Frost for you

The poetry of Robert Frost undoubtedly occupies an important place in American literature. Unfortunately, much of his work has faded into academia, analyzed in English class but not otherwise enjoyed. Nevertheless, Frost primarily wrote his poems for the enjoyment of his public readership, and it is this reading pleasure above all that I would like to share in my column this semester.

Walking into Cohen as a first-year for my first-ever college class, Bio 13, I was pleased to see the first line of one of my favorite Frost poems splashed across the PowerPoint slide: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” from Frost’s “Mending Wall” (1914). Alas, my biology class was not about to transform into a discussion of Frost’s philosophical concept of boundaries: the professor tied the line into a discussion of the chemical properties of cell walls. To my dismay, Frost and poetry were forgotten for the rest of the semester.

But “Mending Wall” deserves more. For this is a poem, at its base, about human attempts at division. The poem's narrator begins by describing a common means of division: a stone wall dividing his land from that of his neighbor's. After this wall has been damaged by a hard winter, the two neighbors meet in the spring in order to mend the wall's gaps: 

“I let my neighbor know beyond the hill / And on a day we meet to walk the line / And set the wall between us once again.”

Stone walls such as the once Frost mentions in the poem are a common sight in New England:from Connecticut to Maine, they crisscross the countryside, dividing the land. Usually constructed in the 19^th century by hand, they often retain their original purpose as property boundary markers up to the present day.

Yet Frost professes uncertainty as to why his neighbor desires the presence of a firm barrier between their properties, arguing that he does not pose any threat to his neighbor’s land. In response the neighbor explains: “Good fences makes good neighbors.” At first glance, this sentiment seems mean-spirited, if not downrightly misguided. Our familiar image of the “good neighbor” envisions him or her as friendly and helpful rather than cold and aloof. Ideally, many would argue, walls should be anathema to good neighborly relations.

Yet I would tend to sympathize with Frost’s curmudgeonly neighbor. The neighbor is not being mean: he’s simply proud of what he owns and unwilling to compromise ownership of it. I often have similar issues when dealing with my cat, Jeoffry. Upon returning home last December for winter break, I discovered that Jeoffry had claimed my favorite chair, and was using it as his favored sleeping area. Obviously this was unacceptable: during the summer, Jeoffry and I had firmly established that I would have exclusive ownership of the chair, while Jeoffry slept on the footstool. Both articles of furniture are equally close to the fireplace (a vital point in winter), and Jeoffry had always been content with the footstool. Accordingly, my arrival home in December instituted a temporary struggle for ownership of the chair. However, after several days, the old borders were satisfactorily restored, and Jeoffry returned content to his footstool. Obviously, my cat and I have remained the best of friends, but I do admit our friendship was strained during the struggle over the chair. Now that boundaries have been restored, our friendship is secure and we have become once again good neighbors in front of the fireplace. In this sense, we can see the wisdom of Frost’s stubborn neighbor, who ends “Mending Wall” with a reassertion of his creed: “He will not go behind his father’s saying / And he likes having thought of it so well / He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’”