Don’t use Frost to justify a wall

By Michael Plaisted, Las Vegas

Friday, May 20, 2016 | 2 a.m.

Over the past several years, even before Donald Trump proposed it, there have been many letters and editorials in support of building our own Berlin Wall — perhaps a Great Wall of China would be more like it — across the Mexican border and sometimes even along the Canadian border.

Many of these letters and editorials have done a great dishonor to poet Robert Frost. Most make reference to a line from his poem “Mending Wall,” which says, “Good fences make good neighbors.” The writers suggest that Frost would favor such a wall. But does it express Frost’s belief? I think most using this quote have heard the phrase but haven’t read the poem.

Frost, the narrator of the poem, is actually against the wall. It’s his “neighbor across the way” who says the quoted line.

Frost says, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down,” and, “There where it is we do not need a wall.” He asks of the wall: “Isn’t it where there are cows? But here there are no cows.” Frost goes on to say, “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.”

And what does Frost think of his neighbor for having said, “Good fences make good neighbors”? He calls him a brutal caveman: “I see him there bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top in each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.” He says he is ignorant — “He moves in darkness as it seems to me ...” — and suggests he is incapable of thinking for himself — “He will no go behind his father’s saying. ... He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’”

If you feel you must support our own “Great Wall of America,” please do not use Frost to justify your xenophobia. Perhaps a passage from his poem “Birches” sums up Frost’s philosophy quite well: “Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”