In "Mending Wall" by Robert Frost, we hear two different voices, that of the speaker and that of his neighbor, and they have very different ideas about the wall between them.

The speaker is a fanciful fellow, and he says that "something there is that doesn't love a wall." He and his neighbor are always fixing the wall that stands between their properties. The speaker can understand the damage that hunters make to it, but there are gaps each spring that seem to have no explanation. He would like to say "elves," but he doesn't think that his neighbor would buy that.

The speaker, in fact, cannot understand why they have to keep a wall between their properties in the first place. The neighbor has only pine and the speaker apple trees, and neither of them are crossing the boundary line. There are no cows involved. So why do they need the wall? The speaker cannot grasp what he is walling in or walling out.

Yet the neighbor, the poem's second voice, insists that "good fences made good neighbors." This is a saying he has heard from his father, and he maintains it steadily in a show of good sense even though there is no practical reason for the wall. The neighbor has always had a wall, and that is good enough for him. He does not need any other explanation, and he has no time for the speaker's fancies.