Elves are small, often mischievous supernatural creatures from folklore that are known to cause damage. They often become a scapegoat when things go wrong. In "Mending Wall," the elves are a figurative way of discussing the forces that work to undo the wall.
The speaker of poem has a series of questions about the practicality of repairing the stone wall he shares with a neighbor. He wonders why they should do it, even though his neighbors says they must, believing that "good fences make good neighbors":
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't itWhere 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." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself.
The speaker's refrain "Something there is that doesn't love a wall"
becomes the counterpart to his neighbor's dogged contention that "good fences
make good neighbors." The speaker imagines saying to his neighbor that
"something" doesn't like a wall. The neighbor would ask in a literal way, what
is that something, and the speaker pictures himself saying it is "elves," which
is a figurative way of describing the force that works against the wall. He
likes the idea of something as fanciful as elves working to roll the stones
away from the wall. He says, moreover, that spring "is the mischief" in him.
Yet then the speaker says that it is "not elves exactly" that don't love a
wall, thereby showing his own literalism. He says, too, that he would prefer
his neighbor to come up with the answer to the question of what doesn't love a
wall.
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