Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?

One of my favorite poets, Pulitzer-Prize-winning American Robert Frost (1874-1963), in his poem “Mending Wall” has his poem’s farmer-narrator comment on a rustic neighbor’s use of the adage, “good fences make good neighbors,” while the two men work in parallel on opposite sides repairing the rock wall that defines, divides, delimits their two properties. Frost’s poem calls our attention to two aspects of the wall: it protects and it impedes.

In our inter-personal relationships, we have walls, formal and informal barriers, that serve to protect us, and yet they can also prevent us from getting close to others.

Even without walls or fences, property has boundaries, whether drawn on maps due to surveyors’ work or merely as the acknowledged distinction between what is ours, yours, theirs. Rules indicate what belongs to us and what does not.

Rules are like boundary lines. Without rules, there is anarchy. Dating, going steady, becoming engaged, marrying…each of these “games” has its rules, explicit or implicit. Without the rules, there is no game; our inter-personal dance becomes disordered, and we may lose our partners.

Manners, etiquette, convention–these keep most people’s behavior within generally expected limits, within the lines, within the rules, so one usually knows what to expect. We break these rules at our peril. Sometimes we find the rules’ apparent artificiality too false; however, when we act spontaneously, regardless of the rules, we risk being, for example, excessively candid or overly demonstrative. The Confucian tradition emphasizes correct behavior and formal relationships among people. The Taoist tradition respects the need for moderation and modesty, but Taoism finds good reasons, at least in private, to go beyond propriety.

Americans abroad have often been viewed as too rambunctious, too lacking in self-control or proper etiquette. They threatened the “walls.” In contrast, the stereotype of Asians in America is one of excessive formality, tending to give the “walls” too much deference, sometimes thereby seeming inscrutable.

I often wish my Chinese-American wife would be more open, more willing to push through the barriers that her modesty, humility, and propriety erect but that block candid conversation. Still, I am thankful for the things she has not said that might have hurt others’ feelings. She, no doubt, has occasionally found me to be too “open.” I regret that my tendency to see and depict life largely as a comedy has made my mood out of place in some conversations or caused my wry comments to be misunderstood and unwelcome.

In love, friendship, neighborliness, and in business affairs, we appropriately adjust the heights and placements of our walls, but we should be careful to stay on our own side, not be “transgressive.” Recently, I interviewed nurses to supplement our staff [they give around-the-clock skilled nursing care at home to my wife and to my mother]. One interviewee did something seemingly trifling immediately after the interview, covertly using something of ours without asking permission. I silently ruled her out as a possible hire. Little things–tell-tale signs, “tells” in the jargon of high-stakes card-playing–reveal important truths: I thought that if we hired her, she was unlikely to stay within our boundaries. Each of us may do such things occasionally, inadvertently revealing something we prefer to hide.

Inattention to others also creates a barrier, such as the one surrounding the person engrossed in reading or playing or talking or texting on his smart-phone, perhaps interacting with someone far away and yet oblivious to those nearby. As we shift our attention from such devices to the people close to us, we break down this psychological wall.

Frost’s “Mending Wall” poem starts with, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Walls fall apart without continual mending. Disorder increases. The poem’s narrator is ambivalent about their shared wall, even though he is collaborating in repairing it. He sees the wall as necessary in some circumstances, but not in this one, forming a needless barrier between his stand of apple trees and his neighbor’s grove of pines. His neighbor disagrees, echoing his father’s advice that good fences keep one neighbor from intruding on another.

I am not a big fan of blank verse [“tennis without the net,” it breaks some of standard poetry’s rules], yet I do like this rhythmic but unrhymed poem, an exception to Frost‘s usual poetic style. The literary “wall” of requiring rhyme and rhythm in a poem makes the achievement of thoughtful beauty more difficult and more impressive when successful. Perhaps Frost is implicitly commenting in “Mending Wall” on a desire on his part to be free sometimes of the limits of conventional poetic forms. Like the “good girl” attracted to “bad boys,” Frost breaks his own usual rules of rhyme, sampling thereby the “wild side” of blank verse.

We are left with this: fences are useful, but alienating. The “better” the fences, the more complete the separation of one person from another, and this effective separation means the pair will not likely become good friends, merely remain “good neighbors.”

Frost’s narrator concludes:

Women and men, through speech and behavior, protectively erect barriers to keep from getting unwanted attention from those they expect not to be of interest to them. Building and maintaining such walls too high, too solid, too formidable keeps us from getting to know some people who would have made our lives richer.

Good fences may make good neighbors, but something there is that does not love a wall.

Dr. Cooper is a retired scientist, now a writer, author and writing coach. His first book, Ting and I: A Memoir of Love, Courage and Devotion, was published by Outskirts Press in 2011 and is available from Outskirts Press, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble, in paperback and ebook formats, as are a memoir he co-authored, The Shield of Gold, and a memoir he edited, High Shoes and Bloomers. On Twitter, he is @douglaswcooper. His blog is http://douglaswinslowcooper.blogspot.com.