The Importance of Walls, by Anthony Esolen

By Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine, Aug. 28, 2024

Dr. Anthony Esolen is the author of 28 books on literature, culture, and the Christian life, whose most recent work is In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John. He and his wife Debra also produce a new web magazine, Word and Song, devoted to reintroducing people to the good, the true, and the beautiful. He is a Distinguished Professor at Thales College

Beyond the matter of real estate, boundaries—walls—are indispensable for art, for science, for healthy social interchange, and for the moral and religious life itself. They are, in fact, constitutive of creation.

“Good fences make good neighbors,” says the gruff fellow in Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” as he and the speaker engage in what seems like a pointless ritual every year after the spring thaw. They walk along the wall between their properties and replace the stones that have fallen, some by the boisterousness of hunters, but most by the mysterious working of nature. For, the speaker says, “Something there is that does not love a wall, / That wants it down.” And why should he and the neighbor have any wall? “There where it is we do not need the wall,” says the speaker, as “He is all pine and I am apple orchard.”

But in fact, it is not good for apple trees to have pine trees too nearby; the pine needles can make the soil too acidic, and pines are great users of water. I am not sure whether the apples tend to work any harm on the pines. In any case, the speaker looks down on his neighbor a bit, saying, as the man carries a large hunk of rock, that he appears like “an old stone savage, armed.” But the neighbor repeats the saying that his father used to say, and they are the last words in the poem, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Frost thus leaves the two attitudes in tension. …

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