Mending Walls, Dissolving Borders

 by Jack Trotter  

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In one interview Robert Frost noted, "I am both a wall builder and a wall destroyer," and hinted intriguingly at the possibility that he was "both fellows" in his poem, "Mending Wall."

Pity poor Robert Frost. At least a baker's dozen of his poems have taken their rightful place among the finest of American literary utterances. Unlike those of Wallace Stevens, say, or the expatriate T.S. Eliot, Frost's poems eschew obscurity, employing instead a spare, limpid, and often colloquial vocabulary that belies the subtlety which emerges with repeated readings. But because they are so easily committed to memory, and because Frost was blessed with an unsurpassed gift for the aphoristic, his poems are routinely mutilated, quoted out of context, and put to uses that surely would have appalled the poet himself.

Such has been the case during the recent debate over Congressional proposals to erect hundreds of miles of new fencing along the U.S.-Mexican border. Senator Jeff Sessions, (R-AL), seems to have initiated the latest round of Frost misappropriations — so to speak — when he stated in the Senate on April 5 that the "open border days are over. 'Good fences make good neighbors.'" Now, of course, that aphorism, which is repeated twice in Frost's "Mending Wall," didn't originate with the poet himself. It was already proverbial when Frost first published his famous poem in North of Boston in 1914. So, it is just possible that Senator Sessions was merely repeating the proverb itself, innocent of any conscious attempt to purloin the cultural authority of the poem. Possible, but not likely. In fact, the proverb, "Good fences make good neighbors," has become so completely identified with the poem that it could hardly be said to survive outside that context. Sessions, like most Americans of his generation, probably read "Mending Wall" in high school — perhaps even memorized it — but, to be charitable, may have forgotten the context in which the proverb appears. Of course, to suggest that the good Senator should have taken the time to reread the poem before embezzling its best known line would be an exercise in futility. But if he had, he would have discovered that it neither affirms nor debunks the proverb in question.

"Mending Wall" depicts two New England farmers who meet each spring at "mending time" to repair the wall that separates their properties. The poem's speaker, who represents himself as the mischievous sort who enjoys teasing his somewhat plodding and less reflective neighbor, notes that there's really no need for a wall along this particular boundary. Neither of the farmers keeps cattle that might wander over the line. Facetiously, he intones, "He is all pine and I am apple orchard. / My apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines . . .." But his neighbor stubbornly insists upon the infallible wisdom of his father's old saying, "Good fences make good neighbors," and so the speaker further provokes him: "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offense, / Something there is that doesn't love a wall, / That wants it down." This elicits nothing more than a repetition of the proverb, like some ritual incantation against contagion. Hence the poet envisions his neighbor "an old-stone savage armed. / He moves in darkness as it seems to me, / Not of woods only and the shade of trees."

On a superficial reading, as this precis demonstrates, "Mending Wall" readily lends itself to the sort of misconstrual that condemns the neighbor farmer as the epitome of reactionary ignorance. He is an Archie Bunker in bib overalls, "who will not go behind his father's saying." The speaker, on the other hand, is all too easily cast in the mold of the free-thinking liberal, who invites the reader to applaud his vision of a world without walls, where boundaries and property lines no longer impede the full flowering of human intercourse. Such, in any case, is the complacent reading of the poem dished out for decades by fuzzy-minded high school English teachers, many of whom probably took their lead from well-thumbed volumes of Monarch Notes. Indeed, many of their credulous students, now all grown up to become Open Borders advocates and NPR media analysts — much to their former mentors' delight — appear to have taken those lessons to heart, so much so that they repeat them almost word for word (much like the "old-stone savage" in Frost's poem) whenever opportunity arises. 

Thus on May 20, not long after Senator Sessions unwittingly assumed the role of Frost's unenlightened neighbor, NPR's Weekend America aired a segment on illegal immigration that was clearly intended to ridicule the stone age assumptions of the Senator from Alabama and all his ilk. Inviting us to join him as he strolls along a stretch of the U.S.-Mexican border near San Diego, producer and narrator of the segment, Philip Babich, introduces Adolfo Simaha, a "Mexican-American" janitor who lives in Tijuana and crosses the border daily to work. Asked what he thinks of Congressional proposals to build more fences along the border, Simaha's response could have been composed by an NPR copywriter, so perfectly does it express the Weekend America editorial slant: "The barrier they propose to put up is something negative; the American who thinks this way is an egotist; he thinks of himself; he does not try to be a social person. I think it's not good for both countries. We must be good neighbors and behave ourselves." Simaha is straight out of central casting, of course; Babich must have been thrilled to stumble — if stumble he did — across so perfect a representative of the hard working, poor Hispanic, who is willing to dirty his hands doing the kind of job that Americans are — so we are endlessly told — no longer willing to do. That Simaha proved to be a relatively articulate speaker of English — well, what more could you ask?

Taking his cue on the words "good neighbors," Babich segues to a scratchy old recording of Robert Frost reading the opening lines of "Mending Wall" in that gravelly but inimitably sonorous tenor of his: "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 . . .." Fade out Frost. Babich queries (portentously): "There's anything but a frozen ground-swell along the border, but is that 'something' lurking nearby?" Presumably, by "that something," Babich refers to huddled masses of Mexicans just on the other side of the border, but he doesn't pause to explain. Instead, he rapidly sketches in the rural New England mise en scene for Frost's poem: the neighbor farmers, the annual spring ritual of wall mending. Fade in Frost: "Before I built a wall, I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out." What is Babich's implied message? Those who support more fence building along the border are like the purblind neighbor farmer, eager to extend barriers against an imaginary threat. Those who question the need for a wall, on the other hand, are like the speaker of the poem, whom Babich sets up as its moral conscience. But of course, most of NPR's faithful listeners don't really "question" (in the philosophical sense) the need for a wall along the border, since they — like Babich — haven't given a moment's thought to the possibility that, sometimes, good fences might actually ensure mutual respect between neighbors.

To reinforce his message, Babich brings on a Frost "expert," Lisa Seal, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin. According to Seal, "'Mending Wall' is a "sort of guideline for how to have a conversation about putting up a wall . . . uh, not necessarily [about] ultimately what it means, but how to have a conversation about how . . . you know we'd better figure out what it means before we do something quite that drastic." One does sympathize with Dr. Seal's students, since she is not exactly a model of professorial clarity, but let's concede that Frost's poem does appear to have something to say about human communication. Otherwise Seal's reading of the text is shamelessly polemical. In the first place, there is no question of "putting up" a wall in the poem; the wall is already, has long since been, there. The speaker and his neighbor are repairing the wall, and, more importantly, it is the speaker himself who initiates the annual ritual: "I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; / And on a day we walk the line / And set the wall between us once again." The Babich / Seal take on the poem conveniently ignores this crucial key to a deeper understanding of its meaning, one that is far from political.

A little later in the segment, Babich takes us to a middle-class suburb situated just east of Los Angeles. Here, where "massive cinder block walls" surround the community, the residents to whom Babich speaks seem unanimously to agree that the walls offer "protection, seclusion." Well, no suprise there. Isn't that why people move into walled communities? But it seems that Babich is merely providing a platform for the appearance of his next guest, novelist Clancy Segal, whose commentary would otherwise appear rather contrived. Segal, we learn, has written a novel called Zone of the Interior, in which a group of psychiatrists "break down physical and mental walls between schizophrenics, doctors, and society." Says Segal: "I have learned through experience . . . that the more I seclude myself behind walls, the worse eventually I'm going to feel, the more paranoid I'm going to get and the more distant I get from other human beings. That's the first step toward going mad, and I'm not going mad again." Though Babich doesn't make this explicit, we gather that Segal has experienced a schizophrenic episode or two, and this apparently qualifies him to speak all the more profoundly upon the subject of fence building along the Mexican border: "Whenever we put up a wall," he laments, "we run out of imagination. We can't think of anything else, so we put up a wall and the message is perfectly clear: We hate you, we can't trust you . . .." Moreover, he adds, our dream of protection and seclusion is simply futile: "There's simply no way of having an impenetrable wall."

This notion that wall building is always and everywhere an exercise in futility (not to mention hatred and suspicion) is a common thread on the liberal side of the fence debate. On May 23, just a few days after the Weekend America segment, NPR's All Things Considered featured a sermonette by Jay Kaiser, illustrated by a series of exempla on the fragility of walls. The piece commences, of course, with Frost's "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," and proceeds to the grandiose claim that "Mending Wall" is "a parable of human history, of wall builders and those who'd just as soon see them crumble." Never mind that Frost himself, as reported by one of his biographers, Stanley Burnshaw, denied that the poem had any allegorical meaning and repeatedly stated in interviews that it had been "spoiled" by being "applied" in this way to political or historical events. Nevertheless, Kaiser boldly takes the plunge, rattling off with facile ease half a dozen examples of failed wall building: the 3rd century Aurelian Wall, built to protect Rome from the barbarian hordes; the Maginot Line, "a feckless attempt at protection, as WWII clearly demonstrated;" the Berlin Wall, now reduced to "souvenirs in the homes of faceless collectors;" the Great Wall of China, still standing, yes, but the "only thing it can keep out are the rabbits;" and Hadrian's Wall, built in "a fruitless attempt to keep the barbarians of Scotland at bay." Quod erat demonstrandum. Or, maybe not. The Maginot Line, it's true, fell victim to German technological prowess. But the Great Wall of China and Hadrian's Wall were, in their time, reasonably effective barriers against invasion. As for the Berlin Wall, who can deny that, while it stood, it served its repugnant purpose well enough. No, none of these walls were impenetrable. Nor has any advocate of fence building along the Mexican border — none with any sense, anyway — ever claimed that such a barrier would be perfectly impenetrable. This argument that fence building is simply useless because sooner or later someone will get through — well, it's just daft. Equally silly, and blatantly inaccurate, is Kaiser's claim that Frost sees the wall in his poem "as a barrier that keeps him and his neighbor strangers." He adds: "I suppose it really comes down to this: . . .Do we keep our neighbors at arm's length [or] keep the door open for a visit?"

The problem with keeping "the door open for a visit" is that if my neighbor is inclined to enter my house uninvited, devour my provisions, and trash my parlor, I may feel justifiably inclined to ask him to leave, then place a hefty deadbolt on the door. Frost, one suspects, might agree. In his "Build Soil," written in 1932 in imitation of Virgil's "First Eclogue," he finds fault with the sort of promiscuous internationalism that would leave the doors between nations perpetually open, that would, in fact, seek to dissolve all barriers and borders in a feverish quest for what the French Hegelian philosopher, Alexandre Kojeve, called the "universal and homogeneous state." Frost, who was often branded as an isolationist during the thirties, insists first upon the integrity of the nation: "Just so before we're international / We're national and act as nationals." In an address to the Amherst Alumni Council, he tied nationality to personality in a way that is quintessentially Frostian: "Look! First I want to be a person, and then we can be as interpersonal as you please . … But, first, you have got to have the personality. First of all, you have got to have the nations and then they can be as international as they please . . .."  Perhaps this statement also provides us with a clue to what "Mending Wall" is really about. What most seems to frustrate the poem's speaker is his neighbor's rote refusal to "go behind his father's saying," to emerge from his father's shadow and become a "personality" in his own right. When the taciturn neighbor fails to do so, the rather self-righteous speaker denounces him, as we have seen, "as an old-stone savage armed." But nowhere does the speaker deny the truth of the proverb; rather, he playfully questions whether that truth is always and everywhere applicable. What is that "something that doesn't love a wall?" The poet wants his neighbor, in the spirit of the season, to give free reign to his imagination, "to say it for himself." But perhaps it would be a mistake to fully identify the speaker with the "poet," as so many readers do. In one interview Frost noted, "I am both a wall builder and a wall destroyer," and hinted intriguingly at the possibility that he "was both fellows . . ." in the poem.

In one of his best known quips, Frost told Carl Sandburg that he'd "rather play tennis with the net down as write free verse." Perhaps it would not be stretching the analogy too far to suggest that our promiscuous internationalists (i.e. multiculturalists), in seeking to dissolve all borders, want to play tennis without the net. But the global harmony of diverse voices they envision is an infantile fantasy. The more likely result would be a global babble, or Babel, of nonpersons engaging in meaningless chit chat (and what passes for "communication" along the garrulous neural pathways of the World Wide Web may be a frightening foretaste of just that). Genuine dialog, by contrast, can take place only between those who have achieved some degree of personhood, who possess — as a minimal requirement, anyway — a rooted sense of belonging to a neighborhood, a region, and, ultimately, a nation. Beyond those boundaries, "community" is no longer possible. "Mending Wall" nudges us in the direction of such an understanding of the limitations of our fallen world, but in the end the poet holds his cards close to his chest: "The secret of what it means," the mischievous Frost once teased, "I keep."

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