By Good Fences, Are Good Neighbors Made?
Loaves of stone
We’re in southern New Hampshire for Thanksgiving. I tell ya, the Nashua Sheraton, freshly renovated? Fabulous.
Thanksgiving dinner was in Carlisle, Mass. Old stone walls, mega New England, very compelling.
The most famous line in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” is naturally:
Good fences make good neighbors.
What I didn’t realize until recently is that the line is a quotation within the poem itself—spoken not by the narrator (plainly Frost), but rather by Frost’s neighbor. Hello!
The proper quote, then, is:
“Good fences make good neighbors.“
What’s more, Frost makes no secret of his annoyance at the neighbor’s hokey homespun adage; the poem repeats the “good fences” line in order to dismantle it—or rather, to stand back and watch it collapse.
The only other repetition in the poem is Frost’s retort:
Something there is that doesn't love a wall.
Every year Frost and his neighbor meet to mend the wall; every year the stones insist on falling apart. Even for mending, disbelief needs suspending:
We have to use a spell to make them balance: / “Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
Auden said “Poetry is not magic.” If it has “an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate.”1
The truth of “Mending Wall” is that other people are a pain in the ass—and we are lost without them.
SEE YOU NEXT FRIDAY, DEAR FRIENDS.
Auden also said “The greatest writer cannot see through a brick wall but, unlike the rest of us, he does not build one.” Total openness would make grocery shopping impossible, but it is practically a precondition of creative thinking. For that kid in American Beauty, camcorder footage of a windblown plastic bag is the most beautiful thing in the world—which means I want to read his poetry, and hope never to end up in his Uber Pool.