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By Robert Frost
Many readers think that Frost identifies with the speaker in this famous poem. He is witty, forward looking and tolerant of natural boundaries: “My
apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines”.
Surely everyone agrees that: “Something
there is that does not love a wall.”
His neighbour is impossibly conservative and narrow minded with his old-fashioned refrain: “Good
fences make good neighbours”.
But
is the old neighbour really arguing that walls help us get on with each other
because we no longer need to talk and negotiate?
I’m not so sure.
The
narrator invited the neighbour to mend their wall together, and doing so lets
them walk and work together. The
wall both separates and connects them.
The
wall has other benefits. The neighbours need not worry or argue about their boundaries
so long as the wall is there. They
can get on with planting, harvesting, and all the other things that people do
when they are at peace with their neighbours. They
may even regard it as worthwhile to improve their land.
Conservatives
know all this and the neighbour does too. He
can’t talk about the benefits of secure property rights or quote Coase’s
theorem but he knows. And he is
right.
I
read this as an iGreen poem. A good fence needs occasional tending but it makes for good
neighbours.
Jim
Thornton
Here is the poem
Mending WallSomething
there is that doesn't love a wall,
That
sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And
spills the upper boulders in the sun; And
makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing: I
have come after them and made repair Where
they have left not one stone on stone,
But
they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To
please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made, But
at spring mending-time we find them there.
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.
We keep the wall between us as we go. To
each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And
some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We
have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay
where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh,
just another kind of outdoor game, One
on a side. It comes to little more:
He
is all pine and I am apple-orchard.
My
apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He
only says, "Good fences make good neighbors." Spring
is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If
I could put a notion in his head: "Why
do they make good neighbors? Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. 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 offence.
Something
there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down!" I could say "Elves" to him, But
it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He
said it for himself. 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 again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
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