Frost Heaves

With Israel’s erection of a fence to separate itself from its Palestinian neighbors, scores of columnists and pundits and even Sharon himself have trotted out a famous line from Robert Frost’s century-old poem “Mending Wall.”

In almost all cases, the writers either imply or explicitly state that Frost believed “good fences make good neighbors.” The trouble is, the whole point of his poem was to question that belief. It is Frost’s neighbor, the other character in the poem, who’s the big fan of fences. Frost questions their value asking:

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,

The thing is, if you actually read the poem, it becomes apparent that Frost would likely make an exception for a barrier between the Israelis and Palestinians. He isn’t opposed to all fences, just those that serve no useful purpose. He asks:

“Why do [fences] make good neighbours? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

If Frost’s neighbor were in the habit of sending his children over to Frost’s kitchen to blow themselves up, I suspect he’d be out there building the best fence he could, whether or not he had his neighbor’s help, and whether or not it was “like to give offence.”

Posted by Andrew Coulson at February 9, 2004 07:46 PM | TrackBack