Who Sets the Boundaries Within Which You Live Your Life?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 offence.
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."
- Robert Frost, "Mending Wall"
"... Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
ReplyDeleteWhat 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. ..."
If this opus is quoted in reference to the travails of Cliven Bundy v. The Feds, I'd have to say the government makes it its business to wall us IN and reducing our options by constantly eroding our constitutionally noted God-given Liberty under the dubious guise of "aiding and protecting" us. At the same time, however, the government walls us OUT by taking more and more of what is supposed to be OURS and holding it for purposes that do not serve us well 00 if at all.
The government wants to have it both ways, and because they have superior "firepower" we are now virtually powerless to chart our own course and fulfill our own destiny.
I believe the feminine instinct to do everything possible to eliminate RISK and ensure "SAFETY" is largely responsible for this state of affairs.
It may be just a coincidence, but it just so happens that the country has been headed for the rocks at an ever-increasiung rate of speed ever since women got the vote.
The "liberation" of so-calld "oppressed" groups has spelt the DOOM of the society built under aegis of WHITE, PROTESTANT CHRISTIAN or AGNOSTIC M-E-N.
God gave males a penis, because He obviously untended for MEN to take the LEAD. Women most obviously are built to be the passive RECEPTORS of MALE Initiatives. ;-)
BTW, just as point of interest:
ReplyDeleteI never realized until today that Mending Wall -- a poem I've known for over fifty years -- is written in good old iambic pentameter. That was never discussed in our high school and college English classes.
I wonder if the teachers didn't realize it, themselves, or if they just didn't consider it important enough to emphasize?
I am hardly against "free verse" having enjoyed -- and written -- a good deal of it, myself, -- but the subtle use of formal, complex, highly stylized techniques that do not make themselves nakedly apparent is evidence of a highly disciplined, acutely sensitive intellect.
ALL the truly important music is written within the confines of very strict, highly disciplined, pre-determined patterns. That this does not seem obvious to the casual listener or average "music lover," and instead appears to be spontaneous is part of what it takes to "prove" the composer's genius.
No matter what we like to think we know about something that may be dear an familiar there is always much more we could learn about it.
Possession of abundant CURIOSITY may be the greatest virtue we could hope to own.
Ancient Mycenaeans were often referred to as Cyclopeans.
ReplyDeleteThey say that the "desert" surrounding the Nile river was a necessary element in establishing Egyptian civilizations, as the king's "subjects" had no where to flee to (hence all the Biblical "wanderings in the desert".
So yes, we can build walls (ala Great Wall of China) or Hadrian's Wall to both keep something in (that which belongs to "us" and/or to keep out that which is NOT "us" (aka - "the other").
The walls of Sparta was her army. Of Athens, it was stone. Of Britain, her "oak" hulls. America, its' the technology inherent in her "air superiority".
ReplyDeleteTerminus was the mythical Roman enforcer of "just boundaries". Mercury was the mythical "transcender" of the duality inherent in boundaries.
ReplyDelete