Link to “Mending Wall.”
Image credit: The Washington Post
“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”
― Robert Frost“I am not a teacher, but an awakener.”
― Robert Frost
Crumbling stones, yelping dogs, apple orchards—in “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost captures New England’s essence. But what more did the poet intend? Perhaps, to investigate the purpose of the fences constructed by man. When read in the context of the 20th century’s political pandemonium, the poem is a reflection on far more than the ritual repair of an ordinary wall. And yet despite the analytical effort spent deciphering Frost’s objective, a broadly accepted, definitive interpretation has proven elusive. Published in 1914, the poem was warped and wielded by ideologues—reactionaries and liberals, isolationists and universalists—to persuade the public of their wisdom. Its threaded iambs and message, understood however contradictorily, inspired millions.
“Mending Wall” opens with an oblique reference to “something that doesn’t love a wall,” that industriously “spills its upper boulders,” and creates cracks in its facades. The poem’s early-spring setting suggests the force is frost, a layer of ice pushing the wall’s component stones apart. The allusion to his own name would not have escaped the poet. But the poem’s puzzle is not yet complete. The narrator himself questions the “something’s” identity. Contemplating how he should describe it to his neighbor while performing repairs, he considers whether “Elves” would be accurate. “But it’s not elves exactly,” he concludes. His reference to the mystical creatures implies that the energy—intrinsic to the plentiful pines and fallen apples—is ineffable. The natural world is silently breaking the barrier imposed upon its pasture, symbolically rejecting the unnatural tribalism and avarice that walls enable.
Paradoxically, mending the wall offers the neighbors an opportunity to connect and converse. A ritual meant to fortify a structure that keeps their plots apart brings the pair of farmers together. Frost seems to suggest that separation requires mutual effort: both sides must agree to be kept apart, as the repeated use of “we” indicates. Even so, the maintenance of fences allows for harmonious consensual connection. Its maintenance is just “another kind of outdoor game,” worthless, perhaps, but harmless. “Good fences,” after all, “make good neighbors,” not sworn enemies. The form of separation the poem endorses is one sustained through peaceful collaboration, like the borders between E.U. members, rather than violently imposed segregation.
Frost himself appears uncertain of the poem’s message. While the poem begins with “Something…that doesn’t love a wall,” it ends with a repetition of the neighbor’s saying: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The reader is left with a defense of walls rather than a compelling iconoclastic thesis. “Mending Wall,” however, does inspire questions… without catalyzing revolution. Thoughtful queries are how change begins, and harmful practices are discarded. Frost illustrates how traditions can be examined to inspire broader, society-wide investigation.
That ambiguity proved useful. In Ronald Reagan’s 1987 address, imploring his soviet counterpart, General Secretary Gorbachev, to “tear down” the Berlin Wall, the American president echoes Frost’s language. To President Reagan and fellow cold warriors, Mending Wall could have read as a denunciation of Eastern isolationism and an endorsement of Western liberalism. The “savage” neighbor repeating his father’s phrase “Good fences make good neighbors” is both an unenlightened conservative and a misguided radical. “Mov[ing] in darkness,” he mends an outdated barrier that scars the pristine New England landscape without considering its purpose.
The narrator, on the other hand, is a thoughtful liberal who carefully considers their springtime ritual: “Why do they make good neighbors?” Despite his reflection, the narrator remains involved in the wall’s reconstruction, wearing his “fingers rough with handling” fallen stones. Moreover, our narrator is the one to let “his neighbor know” when the time has come to “set the wall between them once again.” The laudable “progressive” not only participates in a practice he questions but also initiates the mending process. He is ambivalent but remains complicit.
If the breaking of walls defined the late 80s and 90s, the 2020s have, thus far, been characterized by their construction. Political polarization, trenches across the front lines of armed conflicts, and hurdles, both physical and legal, to immigration have divided us. Reading Frost’s piece is an opportunity for collective reflection on what we are “walling in or walling out.”