Robert Frost's "Mending Wall"
[Trivia: When it comes to films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, which . . .
is the only one with a 2-letter title?
is the only one with no letters in the title?
is the most recent sequel to have been nominated?
is the only one to take its title from a line in Psalm 22?
Hint: none of these ultimately won the award, and all of these were released within the last 25 years.]
Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” is one of his best well-known, rivaled only by the all-time-great likes of “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” It’s long enough that I won’t reproduce the whole thing here, but you can read it here or, better yet, listen to the poet himself read it here. If you just need a quick refresher, it’s about a New England farmer whose stone wall has been disturbed and dislodged by the earth, swelling under the frozen winter, and who walks along it with his neighbor replacing the fallen stones. According to Wikipedia, this was Frost’s stone wall:
The neighbor, after all, has an inherited saying: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The speaker starts a conversation about it:
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 . . .
Two entire lines are repeated in the poem: the neighbor’s proverb “Good fences make good neighbors” (line 27 and 45) and the speaker’s observation about the earth’s destruction, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall . . .” (lines 1 and 35).
This poem also gained some notoriety in the 1995 SCOTUS opinion Plaut v. Spendthrift Farm, Inc. The great Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for a 6-member majority, while Justice Stephen Breyer, concurring in the outcome of the case but differing in the reasoning behind it, wrote a concurrence in the judgement that traded points with the majority opinion. The legal question turned to the separation of powers—or, as Linda Greenhouse reported at the time,
In recent years, separation of powers questions have figured in decisions over the power of independent counsels, and Congressional efforts to curb Presidential power to send troops into combat, a debate that remains unresolved.
The decision today, Plaut v. Spendthrift Farm, No. 93-1121, is not necessarily a shift by the Court. Rather, it is a reminder that in the view of the Court today as much as at any time in the past, the separation of powers remains an essential part of the constitutional system requiring judicial vigilance at the highest level.
Neither of President Clinton's two Supreme Court appointees subscribed to Justice Scalia's view. Justice Stephen G. Breyer agreed with the majority, in a separate opinion, that the law at issue violated the separation of powers but he objected to Justice Scalia's analysis as too rigid and unnecessarily broad.
Responding to Justice Scalia's image of high walls between the branches, Justice Breyer said: "The unnecessary building of such walls is, in itself, dangerous, because the Constitution blends, as well as separates, powers in its effort to create a government that will work for, as well as protect the liberties of, its citizens.
Justices Scalia and Breyer engaged in a duet of quotations from the poetry of Robert Frost. To Justice Scalia's statement that "Separation of powers, a distinctively American political doctrine, profits from the advice authored by a distinctively American poet: Good fences make good neighbors." Justice Breyer replied:
"One might consider as well that poet's caution, for he not only notes that 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall,' but also writes, 'Before I built a wall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out."'
The two references to Frost appear almost at the very end of the respective opinions, throwing heritage and emotional ballast to the preceding legal arguments.
I think neither of these uses of “Mending Wall” is perfect, and I’d like to divide these uses of Frost’s poetry by two. But, sorry I cannot take both and have one opinion, both get something right.
Referring to “good fences make good neighbors” as the “advice authored by” Frost is extraordinary sleight-of-hand. It certainly isn’t “Frost’s advice” although it is technically true that it is advice and he authored it. In the context of the dialogue of his poem, for the advice is spoken by someone undermined by the speaker much like the frozen earth undermined their wall, the advice is not issued at face value.
And yet, to Breyer’s point, in this case, it seems that we know what we are walling out and walling in: the three respective powers of the government. For Frost is not anti-wall. He simply wants to know what it is he’s walling in or walling out; cows, perhaps. The case before the Supreme Court was hardly about erecting a wall for the heck of it, as it seemed to perhaps be in the poem. Even if Scalia strains to attribute his idea to Frost, he has perhaps the better claim of applying that line of poetry to the circumstance.
~
Answer:
is the only one with a 2-letter title: Up
is the only one with no letters in the title: 1917
is the most recent sequel to have been nominated: Top Gun: Maverick
is the only one to take its title from a line in Psalm 22: The Power of the Dog