Walls

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."

Robert Frost’s Mending Wall

In my daily meanderings I came across this wall. I still have deep New England roots, and the wall brought back memories of my childhood home on 14 acres of land. The property was totally surrounded by a Robert Frost stone wall. In one stretch blueberries grew, enough to gather pail-fulls for ice cream, pancakes and muffins. Another part separated our pine grove from the road. Squirrels ran up and down the stones nimbly, and my brother and I would run along the ridge too, but no where as nimbly. Sometimes we would catch site of a snake slithering into his hidey hole among the stones and then we would find another place to play.

But as I walked next to this French wall, I wasn’t thinking so much of my childhood, but how people build walls. Some are real: Berlin, Gaza, the Mexican-American border. Some are not nationalistic, but are still physical and shut off neighbourhoods or neighbours.

Others are psychological but no less real, putting up distinctions, e.g. my religion is different than yours, I have a better car. My mother was great at putting up walls and eliminating wonderful people from her life because of a perceived misdemeanour such as putting milk on the table in a bottle instead of a pitcher.

Some use walls to meet their personal agendas, setting people up for situations where the one coming to the wall can’t win…but in winning may lose an honesty or a worthwhile human sharing.

Walls can shut in or shut out, but somehow it seems to me, although they define spaces, in defining those space they shut out the possible. As a writer, it is probably good, because walls make for good conflict in stories, and as Frost knows, walls make good poems. What it doesn’t make is good relationships.