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Something there is that doesn't love a wall�
Good fences make good neighbors.

4 ½





This second collection of sixteen poems was published the year after Frost's first one. It must be the case that most, if not all, were written in the years preceding, and were just waiting to be assembled together by the writer and loosed on the world. The title refers to the small-town, rural New England, the state of New Hampshire. Frost had a farm here which his grandfather had bought for him, at which he and his family lived for several years before moving to England for a couple years. While in England the first two collections of his poetry were published.

My friend Alan comments below about my rating of 4. I've raised it a bit, but like an Olympic judge, I would like to leave room for a higher rating for a later collection. Was this really Frost's greatest collection? Maybe so. (I guess I'm also still a bit bemused by the poetry I found here.)

Below, I quote 3 poems complete, and offer very short descriptions of the others. Sixteen is not a large number of poems � but there are a lot of poetic lines here, many of the poems being over 100 lines long.

One thing I realized after reading a few of them, was that these are poems of the particular. Much poetry is of a more general nature, advancing themes of a summer day, or a failed relationship, etc. More later.

The opening poem is one of Frost's iconic poems, having a few lines that are familiar to millions. These are in bold below.

MENDING WALL

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 apples 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."

The bolded lines are both very familiar to me, hardly any of the rest of it. But they second two seem to directly contradict the first. I'm not sure that I ever really associated the two different sentiments with a single poem. But the poem, being about walls, seems general enough � though couched in the particular first-person narrator.

Now, however, come the short stories. Pages long. About particular folks. Folks who speak to one another, poems made of nothing but dialogue. Who ever thought of such a thing. Homer?

THE DEATH OF THE HIRED MAN
166 lines, dialogue between a man and a woman.

THE MOUNTAIN
109 lines, dialogue between two men who don't know one another.

A HUNDRED COLLARS
180 lines, with three speakers: a hotel clerk, and (mostly) two men forced to share a room.

HOME BURIAL
116 lines, man and wife. This one has the feel of a Lydia Davis ominous tale � man and wife pried apart rather than brought together by a life changing event,



The next is mostly a monologue, on memory and truth.

THE BLACK COTTAGE

WE chanced in passing by that afternoon
To catch it in a sort of special picture
Among tar-banded ancient cherry trees,
Set well back from the road in rank lodged grass,
The little cottage we were speaking of, 5
A front with just a door between two windows,
Fresh painted by the shower a velvet black.
We paused, the minister and I, to look.
He made as if to hold it at arm’s length
Or put the leaves aside that framed it in. 10
“Pretty,� he said. “Come in. No one will care.�
The path was a vague parting in the grass
That led us to a weathered window-sill.
We pressed our faces to the pane. “You see,� he said,
“Everything’s as she left it when she died. 15
Her sons won’t sell the house or the things in it.
They say they mean to come and summer here
Where they were boys. They haven’t come this year.
They live so far away—one is out west�
It will be hard for them to keep their word. 20
Anyway they won’t have the place disturbed.�
A buttoned hair-cloth lounge spread scrolling arms
Under a crayon portrait on the wall
Done sadly from an old daguerreotype.
“That was the father as he went to war. 25
She always, when she talked about war,
Sooner or later came and leaned, half knelt
Against the lounge beside it, though I doubt
If such unlifelike lines kept power to stir
Anything in her after all the years. 30
He fell at Gettysburg or Fredericksburg,
I ought to know—it makes a difference which:
Fredericksburg wasn’t Gettysburg, of course.
But what I’m getting to is how forsaken
A little cottage this has always seemed; 35
Since she went more than ever, but before�
I don’t mean altogether by the lives
That had gone out of it, the father first,
Then the two sons, till she was left alone.
(Nothing could draw her after those two sons. 40
She valued the considerate neglect
She had at some cost taught them after years.)
I mean by the world’s having passed it by�
As we almost got by this afternoon.
It always seems to me a sort of mark 45
To measure how far fifty years have brought us.
Why not sit down if you are in no haste?
These doorsteps seldom have a visitor.
The warping boards pull out their own old nails
With none to tread and put them in their place. 50
She had her own idea of things, the old lady.
And she liked talk. She had seen Garrison
And Whittier, and had her story of them.
One wasn’t long in learning that she thought
Whatever else the Civil War was for 55
It wasn’t just to keep the States together,
Nor just to free the slaves, though it did both.
She wouldn’t have believed those ends enough
To have given outright for them all she gave.
Her giving somehow touched the principle 60
That all men are created free and equal.
And to hear her quaint phrases—so removed
From the world’s view to-day of all those things.
That’s a hard mystery of Jefferson’s.
What did he mean? Of course the easy way 65
Is to decide it simply isn’t true.
It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.
But never mind, the Welshman got it planted
Where it will trouble us a thousand years.
Each age will have to reconsider it. 70
You couldn’t tell her what the West was saying,
And what the South to her serene belief.
She had some art of hearing and yet not
Hearing the latter wisdom of the world.
White was the only race she ever knew. 75
Black she had scarcely seen, and yellow never.
But how could they be made so very unlike
By the same hand working in the same stuff?
She had supposed the war decided that.
What are you going to do with such a person? 80
Strange how such innocence gets its own way.
I shouldn’t be surprised if in this world
It were the force that would at last prevail.
Do you know but for her there was a time
When to please younger members of the church, 85
Or rather say non-members in the church,
Whom we all have to think of nowadays,
I would have changed the Creed a very little?
Not that she ever had to ask me not to;
It never got so far as that; but the bare thought 90
Of her old tremulous bonnet in the pew,
And of her half asleep was too much for me.
Why, I might wake her up and startle her.
It was the words ‘descended into Hades�
That seemed too pagan to our liberal youth. 95
You know they suffered from a general onslaught.
And well, if they weren’t true why keep right on
Saying them like the heathen? We could drop them.
Only—there was the bonnet in the pew.
Such a phrase couldn’t have meant much to her. 100
But suppose she had missed it from the Creed
As a child misses the unsaid Good-night,
And falls asleep with heartache—how should I feel?
I’m just as glad she made me keep hands off,
For, dear me, why abandon a belief 105
Merely because it ceases to be true.
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes.
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favour. 110
As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish
I could be monarch of a desert land
I could devote and dedicate forever
To the truths we keep coming back and back to.
So desert it would have to be, so walled 115
By mountain ranges half in summer snow,
No one would covet it or think it worth
The pains of conquering to force change on.
Scattered oases where men dwelt, but mostly
Sand dunes held loosely in tamarisk 120
Blown over and over themselves in idleness.
Sand grains should sugar in the natal dew
The babe born to the desert, the sand storm
Retard mid-waste my cowering caravans�

“There are bees in this wall.� He struck the clapboards, 125
Fierce heads looked out; small bodies pivoted.
We rose to go. Sunset blazed on the windows.

BLUEBERRIES
105 lines, dialogue with every couplet or triplet of lines (irregular) rhyming!

A SERVANT TO SERVANTS
178 lines, one person's thoughts. Very strange.

AFTER APPLE PICKING
Short (43 lines) inner monologue.

THE CODE
108 lines, starts and ends as dialogue, but in between one relates a long personal story.

THE GENERATIONS OF MEN
212 lines. Another short story, in dialogue of two. With an end of some promise, but who can know?
Introduced by a narrator, then becomes a dialogue between strangers, man and woman who discover they're related.

THE HOUSEKEEPER
216 lines. You forget you're reading a poem, but when you think, you know it is a poem, you're not just reading sentences. Dialogue, with the person being discussed joining in near the end.

THE FEAR
94 lines, similar to the previous, but even creepier dialogue, with a third joining in at the end.

THE SELF-SEEKER
228 lines, mostly a dialogue; a third comes, then goes. This one took me a long while to figure out who the male speaker was, who the female.

THE WOOD-PILE
Short. 40 lines, very little speaking, maybe four lines of monologue.



And finally, the second book-end, the book-ends offering little clue to the iconoclastic (?) poetry in between.

GOOD HOURS

I had for my winter evening walk �
No one at all with whom to talk,
But I had the cottages in a row
Up to their shining eyes in snow.

And I thought I had the folk within:
I had the sound of a violin;
I had a glimpse through curtain laces
Of youthful forms and youthful faces.

I had such company outward bound.
I went till there were no cottages found.
I turned and repented, but coming back
I saw no window but that was black.

Over the snow my creaking feet
Disturbed the slumbering village street
Like profanation, by your leave,
At ten o'clock of a winter eve.

As if to cap all the enigmatic talk with a straightforward, "That's that!"



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