ness as well. Instead of helping each other on one side at a time, they stay within the confines of the wall. Yet, there seems to be a desire to visit the very person the wall holds back, at least on the sideof the narrator, who initiates the mending of this wall in the first place. There is a fear ofsolititude which decrees that they will work together, and a selfish desire not to inovlvethemselves too directly in the affairs of the other, which keeps them on their respective sides ofthe wall. In further describing the labor of mending the wall, the speaker describes the stones thatseperate narrator from neighbor, "And some are loaves and some so nearly balls/We have touse a spell to make them balance/'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'/We wear ourfingers rough with handling them/Oh, just another kind of out-door game,/One on a side. Itcomes to little more". Notice what the speaker says in the "spell" - "stay where you are untilour backs are turned." There is an implication here, at least on the part of the narrator, that shecares little for the actual mending of the wall. An indifference to the effectiveness of theserepairs suggests that this entire undertaking is no more than an exhibition. It is not the wall thatneeds mending, it is the relationship of the speaker and her companion in labor. This activity isviewed by the narrator as little more than an outdoor game - "one on a side". Yet, despite thespeakers seemingly playful attitiude to this two-fold activity, further along in the poem, weglimpse for the first time, the neighbors attitiude, which is markedly different - "My apple treeswill never get across/And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him./He only says, 'Good fencesmake good neighbors'. The neighbor is a man of cliches, acting on the instinct of tradition,unlike the narrator who is doing little more than playing an "outdoor game". It is in these linesthat Frost best represents not only a human ...
