I have a friend who dwells far from where my meatself abides. I miss him terribly. My friend is a writer and professional editor. He loves literature and he is wise in its ways. He has opened my eyes to many things, among them the greatness of Robert Frost as a poet. Certain prejudices had closed me off from Frost's art. I thought of Frost as a verbal Norman Rockwell, full of snowy New England scenes and so on. I am grateful to my friend for taking this stupidity from me. Sometimes I wonder what my friend sees in me.

I am particularly fond of "Mending Wall". Here is the poem in its entirety.

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 outdoor 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 offense.
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.'

President Greer once surprised me by speaking about Frost in a faculty meeting. In the midst of a lot of dreary talk about enrollments and budgets he started waving around a large green book. I could tell from the back row that it was a copy of COMPLETE POEMS OF ROBERT FROST, an old hardbound copy from the Sixties like mine. He often has a surprise or two for such occasions." I just have to read you something from this," he said. "I was in Augusta, Georgia yesterday on my way back to give this speech. And I read this poem. And it moved me. It really moved me."

Then he began to read "Mending Wall". It was a fascinating and dramatic reading, full of crescendi and decrescendi, tempo changes and shifting intonations. Frost's New England clarity covered with a syrup of south Georgia vowels and the powdered sugar of his homiletic delivery. But it was good. A poem quoted in its entirety at a faculty meeting. And a very good poem at that! Then the president made his point. Each of us teachers is a mender of walls. We have to work together and be diligent and worthy workers.

At first I was indignant at this flat-footed interpretation of a poem I considered elusive and dialectical. Why does the poem begin with the something there is that doesn't love a wall, and then repeat it toward the end, if the poem was about how we should all be good wall-menders? Isn't it important that it is all a game and we no longer need the wall? And isn't the neighbor said to live in darkness because he cannot see behind his father's saying about good fences? Isn't this really a poem about the folly of building walls, or anything else, without considering circumstances anew and the darkness of living life by cliches?

After a little more thought, I saw the president's interpretation was better than my instant reaction. It is mysterious, the something that loves not walls. It is elemental, being connected both with Winter frost-heave and the mischief that comes to the poet in Spring. But it is not necessarily just or good. The poet describes the challenge he imagines making to the neighbor as a product of "the mischief in me." The wall is a plausible symbol for learning and culture, or whatever it is that teachers set to mending each Fall. Retarding the arrival of that oblivion Time would bring to all achievements.

What then about the neighbor's darkness and the need to raise the mischievous question, "Why?" In the haste of my first reaction I thought of this why as a rhetorical question the meaning of which was, 'There is no longer any point and hence the practice is foolish.' Now I see the why is a genuine request to reconsider the point of the practice. Upon reconsideration a new why emerges, one that is surprising, almost paradoxical: whereas fences used to make good neighbors by keeping them (and their cows) apart, now fences make good neighbors by bringing them together in the harmless game of fence-mending. A change in historical circumstance, pastures give way to orchards and pine groves, has changed the significance of a social practice. It changed from being conservative, keeping the pastoral culture from falling into conflict, to being creative, being an occasion for the poet and his neighbor "beyond the hill" to constitute their relationship. It is, after all, the poet who initiates the mending.

Read like this, "Mending Wall" is a good symbol for what I try to do. Perhaps people once sought wisdom directly from the old books I read, but it is not in Plato, for example, that I seek to learn how to live. It is in the game of talking about Plato that I hope to make the free connection with others that is living aright. It is the game of mending this useless wall that I want my students to enjoy. Though the wall is useless, the mending (interpretation) is everything.

Well, no. Not everything. I have left out the music of the poem and hence, all that makes it beautiful. Beyond interpretation lies a moment of appreciation in which thought and feeling are one and in which the divided soul anticipates redemption.