line of reasoning, he repeats the line that opened the poem, and which offers his own bit of quasi-proverbial wisdom: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Formally, what’s most notable about this passage is the simple fact that the speaker’s words appear in quotation marks. Elsewhere in the poem, the speaker paraphrases the words he spoke to his neighbor. Here, however, he offers a direct quotation of words that remained unspoken. This disjunction underscores the gaps in communication that persist between the speaker and his neighbor.

                   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.”

The poem closes with lines 38–45, where the speaker reveals a judgmental attitude toward his neighbor. In a way, these lines may be read as a rationalization for the speaker’s decision not to make a public case against the wall and instead keep his thoughts to himself. The reason seems to be that the speaker feels his neighbor is too close-minded to engage meaningfully. The primary evidence for this feeling is that the neighbor relies on proverbial wisdom rather than his own critical faculties. To the speaker, such reliance on cookie-cutter thinking is a sign of intellectual backwardness—one that he then projects onto his neighbor, who he likens here to “an old-stone savage armed” who “moves in darkness.” As if to confirm the speaker’s unflattering depiction, the neighbor repeats his earlier words about good fences making good neighbors. Yet an important irony resonates here in the poem’s final lines. The speaker’s judgment of his neighbor implicitly serves to bolster his own sense of superiority. If his neighbor is close-minded and backward, the speaker is open-minded and forward-thinking. But for all his self-righteousness, the speaker has still shown up to mend the very wall he questions, leaving the status quo intact.

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