Donald Trump should read Robert Frostâs poem âMending Wallâ
In the late summer of 1962, poet Robert Frost was invited to visit the Soviet Union. During the visit, he read at a Moscow library. The poem he chose was âMending Wall,â which is ostensibly about two New Englanders setting out to repair the stone barrier between their farms.
In the first line of the poem, the narrator famously expresses a hesitation about this task: âSomething there is,â he announces, âthat doesnât love a wall.â You can be sure that, for the party hacks in the audience, that image recalled not so much rural New Hampshire as Berlin, cleaved in two the previous year with slabs of concrete.
âThe Russians didnât know whether to laugh or what,â the Associated Press reported. I am surprised that Frost made it back home.
The first line of âMending Wallâ is its second most famous. The one that most often is repeated is the twice-uttered refrain of the narratorâs partner in the wall-mending business: âGood fences make good neighbors.â
Sarah Palin quoted this line in a 2010 post on Facebook, though with a bit of creative license (âFences make for good neighbors.â). This was meant to serve as a warning to a journalist who was moving in next door to Alaskaâs first family as part of the research for his book on the disastrous former vice presidential candidate. A blogger for the Atlantic mocked Palinâs allusion to Frost, calling his poem âa polemic against building walls.â Yet the poem is not a polemic in even the most casual use of the word, and it is not âagainstâ the notion of walls. Only mediocre poets write polemics, or poems that are explicitly for or against anything.
As with Frostâs most famous poem, âThe Road Not Taken,â âMending Wallâ is regularly quoted but rarely understood. Like so much of Frostâs poetry, it fools the reader with its bucolic imagery. If all you see is a pretty picture, Iâm afraid you arenât seeing much.
I hadnât thought about the poem for a while, as contemporary life doesnât leave many moments for poetic contemplation. But during a June visit to the campus of Dartmouth College, which Frost attended without graduating, I came across a bronze statue of the poet on a secluded, hilly rise of land. He is sitting, hunched over a writing pad, on which is written the first line of âMending Wall.â The rest of the pad is blank.
To think of walls in this madding election season is to think principally of the one Donald Trump promises to build between the United States and Mexico. As you can imagine, both supporters and detractors of Trumpâs idea have used Frostâs poem to their ends. âGood Fences Make Sovereign Nationsâ was the headline of a pro-Trump article on the conservative website the Blaze. The liberal Brookings Institution, in an anti-Trump blog post, quoted the poemâs first line while also cleverly subverting its last: âGood fences make good neighbors, and bad fences make bad ones.â
So which side is correct, the one that celebrates the poemâs first line or the one that touts its last? Well, neither. And both. âPeople are frequently misunderstanding it or misinterpreting it,â Frost said of âMending Wall.â
âThe secret of what it means I keep.â
The poem itself introduces a quality that political pundits abhor: complexity. The narrator is openly skeptical about the efficacy of walls, complaining about the gaps âat spring mending-time,â which appear even if âNo one has seen them made or heard them made.â Yet he isnât unwilling to join with his neighbor to âset the wall between us once again.â He will do the work, even as he confides in us that it is all âjust another outdoor game.â
The secret of what it means I keep.
— Robert Frost
The poemâs most forthright and forceful lines come near the end, when the narrator drops some of his gentle mockery to reveal why, exactly, he is reluctant about this enterprise:
Before I build a wall Iâd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offense.
About 38% of American voters support Trumpâs proposal for a wall with Mexico, according to polling in the spring by the Pew Research Center. And half support another wall, this one invisible, that would ban all Muslims from entering the United States, a centerpiece of the Trump plan to make America great again. He seems to know exactly whom to wall in and whom to wall out, and he clearly does not mind giving offense. Giving offense might well be the whole point.
It is likely that some of those who support Trumpâs walls are genuine racists, thrilled to find their convictions, long bred in silence, suddenly shouted by the presumptive Republican nominee, then repeated ad infinitum on cable news, treated as serious stuff by unserious people. But many of those who support Trump are simply frightened; the wall represents a bulwark not so much against the Islamic State or the Sinaloa Cartel, but against the 21st century, blowing across the dark fields of the republic like one of those punishing New Hampshire winds that come in October and stay through March.
Frostâs narrator recognizes this same impulse in his neighbor. He thinks about teasing him (âI could say âElvesâ to himâ), about pointing out that theyâd need only a fence to bar the trespasses of cattle, except âhere there are no cows.â The narrator refrains, recognizing mockery wonât help, a reminder to those of us on the left who smugly caricature all Trump supporters as ignorant rubes.
So what is the answer? Poetry, I am afraid, doesnât provide one that fits into a âBreaking Newsâ chyron. Frost took an almost Joycean delight in confounding his readers, and so âMending Wallâ ends on the conviction about good fences making good neighbors, making the entire poem a gorgeous act of equivocation.
You know that the narrator doesnât believe this, so why does he let it stand? Because some do not love walls, but others do, and always have. Hence the wall in Berlin, but also Hadrianâs Wall and the Great Wall of China.
To wall off is an ancient human impulse, and there is no use in pretending that weâve transcended that desire. Itâs what we do with that impulse that matters. A demagogue like Donald Trump will use it to his own hateful ends. An artist like Robert Frost will take the same and, listening to the complex rhythms of the human heart, create a thing of beauty.
Nazaryan is a senior writer for Newsweek.
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