Walls

When I was in school, we had to memorize lines of poetry for a grade.  You could pick whatever poems from the list you wanted to learn, and how many ever lines you wanted to say depending on the grade you were satisfied with.  (Almost everyone chose “The Duck” by Ogden Nash for eight of their lines.  Because I was forced to listen to my classmates repeat it over and over, I still have that silly poem memorized all these years later.)

But, snob that I was, I preferred poems with a little more intended meaning to them, like those of Robert Frost.  I memorized the ever-popular "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken".  But then for some masochistic reason, I decided I simply must memorize "Mending Wall".  (I can promise you none of my classmates went near Mending Wall.)  It was long.  It didn’t rhyme.  And what the heck did it mean, anyway?

I’m not sure I really had any idea then, but it was compelling to me anyway.  It still draws me today, although now that I’m grown up I think I understand it a bit better.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall...

And then Frost goes on to describe a scene in which he and his neighbor proceed to counter that sentiment by rebuilding the broken wall on their property line.  Time, the weather and other people had all contributed to huge gaps in the rock wall between the two neighbors; so each spring they walked along the wall, each on their own side, to fill in the holes.

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.

Apparently it wasn't easy to rebuild and maintain the wall.

Frost comments there is a huge section of land that doesn’t even really need a wall, for there is a natural boundary there already...two different types of trees that will never intermingle. His neighbor is uncomfortable with even the hint of not needing a wall and hence the famous line:

He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.

Frost isn’t so sure.

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors?’

Frost points out they have no livestock they are trying to contain.  What are they working so hard to wall in or wall out, anyway? The neighbor seems stuck in a darkness from something other than the tree shadows as he insists, as his father did before him, that the good fences are what makes the neighbors able to get along.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.

And there is something in many of us that is terrified of the cracks.