MICHELE NORRIS, host:
One of the most controversial elements of the House and Senate's immigration bills is a proposed wall between the United States and Mexico. The House bill calls for a 700-mile wall and the Senate has proposed fencing about half that length. That difference will be a key point in negotiations between the two chambers.
The debate reminds commentator Jay Keyser of a Robert Frost poem about a stone wall between two farms and two different views of what a wall signifies.
JAY KEYSER reporting:
"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." These are the opening lines of Robert Frost's poem Mending Wall. If they don't sound familiar, you may recognize the closing line.
Good fences make good neighbors.
KEYSER: Those are the words of a farmer who insists that each year he and Frost walks the border that separates their land, closing the gaps in the wall that have mysteriously appeared, the topping stones that have somehow disappeared. Frost's poem about two men walking either side of a dividing line is a parable of human history, a tale of wall builders and those who would just as soon see them crumble.
History is full of walls. Think of Hadrian's Wall, ordered by Hadrian, Emperor of Rome in 122 A.D. in a fruitless attempt to keep the Barbarians of Scotland at bay. Today the wall is little more than a pile of occasional stone scattered across the waste of England. Most of Hadrian's Wall disappeared into nearby cottages built by farmers unconcerned with the (unintelligible) that gave rise to such a bonanza of building materials.
Or there is the Orelian Wall built in the third century to encircle Rome and protect it from the gathering hordes. Now it does duty as one side of a cemetery. The Majounu(ph) Line was built by the French after World War I to protect them from the Germans. Today the Majounu Line is more imaginary, a feckless attempt at protection, as World War II so clearly demonstrated. The Berlin Wall mostly exists in small chunks, souvenirs in the homes of thousands of faceless collectors.
The only wall that I can think of that has survived the ages is the Great Wall of China. It stretches about 4,000 miles from one end of China to the other and stands as one of the whitest elephants the world has ever seen. Tourists can't resist it. The only thing it can keep out are rabbits.
And still nations build walls. Why should that be? I suppose the answer is that sometimes a wall is just a wall and sometimes it's a barrier. Ordinary people find walls useful. They hold up roofs, they fence in gardens. They keep out pests. But too often what nations build are not walls, but barriers. They keep out the unwanted. They keep in the unwilling.
In his poem, Robert Frost sees the wall as a barrier that keeps him and his neighbor strangers. Frost's neighbor, the farmer, sees it as useful, an amenity between them evoking distance and ensuring civility or at least lack of the complications that attend human interaction. I suppose it really comes down to this. Do we build barriers or do we build walls? Do we keep our neighbors at arm's length or do we keep the door open for a visit.
In other words, it's either the farmer's view, good fences make good neighbors, or it's the poet's, something there is that doesn't love a wall.
NORRIS: Jay Keyser is a Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at MIT.
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