Mending Walls Can Save Lives

Robert Frost’s poems (as indicated by “Mending Wall,” which I wrote on yesterday) have the wonderful ability to move from the very specific to the universal.  One begins with a small incident (two neighbors fixing a stone wall) and, before one knows it, one is thinking deeply about the world–barriers between people, roads not taken, childhood memories.

I can report, from a 1995 seminar I taught in Slovenia for English teachers, that Frost travels well.  This I expected.  What caught me by surprise, however, was the woman whose life lined up very closely with the literal situations that Frost describes.  She didn’t have to make much of a metaphorical adjustment.

I’ve told the story before but I want to reflect on it a bit more.  The teacher grew up in the Bela Krajina region of Slovenia, which is known for its white birches.  Therefore she became excited when she saw that Frost had written a poem about birches.  But that wasn’t all.  As a child, like Frost as a child, she had been “a swinger of birches.”

She reported that Frost got the process exactly right.  She too had kept her poise


to the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

And then she too had

flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking [her] way down through the air to the ground.

Her story was wonderful, but there was more to come.  Her recollections turned from nostalgia to dark tragedy when we read “Mending Wall.”

The poem brought back memories of how, when she was older, her father had been killed in a boundary dispute with a neighbor.  There had been an on-going quarrel about where the line between their two farms.   Then one day the man clubbed her father to death with a shovel.

No longer able to run the farm, her mother had to take the children and move to Ljubljana, the country’s capital.

From what I could tell, this woman was a wonderful teacher—certainly she was kind and open—and I find myself wondering what these poems did for her.  “Birches,” which is filled with images of life’s heaviness, nevertheless draws on happy childhood memories to serve as a counterweight.  Throughout her life, did she instinctively draw on this wisdom and then find it validated in the poem?  When life became too much like a “pathless wood,” did she think back to swinging on birches to help her through?

And what about visiting, through “Mending Wall,” painful memories about the death of her father?  The poem has images that must have recalled for her the horrifying moment: “a stone grasped firmly by the top/ In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.”  But there are also images of two men agreeing on a clear boundary line.  There is no warring over a few meters.  No death.

For one thinking back to childhood trauma, “Mending Wall” might be consoling rather than depressing.  There is a something to be said about clear boundaries, even though nature chafes against them.  It makes sense, for such a reader, that the speaker of the poem would want to collaborate with a neighbor in a yearly ritual to reaffirm the line that divides them.  There is wisdom as well as myopia in tradition.

For me, meanwhile, there are few joys comparable to encountering such responses.  Not only do the stories triggered by these poems widen my vision of the world, but they also reveal heretofore unperceived complexities in the poems.  The dialogue between poetry and life grows richer and richer.

In the final line of “Birches,” Frost writes, “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”  One could also do worse than be a teacher of poetry.