Welcome to the June 2016 Poem of the Month!
We are in silly political season, and I guess all the talk of building a wall between the US and Mexico made me think of this poem. “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost is such a staple of the American Poetic Canon that I was certain I must have selected it at some point in the 12 years I have been sending out poems of the month. A quick search surprised me – I hadn’t. So I set off to remedy that.
It has been years since I read this poem, and it speaks to me now in ways that I don’t know that it ever did before. As many times as I’ve read this poem in my life, it just seems like a very different poem than the one I read in middle school, or high school, college, or in my 20’s or 30’s.
On one side of the fence, the thinker and poet – pondering the meanings of walls and seeking understanding. On the other side, the neighbor blindly holding steadfast to his father’s mantra that “Good fences make good neighbors.”
I think Frost and I would have gotten along really well. I smiled as I read his lines prodding at his neighbor about walls:
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors?
This is exactly the kind of context we should all be searching for today – not blind acceptance of the entrenched ideas that walls (literal and figurative) make good neighbors, but rather asking deeper questions to really get to the root of the idea or issue.
I think the frustrating part is how dogmatic people sometimes hang onto their beliefs, and aren’t really interested in engaging in the conversation:
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
I guess the reality is that the poem hasn’t really changed – I have. And this is where I feel a kindred spirit with Frost in this poem – there is a deep calmness and rationality in his assertions that
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.’
Enjoy!
Stewart
Mending Wall
by Robert Frost
(1874 – 1963)
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.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
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,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. 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.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
