My friend and I were tossing around ideas from the morning news, and we came inevitably to the subject of walls. I recalled the old saying:

‘good fences make good neighbours’

He looked at me, confused, and asked, ‘where did that come from?’ Having grown up in Southern Europe, he had missed that pearl of wisdom. ‘It must be a farmer’s thing’, I thought, so I looked online to see where it came from.

Happily, the search was sidetracked by the intriguing poem Mending Wall by Robert Frost. In it, the author and his neighbour are conversing as they mend the stone wall between their fields, a spring ritual to repair what nature has crumbled in previous months. The neighbour lives by the old adage, ‘Good fences make good neighbours’, even though there is nothing they really need to keep in, or out of each other’s spaces.

A wall is seldom a neutral space. It materialises the inherent tension of existence and coexistence. Frost captures the tense dynamics between nature and human constructs in the first line of the poem,

‘Something there is that does not love a wall’

They seem an essential human fixture. We build walls almost instinctively … almost.

But walls carelessly placed weigh heavily in the soul, individually and collectively.

The same walls that protect us and create intimacy can also cut us off from what we need most. Too often, they reflect broken trust and diminished lives. Imposed walls can wither hopes, or ignite the human spirit to defiance and risk in overcoming them.

If we accept Frost’s invitation at the end of the poem to ‘go behind the saying’, we must contend with a deeper instinct, that relentless, swelling vitality that disregards our efforts at division.

Andrea, Feb 2019

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

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