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.