Walls and Neighbors, Robert Frost

Welcome to Poetry Friday! This week we are hosted by writer and photographer Buffy Silverman at https://buffysilverman.com. Thank you, Buffy, for hosting.

What is Poetry Friday? Find out at: https://www.nowaterriver.com/what-in-the-world-is-poetry-friday/

Because of all the current fighting and all the walls real or metaphoric between people, I’m not the only one thinking about neighbors and how human beings get along.

I looked for a poem to share and I stumbled upon this famous 1914 poem by Robert Frost.

MENDING WALL

BY ROBERT FROST

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 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 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.’

Though some might say, after reading the poem, that “fences make good neighbors,” it seems that there are no firm answers to the question about the utility of walls in Frost’s poem. Below is an example of a useful wall:

This wall of rock protects a town from the ocean.

But the utility of a wall is not always clear.

At the beginning of Frost’s poem, a wall between the narrator and his neighbor has fallen down by natural events such as frozen winter ground. Also hunters have created holes in the fence. So the narrator and his neighbor are rebuilding it even though, according to the narrator, there is little reason for a fence between the two properties. No cattle to contain, no apparent purpose, yet they are repairing it as they do every year.

Later in the poem, the narrator suggests that before building a wall, one might ask, “what was I walling in or walling out?” Who am I offending?

But people are different. To the neighbor it’s not a complicated question at all and he believes as his father did, “Good fences make good neighbors.” He shares no thoughts beyond this, doesn’t question the wisdom behind the wall.

The narrator, on the other hand, thinks more deeply about fences and walls and that it might be advisable to consider why? before building one.

What do you think?

It was helpful to read the commentary about the poem by Austin Allen here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/150774/robert-frost-mending-wall

Below is a silly poem I wrote a while ago about a mean neighbor when we were children.

OUR MEAN NEIGHBOR

Seven in all 
he grabbed this year,
and hid our balls
in his cellar bier.

New and old
from our favorite sports, 
my neighbor is 
a nasty sort,

grabbing them faster
than we can guard—
Oh!  Preventing this
is very hard!

You see, his garden,
full of leafy chard,
is down the hill 
from my back yard,
              
So might he be
more pleasant to me,
if it weren’t for the forces
of gravity?

© Janice Scully 2023

Perhaps, because of the forces of gravity, a fence at the bottom of our yard might have made for a friendlier neighbor.

Thank you Buffy for hosting! Have a great weekend.

A wall at the Castelo de São Jorge in Lisbon.