“Mending Wall” and the Defense of Tradition
In 1886 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., famously warned, "the law is not the place for the artist or the poet." Yet there are exceptions, as Justice Antonin Scalia (full disclosure: my father) would demonstrate over a century later. Writing for the Court in Plaut v. Spendthrift Farm, Scalia described the separation of powers — that "structural safeguard...establishing high walls and clear distinctions" — as "a distinctively American political doctrine [that] profits from the advice authored by a distinctively American poet: Good fences make good neighbors." He assumed even lawyers would get his reference to Robert Frost's 1914 poem "Mending Wall."
You may remember the work's basic narrative arc: A farmer tells of the annual maintenance that he and his neighbor conduct on the stone wall separating their properties. The two characters seem to have very different attitudes about the task. The neighbor goes about the job without questioning its value or relevance; he is motivated by the belief, which he expresses multiple times, that "[g]ood fences make good neighbors." But the speaker appears to resent the chore.
Picking up on the reference in his concurring opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer took the speaker's side, arguing that the majority's view of the separation of powers was too strict. "[O]ne might consider...that poet's caution," he advised, "for he not only notes that 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall,' but also writes, 'Before I built a wall I'd ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out.'"
This exchange is so on the nose, Aaron Sorkin might have written it: the conservative justice quoting Frost's tradition-bound neighbor, the liberal rebutting with the words of Frost's reform-minded speaker. In an editorial published shortly after the decision's release, the New York Times sided with the latter, insisting that "Robert Frost gave no such advice, though Justice Scalia is not the first to say he did. His poem, 'Mending Wall,' makes the case against walls." Noting that Scalia had the opportunity to defend or correct his interpretation of the poem after Breyer challenged it in his concurrence, the Times concluded: "He must have clung to the slogan — like Frost's neighbor clutching a rock in each hand."
More charitably, literary scholar Kieran Dolin observed that in quoting lines from the poem, the two justices "uncannily re-enact[ed] the roles of the two farmers," from Scalia repeating the proverb on fences down to Breyer "ask[ing] the sceptical questions while rebuilding the wall, noting that Frost doubts the wisdom of the wall, whilst agreeing with Justice Scalia to apply the separation of powers doctrine to this case." In short, the exchange between the justices is a poignant reenactment of the poem — or, at least, a fairly common understanding of it.
Anyone offering an expansive interpretation of "Mending Wall" needs to tread carefully: It is a much-beloved and widely read work about which many readers will have strong opinions. Frost himself warned against over-interpreting it, telling one audience, "I'm always distressed when I find somebody being ugly about it, outraging the poem, going some way, especially if it's on some theory I can see their applying to everything." Or, as he put it elsewhere: "People are frequently misunderstanding it or misinterpreting it. The secret of what it means I keep."
With those qualifications in mind, I want to propose a reading of the poem that shows it to be a deceptively complex work offering important insights into the nature of argument and persuasion, especially about the challenges inherent in the defense of established traditions or institutions. More than a century after Frost wrote "Mending Wall," we can gain much from paying attention to its layered presentation of the conflict between tradition and reform.
THE SPEAKER AS REFORMER
"Mending Wall" begins with the speaker's mysterious, almost mystical declaration about a force that seeks to destroy the kind of wall he is charged with repairing:
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.
He clarifies almost immediately that this damage wrought by natural forces — forces that are summoned by an unnamed "something" — is distinct from the "work of hunters" who overturn stones during their chases. That destruction is immediate and obvious. But the speaker and his neighbor are fixing "gaps" caused by unknown sources: "No one has seen them made or heard them made," but every spring at "mending-time we find them there."
The process is perennial, and its effects are temporary. Nonetheless, the speaker and his neighbor annually "meet to walk the line/And set the wall between us once again." Some of the stones barely balance when they're returned to the wall, the speaker joking: "We have to use a spell to make them balance:/'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'" Because of the project's futility, the speaker dismisses it as "just another kind of outdoor game,/One on a side. It comes to little more[.]"
Not only are the repairs ephemeral; the speaker also complains that the wall serves no real purpose, has no tangible value for the property owners:
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.
This peculiar image of the apple trees sneaking across to snack on pine cones is typical of the speaker: He enjoys phrases that force us to rethink the basic nature of things. Consider how he describes the violent destruction of the wall wrought by hunters: The men dislodge the stones because "they would have the rabbit out of hiding,/To please the yelping dogs." The hunter pursues the rabbit to win the approval of his dogs? Something more like the opposite is true: The dogs are trained to chase the rabbit to please the hunters.
The speaker's proclivity for surprising phrasing is not just an entertaining quirk; it's crucial to understanding his interaction with his neighbor. Given the speaker's claim that "we do not need the wall," the poem's central conflict revolves around the speaker's efforts to engage with his fellow wall mender on why the task they're undertaking is worthwhile. The neighbor is incapable of explaining why this process is necessary, or of articulating what value the wall holds. He instead resorts to his hereditary catchphrase: "Good fences make good neighbors."
The speaker again invites his neighbor to explain his case: What purpose do fences serve that makes them form the virtue of neighborliness? Not only do they have different plants on their properties, making it impossible to confuse one for the other, but there are no livestock to make the wall useful, either:
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."
The speaker's frustration is not about the neighbor's wall-mending techniques; it comes down to what we might now call his lack of critical-thinking skills. This impatience intensifies as the poem progresses, and in the concluding lines the speaker uses brutal figurative language to describe the neighbor:
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."
Poet Austin Allen has written: "Because the neighbor gets the last word, it's possible to read 'Good fences make good neighbors' as the poem's straightforward message." But the speaker subverts that message by depicting his neighbor as a threatening Neanderthal. The reference to his moving "in darkness.../Not of woods only and the shade of trees" suggests he is unenlightened, walking in ignorance and unthinking habit. And there's even a threat of violence to him, as he has "a stone grasped firmly by the top/In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed." The wall itself becomes an emblem of uncritical acceptance of custom and received tradition, as the neighbor "will not go behind" the expression to see what supports it. Although the speaker's figurative language is uncharitable, his frustration seems justified: He is right to recognize a shortcoming in the neighbor's mere repetition of unexamined clichés.
It would be a mistake to conflate the speaker's perspective with Frost's own, but the poet's complaint about bad writing certainly suggests he sympathized with the speaker's lament:
When a man sits down with pen and paper to write, he declares his purpose of being original, instead of taking these second-hand words and phrases. I am sick of people who use only these ready-made words and phrases. I like better a boy who invents them for himself — who takes a word or phrase from where it lies and moves it to another place.
The neighbor's reliance on "ready-made words and phrases" is the very source of the speaker's frustration. There's another reason it's tempting to conflate the speaker with Frost: He claims that "the frozen-ground-swell" destroys walls — phrasing that some critics interpret as a pun on the poet's last name. If you buy that pun (I admit I'm not convinced), it's a great example of the "purpose of being original" that Frost and his speaker advocate.
Frost's aversion to stock phrases anticipates George Orwell's warnings in "Politics and the English Language," published some 30 years later. Hearing people repeat predictable phrases, Orwell explained, "one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy....And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine." Like Frost, Orwell emphasized a preference for original expression over inherited phrasing. And like Frost's speaker, he used dehumanizing — though perhaps less insulting — language to describe those who speak in cliché. In the poem as in Orwell's essay, the failure to speak independently of stock phrases implies not only intellectual weakness but, in the case of "Mending Wall," an inability to examine the logic behind received wisdom.
It's easy to imagine the speaker in "Mending Wall" as simply trying to engage in a Socratic dialogue. From this perspective, he asks his neighbor to propose a justification for their shared action. When the neighbor presents a broad principle in response, the speaker counters with examples that show the shortcoming of that general principle in a specific circumstance. The speaker hopes for a worthy interlocutor, and would probably even settle for a Sophist, anyone who might participate in an intellectual conversation about first principles. But instead of modifying his initial position to take its shortcomings into account, the neighbor parrots "his father's saying." The Socratic format of their exchange might look something like this:
Socrates: There is something that does not love a wall.
Plesios: Good fences make good neighbors.
Socrates: But why do they make good neighbors? Is it not where they possess the same fruits or beasts? But we possess neither the same fruits nor beasts.
Plesios: Good fences make good neighbors.
"Socrates is always focused on the consistency of his partners," Ward Farnsworth explained, and to the neighbor's credit, he is nothing if not consistent. But repetition is the lowest form of consistency, and the Socratic dialogue ends before it can really begin.
The reading of "Mending Wall" I've presented so far presents a clear challenge to tradition. The neighbor represents an inarticulate, indefensible conservativism that hides behind tradition and wallows in ignorance. The speaker's final depiction of the neighbor may be uncharitable, but it is understandable. There's just no reasoning with some people!
THE SPEAKER AS MENDER
But there is a more compelling interpretation of the poem, one that challenges the common notion that the speaker "doubts the wisdom of the wall," or that he stands in sharp opposition to his neighbor. There are two crucial details that call this understanding of the poem into question, sending the frozen-ground-swell under it.
The first of these details is that the speaker's frustration with the task, especially compared to his neighbor's defense of it, would suggest it is the neighbor who calls on the speaker to rebuild the wall every spring. But the speaker tells us he is the one responsible for beginning the repairs: "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." The speaker himself calls the neighbor to mend the wall — the neighbor, set "beyond the hill," may not even be able to see its dilapidating condition. What's more, as we saw above, he informs us early in the poem that he "made repair/Where [the hunters] have left not one stone on a stone."
These details complicate any simple understanding of the speaker as a hater of walls. If he didn't think the wall was worthwhile, if he didn't know there was a clear purpose to it, if he didn't sense a warrant behind his neighbor's refrain, he would not take the lead in making the repairs. Suddenly, the speaker is more like his neighbor than we thought. The neighbor may be inarticulate and brutish, but the speaker shares his interest in repairing the wall.
A second important detail also builds a bridge, if I may change infrastructure metaphors, between the speaker and his neighbor. "Mending Wall" contains two phrases that recur two times each over the course of the poem. The first, of course, is the father's saying: "Good fences make good neighbors." That line is memorable in part because it's how the poem ends. But there's a second repeated expression that gets less notice even though, in a sort of rhetorical symmetry, it's the poem's first line: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."
It's a provocative claim — but what does it mean? The speaker never explains. After he first makes the assertion in the opening lines, he abruptly moves, in line five, to what he does not mean — "[t]he work of hunters is another thing," a different thing than the "[s]omething," that is outside the boundaries of his main interest. After that digression, he describes the process of wall-mending and his not-so-neighborly interactions before returning to his observation: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." He finally ventures a guess at what that "thing" is — or rather, what it isn't: "I could say 'Elves' to him,/But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather/He said it for himself." Because the speaker subtly deflects from his own inability to articulate his thinking by turning his attention to the neighbor's inability, it's easy to miss that he's as incapable of articulating what he means as the "savage" who "moves in darkness." Like his inarticulate and ignorant interlocutor, he twice expresses a belief and twice fails to explain what it means.
This similarity (which Anne Lange of Katonah, New York, pointed out in a letter to the editor challenging the New York Times's criticism of Justice Scalia's opinion) suggests a surprising affinity between speaker and neighbor, even if the speaker himself doesn't realize it. This more nuanced reading corresponds to some of what we know about Frost. As William Pritchard explained, for the collection in which "Mending Wall" was first published, Frost "tried to write poems...without villains." The works instead "strive for inclusiveness although they are spoken throughout by a voice we are tempted to call 'Frost.'" With that in mind, we should be willing to see that the neighbor is not just a straw man for the speaker's withering criticism.
After all, this is Frost we're talking about — the great formal poet who once quipped: "Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down." He understood the power of boundaries. As Jay Parini observed in his biography of Frost, the poet "often emphasized the need for boundaries taken as liberating rather than confining limits." He wrote "Mending Wall" as Ezra Pound began the imagist movement, and he continued writing formal verse through the modernist period. "Mending Wall" itself participates in a long formal tradition. The poem is in blank verse (unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter), a form first used in English in the 16th century by Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, for his translation of Books II and IV of the Aeneid. From there, as writer William Baer explains, "blank verse became the prosodic basis for an incomparable series of major literary achievements," including Shakespeare's plays, Milton's Paradise Lost, Wordsworth's Prelude, as well as shorter works like Tennyson's "Ulysses."
This list is by no means exhaustive: Blank verse is the most common regular form in the English language. Through its form, then, "Mending Wall" participates in a tradition passed down through the centuries. Frost believed it was a tradition worth preserving: "The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of limited meter are endless," he once observed. He even playfully hints at the connection between this defense of traditional poetic form and the poem's wall when his characters "walk the line/And set the wall between us once again" (emphasis added).
Indeed, one reason the neighbor's empty answers may frustrate some readers is that it's not difficult to imagine how a more articulate neighbor, someone more willing to take the speaker's bait, would respond to his interrogation, what reasons he might offer to support the repeated aphorism. For example, good fences make good neighbors irrespective of trees and livestock because knowing boundaries can prevent disputes over property development. There's also the aesthetic appeal of a finished wall as opposed to a crumbling one. And I suspect that a wall in disrepair would hurt resale prospects. Caveat emptor: If a homeowner fails to repair flaws in plain view, can you trust how he cares for what is hidden?
But perhaps the most helpful line of defense for the notion that good fences make good neighbors is not that the wall's good condition makes the neighbors good; rather, the act of repairing the wall makes them so. The very process of maintaining the barrier between the neighbors paradoxically brings them together. That is indeed what happens in the poem itself. Literary critic Richard Poirier explains: "More is 'made' in this 'outdoor game' than fences. The two men also 'make' talk, or at least that is what the speaker tries to do as against the reiterated assertions of his companion, which are as heavy and limited as the wall itself."
It is true that we don't know how much the two men engage with each other outside the spring mending time, but the scene we encounter in "Mending Wall" is a tableau of community building. Or at least, it could be; Poirier blames the companion's dullness for impeding conversation, but one could just as easily blame the speaker's pseudo-Socratic pestering and condescension. Regardless, the opportunity for community building is there. Perhaps this is why the speaker mends the wall despite his arguments against it.
Recognizing the speaker's parallels with his neighbor and his own interest in maintaining the wall transforms the poem from a straightforward challenge of tradition into a much more complex consideration of both conservative and radical rhetoric. This reading does not make the neighbor articulate; instead, it makes him an imperfect steward of a worthy tradition. And the speaker, though somewhat skeptical of the annual ritual, fails to find an argument strong enough to dissuade himself from participating in it.
FROST'S WALL AND CHESTERTON'S FENCE
Speaking of conversations, there is an interesting one between this layered reading of "Mending Wall" and another well-known consideration of tradition.
In "The Drift from Domesticity," published 15 years after Frost's poem, G. K. Chesterton presents a defense of traditional family structures with an analogy that calls Frost's wall to mind. Like the neighbor in "Mending Wall" — and the internal logic of the poem itself — Chesterton calls for a cautious approach to abandoning time-honored customs and institutions.
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
As Chesterton explains, his "paradox rests on the most elementary common sense," which is that a reasonable human being constructed the barrier: "It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street."
Chesterton's logic assumes that the men and women who establish institutions or traditions are not fools. Presumably, they are not evil, either. He urges the reformer to take a charitable view of our ancestors — to stay his hand before raising the sledgehammer: "[N]obody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution." His point is not that reform is never warranted; rather, he puts the burden of proof on the reformer.
That rhetorical approach is what makes Chesterton's passage such a compelling contrast to Frost's poem. It's true whether you subscribe to the first interpretation of "Mending Wall" — what you might call the prevailing view — in which the speaker easily dispatches with his hidebound neighbor's claims, or the second one, which presents the speaker as a less-effective rhetorician and a fainthearted reformer. In either case, whereas Chesterton puts the burden on the leveler, Frost's poem puts the onus on traditionalists to defend their position: "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." And where Chesterton seems to assume a rhetorical failure on the part of the reformer, in Frost the traditionalist fails, too. (Let's pause here to admire, or groan at, Frost's pun: "to whom I was like to give offense" — a fence.)
What's more, Frost's speaker does what Chesterton demands of reformers: He offers some rationale for why the fence was built, or in what contexts fences make good neighbors, and demonstrates how that does not apply to this specific situation. He has gone away and thought. He has come back and told the neighbor that he does not see the use of it. Yet perhaps because he is unable to articulate his own argument clearly, or because he senses the same value in the wall that his neighbor cannot express, he mends.
For the conservative, Chesterton's paradox may be the more reassuring perspective, but Frost's is both more challenging and more helpful for our times. It offers a complex defense of tradition as well as a warning to traditionalists. It depicts reformers and conservatives in a conversation, and makes clear that it isn't enough for those who wish to uphold traditions to give history homework to their adversaries. They cannot afford to be as self-satisfied as Chesterton's parable suggests; they need to do their own thinking. Because sooner or later, they will have a neighbor who really doesn't love a wall — who won't just refrain from telling them when it needs mending, but will try to break it down. That neighbor won't be persuaded by an aphorism, but he may be by an argument.