Was LASN's Walls/Fencing commentator ("Fencing Off the Beaten Path," January 1996) asleep during Freshman English when Robert Frost's poem, "Mending Wall" was discussed? Frost did not extoll "the virtues of mending walls and fences to keep people from converging on their differences," but questioned the very need for barriers as the poem continued, "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,/ And to whom I was like togive offense."

Frost then concluded the poem with a description of the neighbor to whom he attributed the quotation, "Good fences make good neighbors."

"...I see him there,/Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top/In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed,/He moves in darkness as it seems to me,/Not of woods only and the shade of trees."...

Misusing lines of poetry out of context is as ludicrous as plopping down bits of Victorial gothicism in a contemporary design.

Sincerely,

Susan Crook

Salt Lake City, UT

04/96