What’s The Origin Of
Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?

The origin of “good fences make good neighbors” is likely a letter that Reverend Ezekiel Rogers of Rowley, Massachusetts wrote to Governor John Winthrop in 1640:

Touching the buisinesse of the Bounds, which we haue now in agitation;
I haue thought, that a good fence helpeth to keepe peace betweene neighbours;
but let vs take heede that we make not a high stone wall, to keepe vs from
meeting.[1]

Benjamin Franklin, a figure known for dispensing pearls of wisdom, included the following version of this aphorism in his Poor Richard’s Almanac for the year 1754:

Love thy Neighbour; yet don’t pull down your Hedge.[2]

Frost Trips The Reader
Into The Boundless

Robert Frost’s poetry can be tricky. And that’s no accident. Commenting on his poems in a letter from 1927, Frost is keen to acknowledge his “innate mischievousness.” As well as the fact that he employs it to “trip the reader head foremost into the boundless…  Forward, you understand, and in the dark.”[5]

We see this waggishness in his work “The Road not Taken,” which he wrote as a joke for his friend Edward Thomas. It’s also at play in Mending Wall. This poem’s narrative is deceptively simple. But don’t let that fool you.

It’s about two neighbors who come together every spring to mend the wall between their two properties. The wall is in need of repair after winter snows have taken their toll and hunters have disrupted its stones in an effort to flush rabbits out of hiding.

The narrator and his neighbor begin replacing fallen stones, and mending the gaps that have formed in the wall over the winter. As they do so, the narrator appears to be trying to convince his neighbor that they don’t really need the wall:

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.”

What the narrator says next reveals the key to reading this poem. Stop and ask yourself, in whose head does the mischievous Frost hope to plant this notion?

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors?

But his neighbor continues the task of replacing the wall’s missing stones. And the poem closes with the lines:

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.”

Keep Frost’s
Love Of Irony In Mind

Robert Frost’s poetry is loaded with irony. And the incongruity at the heart of Mending Wall lies in the fact that a structure whose purpose is to separate, is the very thing that calls the narrator and his neighbor out of their respective dwellings following winter’s thaw.  Bringing them together to engage in what sounds rather like a game, or at the very least a tradition:

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.

So, why do good fences make good neighbors in Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall?  Not because they maintain boundaries. Rather, because they bring folks like the narrator and his neighbor together. And that’s quite the ironic twist on an aphorism typically invoked to mean the exact opposite.

#Aphorisms Unplugged        #Robert Frost      #The Art of Reading