Context

You know when you're hanging out in your front yard playing, uh, lawn darts or whatever, and you see some moving vans pull up next door, and then a fence gets out and starts hauling some boxes toward the front door?

No? Okay, maybe this is some kind of metaphor then. It is a poem, after all.

In Frost's "Mending Wall," two neighbors chat it up on opposite sides of a wall that's been erected between their two properties. Our speaker's neighbor says that "good fences make good neighbors." Translation? When there's some separation between two individuals or their properties, it allows for better relations between them. If there were no fence, and the guy came traipsing into his neighbor's lawn each morning, peering into his bedroom window and asking if he had any extra sugar…it might get a wee bit annoying.

But in Frost's poem, the necessity of such boundaries is called into question. While we might have more privacy, what are we giving up? Are we cutting ourselves off from people and experiences that might otherwise add to the quality of our lives? It's something to chew on, anyway. Dig deeper into the poem here.

For what it's worth, we think that fences quite literally make good neighbors. They're quiet, they keep to themselves, and there's something about their symmetry that's pleasing to the eye. They're just not real great at paying their rent on time.

Where you've heard it

If you keep up on the continuing antics of one Sarah Palin, you might have heard about this little doozy.

You might also run into it in a psychology article or in a book that expands the breadth of the comparison to international borders.

Or you may have heard your neighbor say it. In that case, he's probably a Robert Frost fan. Or he's never heard of Robert Frost, and this is his way of telling you to keep your butt off his lawn.

Pretentious Factor

If you were to drop this quote at a dinner party, would you get an in-unison "awww" or would everyone roll their eyes and never invite you back? Here it is, on a scale of 1-10.

This quote gets a few points for showing up in a poem that isn't entirely straightforward (but then, what poem is?), but other than that, there's not a lot of pretension going on here. It's written in simple language and seems conversational enough that we can imagine our neighbor actually saying it. That is, if we could hear them at all through that gigantic wall they've been building.