[Part II: Frost Heaves, a Coda, if you will, to the February 23, 2024 post on the human costs of building walls.]
It would be unfair to leave my parsing of "Mending Wall" (in my February 23rd post) without giving a bit more voice to a few elements that shed additional light on Robert Frost's thinking, his philosophical leanings, and his superb craftsmanship. The appearance of narrative and descriptive simplicity in "Mending Wall" is a Frost trademark; that is a primary reason we all find his poems so attractive. But that very simplicity embodies a more complex, nuanced set of attitudes and ideas. Frost as "frost heave" -- personal belief as 'force of nature' -- is just one example of Frost's layered technique.
It's easy enough to note that "good fences make good neighbors." Often quoted, this sentiment is both a traditional cliche that smacks of medieval thinking and an unexamined home-grown proverb. We might think it is the notion we are expected to embrace because it is up-front, straightforward, and plain-spoken at the end of the poem. It is, to use a modern figure of speech, the "take away."
Well, yes and no. Noting Frost's low opinion of walls takes the idea one step further, the notion enhanced by his descriptive language regarding his stone-age neighbor who resolutely embraces the fence/good neighbor ideal. That was the gist of my last post.
If we understand Frost's opposition to fences making good neighbors, we ought to be surprised by his, or the narrator's, participation in the annual ritual of rebuilding the wall. Since neither neighbor needs the wall for land or crop protection and since neither needs the wall as a repository for stones pulled from fields being prepared for crops, the exercise of setting tumbled rocks back onto the rock wall has no immediate agricultural, privacy, or security function.
Frost is right, the wall is not necessary between civilized people living next to each other. Civilized neighbors don't need walls.
What the annual rebuilding of the stone walls does require, oddly enough, is cooperation, a willingness to compromise, and an understanding of working together. Good fences that bring us together to work in peace toward a common goal, shared labor, and maintaining a land feature that enhances both domains. In other words, it is an activity that benefits both while costing little more than a few hours, a bit of labor, some wear and tear on the hands, and a desire to keep the peace.
I won't push this notion far enough to suggest that Frost had Christian leanings, but I will argue that the narrator in "Mending Wall" was acting under the broadly understood Christian principle of "love your neighbor as yourself."
Frost's wall -- in this instance not a wall built out of fear nor out of a misplaced sense of political expedience -- constitutes a shared wall, restored for the common good through common labor and a spirit of good will. A wall meant to bridge, if you will, to unify rather than to divide. A wall that allows both neighbors to maintain their identities, even as they remain congenial with one another. Now that, I would argue, is an extraordinary example of how we might find common cause in an age characterized by rigidity, misplaced virtue, orchestrated fear, and, frankly, arrogance.
