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What does the speaker think destroys the wall?

In the poem "Mending Wall," the speaker thinks that the long stone wall between his property and that of his neighbor's gets destroyed regularly by two things:


1. When it's springtime and the ground thaws out from being frozen, it swells upward. This swelling of the ground ruptures the wall and leaves very large gaps in it. (Refer to lines 1-4 in the poem.)


2. When hunterscome by and have a reckless disregard...

In the poem "Mending Wall," the speaker thinks that the long stone wall between his property and that of his neighbor's gets destroyed regularly by two things:


1. When it's springtime and the ground thaws out from being frozen, it swells upward. This swelling of the ground ruptures the wall and leaves very large gaps in it. (Refer to lines 1-4 in the poem.)


2. When hunters come by and have a reckless disregard for other people's property, they end up smashing bits of the wall as they're trying to drive out animals from their hiding places. (Refer to lines 5-9 in the poem.)


However, the narrator admits that he's just guessing about how the wall does get damaged. He mentions that the gaps just show up every spring, and no one is actually there to witness the creation of those gaps.


This question of how the wall gets damaged on a regular yearly basis is important to our understanding of the poem. Knowing that this happens every spring, in a predictable way, we understand that the speaker and his neighbor are doing their mending together as a well-established habit. It makes sense, then, for the speaker of the poem to spend time thinking about why they keep mending this wall and why they even need the wall in the first place, when the boundary between the two men's properties is already so obvious.

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