Poetry is eternal. It's purpose is to capture human experience in words that scape off the layers of rust that other words have oxidized onto those experiences. Decades, even centuries later, great poetry doesn't just talk about experience, it evokes experience.
But, even great poems are subject to oxidation. Take Robert Frost's, Mending Wall, for example.
| 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: | 5 |
| I have come after them and made repair | |
| Where they have left not one stone on 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, | 10 |
| 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. | 15 |
| 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. | 20 |
| Oh, just another kind of outdoor game, | |
| One on a side. It comes to little more: | |
| 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. | 25 |
| 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. | 30 |
| 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, | 35 |
| 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, | 40 |
| 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." |
It begins with one very familiar line...
Something there is that doesn't love a wall
and ends with another...
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Because of that familiarity, it's easy to miss the experiences Frost is trying to evoke.
When Frost wrote this poem in 1913, the world was engaged in "the great war to end all wars." When that war was over, the Treaty of Versailles sought to punish Germany and construct "walls" that would prevent war from ever breaking out again.
But, Frost knew that there were forces in the nature of the Earth, and in the nature of human beings, that "doesn't love a wall." He knew that no matter how fervently we might wish it to be true, "good fences make good neighbors" is an empty hope. Mid-way through the poem, he playfully points out our knowledge of this folly when he says:
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!"
Four years ago today, we suffered a tragic attack. Our wall, our invulnerability, was breached. In the ensuing years, we have tried to re-build that wall, to strengthen it, fortify it by, "fighting terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here." I have uttered those words myself. I know their power as a magical incantation: "please let it be so."
But since July 7th in London we know more powerfully than ever that, "something there is that doesn't love a wall." There is no, "over there" and "over here," any longer. If they ever did, good fences no longer make good neighbors.
Yet, we still try to cast the same spell as we attempt to put the stones back in balance; the same way we have for centuries.
And, the experience of folly is just as vivid today as it was for Frost as he and his neighbor walked their wall 90 years ago:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We think we know what we are walling out: "terror," we say. (What an odd notion, to think we can wall out something so fundamental to our nature.)
But, along with Frost, I wonder, what are we walling in?
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