Another Layer of Frosting

In response to Alicia's last post, I have to say a bit about one of my favorite of Frost's poems, Mending Wall:

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 neighbour 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 out-door 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 neighbours."

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Why do they make good neighbours? 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 offence.

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 neighbours."

Now, this version is taken from the Literature Netwrok website, so it isn't quite as Frost laid it down. It's not separated into stanzas, but I believe the wording is right.

People come away from this poem with scores of deep meanings about governments, war and peace, and even anarchy. Now I don't claim to be an expert on Frost, but I hardly find evidence enough in a Formalist look at this piece to go so far as to suggest any of these meanings. I offer here a bit of an essay I wrote about Mending Wall.

"The title of the poem helps give light to a deeper understanding of the poem’s theme. The title suggests a meaning of more than a chore of mending a fallen wall. Mending can be viewed as an adjective describing the wall as a means of mending friendships. Frost does not attach the two words with an article (Mending a Wall, or Mending the Wall) which allows the title to serve a more suggestive purpose. Indeed, in examination of the neighbor’s old family saying “Good fences make good neighbors,” it might be suggested that it is not the separation that a wall provides to distance people that makes them “good neighbors.” It could be the opportunity provided to spend time working together which serves to strengthen a friendship and draws neighbors together."

This take on the poem shows a certain irony in the narrator's observation of his neighbor, "He moves in darness as it seems to me". The whole time, his neighbor repeats the saying hoping that the narrator will finally understand. It is really the narrator who could be said to be "in the dark" about the notion of what makes good neighbors. People usually read through it siding with the narrator thinking how daft is the "old-stone savage" neighbor. Now when I read it, I see so much of youthful inexperience in the narrator, and so much of age-earned wisdom in the neighbor.

I find more in the structure and elements found in the text to support this sort of a take on the poem. It's a lot more interesting than an essay on politics.

~Steven