Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.
Lines 23-26
There where it is we do not need the wall:
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.
- Newsflash! Our speaker slips in a little commentary here in Line 22. He indicates that the precious wall, the one that he spends all of this time talking about, is actually unnecessary.
- Wait a minute. We think we’re here to uncover the mystery of the wall-destroyer. Now, we find out that our speaker isn’t really that into the wall itself.
- Hmm. If we are Sherlockian about this, we just might suspect our speaker as the unknown wall-destroyer.
- Our speaker wants to convince his neighbor that the wall is plain unnecessary. He uses the old apples-aren’t-carnivorous argument, and tells his neighbor that the apples that he grows will never eat or disturb the pine trees which grow on his neighbor’s property.