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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
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WARNING : (Grumble -e).
I have seen yet once again a use of Robert Frost's words in his poem "Mending Walls" to imply that Frost was in favor of walls ... Arrgh!... His *neighbor* said "Good fences make good neighbors" not Frost ...
Anyway I am braced for your potshots but please read the poem before hitting that New Post button :
(end grumble, begin poem -e)
red highlight added
"Mending Walls"
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 outdoor 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.'
From The Poetry of Robert Frost by Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem.
Copyright 1916, 1923, 1928, 1930, 1934, 1939, 1947, 1949, © 1969 by Holt Rinehart and
Winston, Inc. Copyright 1936, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1951, 1953, 1954, © 1956,
1958, 1959, 1961, 1962 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1962, 1967, 1970 by Leslie Frost
Ballantine.
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,156
old hand
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old hand
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Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
I always liked those lines.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Posts: 13,803 |
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.
Say what you will, he *did help set the wall back up.
Then there was the farmer who built his stone wall 4' high and 6' thick, so "when the wind blows it over it'll be taller than it was."
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Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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An instructor in English once said that nostalgia is the most powerful theme in American literature. One of the most potent sources of nostalgia for me is to drive through the many parts of New England where stone walls so laboriously built now divide forest into meaningless squares, and the cellar walls only remain of the years of labor some long ago farmer put into them building the long gone house and barn.. I have ploughed with horses, and given them a breather while I trudged with a frost heaved stone to add it to the wall. And thought of the now wasted labor my predecessors expended on the same task, now pointless.
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Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Posts: 5,400 |
RE:
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.
among mental health professionals, it is often stated that the reason "asylum" have fences, isso that those out side can have a clear demarkation of who is sane and who is insane.
i think there is something very human about "catagories" and some catagories are rated higher than others.. Sane is rated higher-- but not all societies have the same definition of sane -- (think of Joan of Arc-- now days, her hearing voice would have her labeled "insane").
i think the highest acheivement of person is to destroy these learned catagories.. to take down the fences-- to recognize the Something there is that doesn't love a wall,.
i like to think myself free of prejudice.. but i keep finding areas and ways that i behave predjudice.. it is a constant battle..i know i have to make an effort to not keep up the fences, to not remain in the dark. we can chose to "keep up the fences" or not. the last few lines that WOW has highlighted-- say it all to well..
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.'
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
"Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,'
Actually those two lines don't make much sense. The walls were built primarily to get rid of stones. They seldom kept anything either in or out.
Dear Bean: The glaciers cleared Canada of stones, and dumped them on New England. To be able to plow, the stones had to be gotten out of the way. It was not nice to dump them on your neighbor's property, so the most efficient way of disposing of them was to put them at the very edge of the property, where only after many years did they become a wall, seldom of any use to keep animals in. Unless you were lucky enough to get a lot of flat ones. The wall in the poem was obviously built astride the property line, of round ones that were hard to make stay put, when the frost heaved things. That's why the walls had to be worked on each spring when there was little else that could profitably be done. And both neighbors had to be present to avoid squabbles about the property line being shifted. That's what the curmudgeon neighbor was hinting at.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Good fences make good neighbors
I love Robert Frost, and have been enamored of his work since about the age of 12. I always took this to be a metaphor for knowing where to draw the line for respecting the privacy of your neighbor, friend, etc., no matter how close you are. Knowing where to grant each other their own space makes for the healthiest of relationships. And, yet, for all that, Something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down. That wants the intimacy of friendship or love to have the courage to shed all barriers, if only for a moment. And, of course, that can never be...for without that pause of spacial mystery the sense of intimacy recoils and scurries away. Only natural, only human. They truly are...Mending Walls.
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old hand
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old hand
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> They truly are...Mending Walls
.. openly and happily building constructs between one another is a favourite human past time, hey.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Good post, ot! You broaden out the idea in a great way.
So the image of walls is an ....phor? [neverdidbothertoabsorbthedifference,lifeistooshort e]
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old hand
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old hand
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wwh alludes to when the frost heaved things...
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.
I don't think it was his preference, but it seems that occasionally the Frost *did* have to heave some things...
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