Saying we should “secure the southern border,” John Berry echoed the familiar Robert Frost poem, “Mending Wall”: “Good fences make good neighbors” (“Democrats wanted border barrier,” Star-Advertiser, Letters, Jan. 12).

Readers of the poem often assume Frost shared this sentiment. But in the poem it is uttered by Frost’s neighbor, with whom the poet does not agree. He thinks of asking his neighbor: “Why do they make good neighbors?/…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.”

That something is ground frost, that breaks down stone walls in Frost’s New England winters; and the implicit pun on the poet’s name emphasizes his own position.

Mark Wilson

Makiki

Click here to read more Letters to the Editor.