This well-known line comes from a poem by Robert Frost entitled "Mending Wall". Taken literally, it's about the mending of a stone wall that divides two farms in New England. These walls were built, back in the old days, by piling up some of the stones which the soil offered up in such abundance. In the winter, as the soil froze, it would heave upward unevenly, knocking the walls over at some points, leading to the springtime ritual of fixing what nature had broken. The stanza breaks in the poem are mine, not Frost's. The lack of them in the original was driving me slightly crazy.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come on them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them mae or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
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."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I'd build a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
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. 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 it again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
According to Louis Untermeyer in his commentary in "Robert Frost's Poems", Frost himself rejected all symbolic interpretations of this piece, but his readers, Untermeyer included, have often seen in it the conflict between man's need for "walls, boundaries, limits and in particular self-limitations" and his natural urge to rebel against such limitations. Untermeyer sees a contradiction in this, but seeing sanity and moderation that can only be achieved through the struggle between conflicting goods as we do, we see such contradictions as a thing to embrace, not as a cause for regret.
Some, however, demand easy answers, and confuse their own lack of motivation with nobility of spirit. Knowing that you are doomed to encounter those such as these, resign yourself to your fate, and continue. Pardon my amnesia, but where DID you come from?