HOLY MOSES…Mike Pence, you are NO poet: “In our state, we coined a phrase, ‘Good fences make good neighbors!’”

Guess what? Robert Frost just called and owns that sentence and wants it back to complete his famous poem “Mending Wall”! Read it for the true meaning if for no other reason?

Your defense of the Donald makes me constantly giggle…geesh? CNN morning show hosts must still be laughing?

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From Wikipedia…

“Mending Wall” is a poem by the twentieth century American poet Robert Frost (1874–1963). It opens Frost’s second collection of poetry, North of Boston, published in 1914 by David Nutt, and it has become “one of the most anthologized and analyzed poems in modern literature”.

Like many of the poems in North of Boston, “Mending Wall” narrates a story drawn from rural New England. The narrator, a New England farmer, contacts his neighbor in the Spring to rebuild the stone wall between their two farms. As the men work, the narrator questions the purpose of a wall “where it is we do not need the wall”. He notes twice in the poem that “something there is that doesn’t love a wall”, but his neighbor replies twice with the proverb, “Good fences make good neighbors”.

Despite its simple, almost folksy language, “Mending Wall” is a complex poem with several themes, beginning with human fellowship, which Frost first dealt with in his poem “A Tuft of Flowers” in his first collection of poems, A Boy’s Will. Unlike the earlier poem which explores the bond between men, “Mending Wall” deals with the distances and tensions between men. The poem explores the contradictions in life and humanity, including the contradictions within each person, as man “makes boundaries and he breaks boundaries”. The poem also explores the role of boundaries in human society as mending the wall serves both to separate and to join the two neighbors, another contradiction. “Mending Wall” also plays with the theme of seasons as recurring cycles in life, and contrasts those cycles with both physical and language parallelism as the men walk along the wall, each to a side, and their language stays each to a side. Then, in “Mending Wall”, Frost meditates on the role of language as a kind of wall that both joins and separates people. Finally, Frost explores the theme of mischief and humor in “Mending Wall”, as the narrator says halfway through the poem, “Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder/If I could put a notion in his head”. Mending the wall is a game for the narrator, though in contrast, the neighbor seems quite serious about the work.

Yup.

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Mending Wall
Robert Frost, 1874 – 1963

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.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
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.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
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.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
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.
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.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. 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.’