Opposition to the reckless defense of walls in the Mending Wall The speaker in "Mending Wall" questions his neighbor's stolid assumption that "good fences make good neighbors" . Perhaps what he opposes is not so much the feeling itself, but the reluctance or inability of the other to think for himself, to "go beyond what his father says". That's right; we must try to move beyond the apophthegm-like opening line of “Mending Wall,” carefully testing gradations of tone as we go. Is it the proverbial authority of “something that is…” that makes it so natural to equate “something” with the speaker? Once this equation is made, the reader joins the speaker in sympathizing with this mysterious "something" and therefore in opposing the neighbor's reckless defense of the walls. Frost resonates subtly and drastic changes in the sound of a phrase like “good fences make good neighbors.” " By the time the poem ends, this line has acquired some of the silliness of a slogan. Similar turns of the screw affect the opening line, when the darker phrase "who wants it down" is added to it, and again when the speaker he refuses to name the counter-wall "something." darkness of the woods, as the next image is that of darkness. The neighbor is seen as subtly threatening, “an armed old savage.” Yet this man was the one who defended the boundaries poetry has made us lower our boundaries and forget who is on which side. In any case, although the speaker's ironic evasiveness undermines any confident interpretation, Poirier is certainly right when he emphasizes the following point: Neighbor . . . a man who can only dully repeat "good fences make good neighbors"--. . .he's not the one who starts building the fence. Rather he is the much livelier, livelier, and "mischievous" speaker in 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 that he will go alone to fill the gaps created in the wall by hunters.