Mending Wall and MAGA

Critical analysis...

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. ~Mending Wall by Robert Frost

I taught American Literature for 16 years so you’ll have to excuse my constant deference to the subject.

I never meant to be an English teacher. I wanted to teach History but my college advisor told me that too many men, men who plan to teach and coach, major in History. That meant if two teachers with the same degree were considered for a teaching position, but only one is also qualified to be the football coach, we know which would be hired. I am not qualified to be the football coach.

I did not protest her assessment. I graduated with an English major and a History minor. Good enough for who it’s for.

In reading so much literature over the years, I know one thing: I like plain language. I am drawn to regular people and their patterns of speech. Plain and simple vernacular.

I love Mark Twain and William Faulkner and Alice Walker and Willa Cather and Walt Whitman and Ernest Hemingway. I love their writing because it sounds familiar and true. Real and unpretentious. Unaffected.

I am a Southerner by birth and a Midwesterner by choice and a rural person by Providence. I like simple things and love simple writing.

I recall loathing poetry in school for that very reason. Even in my undergraduate. I once had a Capstone class in Shakespeare. I loved learning about the man and his family and his history, but I did not love his writing. Yes, it was funny. Yes, it was bawdy. But it always felt like I was the odd man out in my feelings about Shakespeare. Especially while earning an English degree.

Then I found American poets like Robert Frost and I fell in love. I read Birches and I lost myself.

You may see their trunks arching in the woods

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

The poem spoke to me. I love the woods. I have a bit of a Thoreau habit in that I like to leave my life for a few days here and there in search of trees and lakes and leaves and trails. I like camping. In a tent. I like to see chipmunks and squirrels and hear small waves from the lake coming in and out. Kissing the rock shore only to leave and come again.

Hello. Goodbye.

I love to sit under Birch trees in the fall and watch the yellow leaves yawn and glide to the ground spinning and dropping slowly until they land where they create a beautiful quilt. A hastily thrown-together jumble of green and yellow and orange.

While teaching, I found Mending Wall by Frost. Still about nature, but it felt political out of the gate.

I taught it several times a year and I feel a certain way about the poem. I love the plain language and the physical work described and the rural landscape and the misunderstanding between neighbors. I love that Frost can hide meaning behind such plain words. The mark of a great writer. He laid it out for me but he snuck something in…something for me to go to work on. Something out in the open but up for interpretation.

The poem opens up with men doing a yearly chore; they are mending the stone wall between them. The narrator wonders why they need a wall at all as they don’t have livestock. He says of the wall, “He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines.”

New England stone wall. The Smithsonian.

His neighbor responds with a phrase he has used several times, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Therein lies a problem for the narrator: why do we need fences and walls and why do they make good neighbors?

Something 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.

Two can walk abreast in the gaps where the wall has decayed. Friends and neighbors can walk together where a wall has fallen due to nature.

And why build a wall in the first place? Why offend a neighbor when there is no need?

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,

And then, the poem turns dark. The neighbor turns into a shadowy character. He seems to be almost ogre-like. He looms large and menacing. Nearly sinister. His reason for mending the wall where there needs to be no wall is ominous —unreasonable. The narrator says of him:

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.

The poem ends with the neighbor insisting again that walls must be built between neighbors because they make good neighbors. A circular argument. A logical fallacy. One you may have found yourself arguing against if you’ve ever engaged with MAGA folks on walls.

I have returned to this poem so many times since 2016. As soon as I heard the Trump quote, “Build the wall” I thought of Frost and his poem. There is something that doesn’t love a wall.

I think of this poem each time I see a Trump rally — when he calls for a wall that was neither completely built nor paid for by Mexico nor in working order. There is something that doesn’t love a wall.

Who will this wall offend and is it worth it? Who will this wall keep in and who will this wall keep out and why? There is something that doesn’t love a wall.

The poem is about borders and the tension unnatural borders create. It is political and presents the reader with with this thought: walls are inconvenient and expensive and just because it’s the way we’ve always done things doesn’t mean it is the way to continue to do things.

We can be better and do better. We can think long and hard on issues like immigration without turning into armed old-stone savages. We can use logic and reason to ask questions and wonder and ponder on better ways to approach the issues of borders and walls.

Nature has shown the way. Nature causes walls to crumble and fall making way for neighbors to walk together…two abreast.

We can ask if there is a better way.

We already know there is something that doesn’t love a wall.

~Jess