February 7, 2019
By Alexandra Petra

“Good fences make good neighbors.” (click here)

— Mike Pence, defending the need for a wall on the United States’ border with Mexico

This old saying appears in the poem “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost. However, in the poem, it was ironic. I have taken the liberty of updating the poem so Mike Pence can quote it without embarrassment:

Something there is that wants to build a wall,...

I visited the exact place most folks speak of about when referring to the Robert Frost fence. It isn't all that. The most interesting part of the fence is it's intended use for the Frost family. Frost said of his farm with a fence.

"I might say the core of all my writing was probably the five free years I had there on the farm down the road a mile or two from Derry Village toward Lawrence. The only thing we had was time and seclusion. I couldn't have figured on it in advance. I hadn't that kind of foresight. But it turned out right as a doctor's prescription."

--Thompson, Lawrence, ed. Selected Letters of Robert Frost. New York, Holt, 1964.

Robert Frost was an interesting man. He taught at Pinkerton Academy (click here) in Derry, New Hampshire. He had six children;  Elliot (1896–1900, died of cholera); daughter Lesley Frost Ballantine (1899–1983); son Carol (1902–1940, committed suicide); daughter Irma (1903–1967); daughter Marjorie (1905–1934, died as a result of puerperal fever after childbirth); and daughter Elinor Bettina (died just three days after her birth in 1907). Only Lesley and Irma outlived their father.

He loved his children and his employment was about a mile or so walk from his home. The farm house is a large house and it accommodated all the people it comfortably sheltered from any New Hampshire winter.

But, the children of Robert Frost didn't know the limits of fences. The fence at the farm house is only for the front yard where the children would play while young.

The children were each assigned a constellation in the night sky over their home to study, read about and write about. In addition, they never had a bed to sleep in they could say was only their bed. The children were allowed to sleep anywhere they wanted within the bedrooms assigned to the children. The exception, of course, was that of any infant at the time that was assigned the crib.

Robert Frost believed in liberal views of child rearing and to his way of thinking he wanted his children to feel safe and loved; that included each other as siblings.

The most interesting aspect of the house was the backyard which sprawled for quite a distance and was bordered by forest. There were no walls to speak of in that yard. Just a stone border fence about a foot and a half high. Robert Frost did not believe in keeping people out with a fence. Not at all. He believed in keeping people inside the fence, especially when their view of the world and a street were unsafe.

I am sorry to say Vice President Pence's analogy is grossly wrong. Perhaps he really should do a study of a subject to understand the depth of authorship, before he wrongly uses it for his own purpose.