Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

My wife, Jean, is a great admirer of the American poet Robert Frost. He came to Agnes Scott College at times gone by to lecture, and all Atlanta looked forward to his visits. One of his most famous poems is about neighbors and their common fence. And heated about securing the border between Mexico and the United States, my mind wanders back to that Robert Frost poem. It is entitled "Mending Wall" and it tells the story of two neighbors who get together every Springtime to walk the old stacked stone fence that separates their land, each on his own side, to repair and re-stack places where weather, or animals, or fallen tree limbs have done damage. The poem starts out this way: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." But every Spring this job needs doing. And as they walk, Frost is questioning the value of this annual ritual. "He is all pine and I am apple orchard," Frost says. "My apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines, I tell him." The neighbor's only reply is Good Fences Make Good Neighbors." Frost continues to question the wall, saying: "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know ... what was I walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give doesn't love a wall, that wants it down," Frost continues his line of thinking, yet at the end the neighbor repeats: "Good fences make good neighbors" And one is convinced that Frost, in the end, agrees with him, else he would have never penned the poem in the first place. So I listen to the debate about Mexico and America, and I agree with Frost on two counts: first, something there is that does not love a wall; and second, Good Fences make Good Neighbors.

This is Gordon Sawyer from a window on historic Green Street.