Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?

I recently read the famous line from Robert Frost’s poem: “good fences make good neighbors.”  I remember my Dad quoting it to me, making a point about the importance of privacy and boundaries for healthy relationships. I always imagined the fences to be waist-high and white-picket, kind of like in the movie Terms of Endearment, which would keep Shirley MacClaine safe from her dubious neighbor, Jack Nicholson. 

Or the fence that Tim Allen’s character would talk over when he’d be getting advice from his neighbor Wilson in Home Improvement. 

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know the name of the poem whose last line is so often quoted. It’s called

Mending Wall. 

When I read the title the first time, I was shocked. Triggered, really. You see, since I live and work at the U.S.-Mexico border in Nogales, Arizona, the word wall has a complex, multi-layered meaning for me. 

And, quite frankly, “mending” is not a word I would use to describe it. 

When I was at the Customs and Border Patrol central office in Nogales I became aware that officers there used the word “fence” when referring to what I call “The Wall.” This structure doesn’t  look like a “fence” to me: 

I read the poem over and over again, and the line that makes the most sense to me is…

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. 

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.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a 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 out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need 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, 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 offense.
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.’

Robert Frost

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