Frost Wasn't for Fences!

By PLS

Senator Jeff Sessions recently quoted from Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Fence” to support the idea of building a concrete wall hundreds of miles long between the US and Mexico, the unthinking person's approach to solving the problem of illegal immigration. "Fences don't make bad neighbors," insisted the Republican Senator from Alabama.

Either the Senator is unable to understand the poem, in which case one is embarrassed for him, or else he is identifying himself with someone who behaves like stone age survival or a brainless robot.

Here is the relevant part of the poem:

‘....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’....I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s’ saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says it again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Such simple language. Such resonance. It’s hard to understand how anyone with a reasonable quota of intelligence or good faith could misunderstand Frost’s strong critique of crude efforts to build barriers between people.

Comments

[MT]

When he references the New Testament he's probably quoting Satan.

[PHK]

Thanks for finding this appro po poem - and the thoughts contained in it.

[John S Williams]

Session misunderstands Frost's meaning. Pat has it right. The speaker or poetic voice of the poem sets up the dilemma:

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.

In contrast, the poetic speaker or voice says, is another--"an old-stone savage armed"-- who is building a stone wall, a man who accepts the admonitions of his father unquestioningly (the inflexible conservative?) and who keeps saying to himself, "Good fences make good neighbors."
But to the poetic voice or speaker, "the old-stone savage" "moves in darkness as it seems to me."

Such is Jeff Sessions, like "the old-stone savage," caught in his inflexible, conservative mindset, believing that that stone walls will solve a problem, maybe won't make good neighbors, but certainly won't make bad ones. Pat is correct in seeing that he fails to understand Frost's poem, just like so often the conservative, locked into his ideological vision of the past, fails to read the past astutely.

John S. Williams
Professor Emerius of English
University of Pacific
Stockton, CA

[MT]

Sessions and other politicians are a little like one of those random sentence generating algorithms. When you're only randomly sampling pieties and cultural touchstones, you're bound not always to make sense. Bush comes close, but he has more minders doing quality control.

[AJ Pegues]

Yes, you are correct. For good or for bad, all American political history features such utterances, regardless of political motive or ideology. But it's one thing to muse about a symbol long distance, and another to live the reality. I'd like to hear from someone who lives in South San Diego or Tijuana about the the wall they've actually had for a number of years.

[J.]

Huh. You know, I never understood that Frost was saying "good fences don't make good neighbors". I thought that "good fences make good neighbors" was the proper saying. But then again, I was never a real poetry fan. Thanks for the lesson.

[Anthony Stark]

The Poem is title Mending Wall, not fence. Now you have to apologize to a polyp like Senator Jeff.