• An ode to good fences An ode to good fences Listening to pronouncements in the presidential race about building a wall brings to mind a Robert Frost poem. It begins with memorable words, “Something there is that doesn’t love a
• An ode to good fences
An ode to good fences
Listening to pronouncements in the presidential race about building a wall brings to mind a Robert Frost poem. It begins with memorable words, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
This is followed by a description of two neighbors who meet each spring to repair the wall separating their properties. Over time the wall has been damaged by nature and hunters.
One of them comments, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
The other thinks, “Why do they make good neighbors? 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.”
He watches his neighbor bringing stones “grasped firmly by the top in each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.”
Then comes a reflection: “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 Springer, Koloa
