Poet, fiction writer, and essayist, Sydney Lea, addresses the artful business of capturing the mercurial nature of truth in poetry, “rambling” as he likes to refer to his disarming style of mixing personal narrative with deft thinking about the “playful” nature of poetry. In his essay for Plume this month titled “About Mending Walls…Sort Of,” he exegetes Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” as his working example of poetry’s magic in suspending two opposing ideas simultaneously, while also writing about his own Frost-like experience as a “neo-native” Vermonter. “I’d venture the act of restoring the stone is not unlike the act of putting a poem together,” he surmises in his analysis of Frost’s extended metaphor about both human relations and the “shifting stones” in poetry. “As I have suggested,” he continues, “that act involves yoking seeming dissimilarities together– but without violence. It is a tricky, maybe even an evanescent gesture.” But there is more to successful poetry’s ultimate intent and art than just “yoking dissimilarities” he argues. He concludes with a credo that arises from what he as a poet, like “so many,” aspires to effect beyond craft itself.
–Chard DeNiord
About Mending Walls…Sort of
– in which your essayist meanders between curmudgeonliness and self-reproof
The COVID-19 scourge has moved a horde of people to my home state, a development that has produced a number of thoughts in me. I will record them here, in the hope they’ll cohere by the time I’m through. Oh, I will ramble. Forgive me: it appears to be a habit in my old age.
I first replicate a well-known poem by a fellow, far more famous Vermont poet.
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 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 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.’
I’ll return to that crusted jewel of a poem in due course.
Twenty years back, the Twin Towers attack encouraged a northward migration akin to the COVID ingress I’ve reported. Studies indicate, however, that within a few years the majority of those earlier newcomers returned to the zones they’d abandoned. No doubt many found they missed their own social circles; a hard winter and/or mud season or two likely drove some back; the dearth in much of the state of what they too carelessly labeled culture surely played its part as well.
The influx of new people prompted by the virus is even more copious than that earlier one, and it may be that this time the recent arrivals (some of whom bought houses sight unseen) will linger in significant numbers.
Like a majority of Vermonters now, I was born elsewhere myself. I’ve lived in this neighborhood for a long time, I have helped to raise five children here, I have seven grandchildren all living in Vermont– but despite all that, I remain what the wonderfully wry storekeeper in my first upper New England town called a “neo-native.” If truth be known, though I was somewhat improbably, even miraculously appointed poet laureate of my adoptive state in 2011 and lately–to my greater astonishment–granted its highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, I have still dwelt just thirty of my fifty-three north-country years within its borders.
My first two towns in the region were in fact across the Connecticut River in New Hampshire. On both sides of that flow, I have at various times since 1968 been a school board member, a library trustee, a village trustee, a deacon and a moderator of my church, a conservation committee member, and so on. But I believed that I had to live in any new community for at least five years before seeking any of those positions. Indeed, I waited until others urged me to take them; I did not run for anything of my own accord.
I resisted talking about everything my prior towns and this one “needed.” After all, the village where I now live was founded in 1763, twenty-eight years before the Republic of Vermont became a state and twenty-five before there was a United States of America. In short, it has persisted through good times and bad without help from me, my fancy education be damned. And I had no interest in transforming it from what it was to what I’d fled, as has happened in my first New Hampshire town, whose ethos, no matter its lovely hills and valleys, is entirely suburban now, its efforts to recapitulate institutions like Old Home Day cringe-worthy self-parodies.
I abandoned that place after more than a decade, then moved yet again as what a local friend calls The Volvo Line crept and still creeps farther north by the year. I did so because culture is not exclusively what hangs on the wall of home, gallery or museum; not what is written or composed; not grand institutions of learning or whatever else. The term just as properly refers to the customs, social arrangements, accomplishments, and behaviors of a particular, identifiable group. My family’s resettlement in Robert Frost’s north of Boston was founded on my respect and affection for its culture in that sense.
Such inclination had long ago led me, after many years of formal schooling, to look for work in these environs. I was lucky enough to find it, and will be lucky enough, I pray, to take my last breath here. My wife and I, at all events, have reserved grave plots in our village cemetery, right next to a treasured neighbor couple, dead in their middle nineties three winters back, avatars– if ever there were– of echt old Yankeedom. (We are perhaps inordinately pleased that we’ll be so situated.)
Now I’m well aware that social and demographic change is inexorable; it’s only that as a rule I feel such change should be organic, not imposed wholesale by people who “know better.” It is for such a reason that I was reminded of the Frost poem I quoted shortly ago, in which a veteran neighbor insists on maintaining a stone border between himself and the poem’s speaker.
Like me, Frost was a non-native Vermonter, born in San Francisco and bred in New Hampshire, and I think he presents the younger character of his poem as a similar figure, one bemused here by his neighbor’s hidebound traditionalism. After all, this particular dividing wall has lost its practical raison d’etre.
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.
The poet deliberately presents his I-figure as one who considers himself as wry and rational, maybe even enlightened. He wonders why his neighbor is so firmly clutched by the dead hand of tradition.
And yet how dead is that tradition? Well, entirely, ludicrously so– from the presumably younger man’s perspective. I think, however, that Frost also illustrates the speaker’s limitations. He regards his neighbor as “an old stone-savage,” one who “moves in darkness …,/ Not of woods only and the shade of trees./He will not go behind his father’s saying….” And yet, as the speaker may fail to see, the older man has endured for generations in what was an extremely harsh context, one that drove many of his peers to the fertile plains in search of better farming conditions. Frost himself, of course, could never cut it as a farmer, nor for quite a number of years could he live full-time in his adoptive commonwealth. So even in 1914 the poem may contain its own self-rebuke. Maybe the traditionalist neighbor is not a mere primitive (though there is plenty of that in him); he’s also a kind of Ancient of Days, not dissimilar to Wordsworth’s famous leech-gatherer. It remains to be seen whether the speaker will have equal stamina.
Now let me pause to consider what I ranted about at the outset , and what I surmise it may have to do not only with “Mending Wall” but also with lyric in general. My earlier, bristly defense of this region’s traditional culture notwithstanding, it would be vain of me to pretend I really and truly belong to it. As a venerable local farmer once put it, jovially but pungently, “You ain’t never pulled tits at 5 o’clock in January.” Further, there are lots of reasons to caution myself about sentimentality when I assert love for old-fashioned society in this bailiwick. The essences of that society, like the true Vermont accent, are rapidly disappearing, but in recording nostalgia for them I must remind myself of their undeniable warts.
The old Yankees could be clannish to the point of xenophobia. They could be narrow-minded, stubborn and, sadly, even racist in the rather rare moments when such bigotry found stimulus. My late novelist friend Howard Frank Mosher’s chilling A Stranger in the Kingdom dramatizes the hideous treatment by vile and vituperative Vermont citizens some decades back of an African-American pastor new to his town. I have become more sensitive to such a matter, having a black son in law and three grandchildren of color. That family moved to the college town of Burlington, which is akin, say, to Missoula, Montana or Austin, Texas– “such a nice town…and so close to Vermont,” as one old-timer quips. Utterly cosmopolitan, it scarcely resembles the society so often evoked by Robert Frost, which is exactly what drove my daughter’s family to move there. They sought to escape the bigotry and downright hostility they encountered in a quainter community.
For four years, I served as Vermont’s poet laureate, during which I made it my mission to visit as many of its community libraries as I could–not as a reader but as one who wanted to discuss what he thought lyric could accomplish that other modes of discourse could not. The makeup of my audiences ranged from the Burlingtonian to, precisely, the far quainter and more bucolic. In almost every case, however, I applied Carl Jung’s contention regarding psychology –“it is never a matter of either-or but of either-and-or”– to the poems I discussed. My claim was that lyric could simultaneously consider two notions, and often more, even ones diametrically opposed to one another, without lapsing into mere muddle, that this was in fact its glorious distinction.
Frost’s own “The Road Not Taken” is an even more conspicuous instance of my thesis than “Mending Wall.” It is forevermore recited at graduations, retirement parties, and so on as illustrative of “rugged Yankee individualism,” and needless to say, it does contain a fair dose of that. But why, then, is it not called “The Road Taken”? Why do people persistently ignore lines such as the following?
as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Rugged individualism? One might just as plausibly say the poem presents an act of pure whimsy.
The poet seems to acknowledge that he’s not at all sure of the distinction between the two possibilities himself. Either-or is inadequate, even impossible…and yet ambiguity and multifariousness strike me not as frustrating but as precious.
But back now to Mending Wall.” Let’s reconsider the chore its two characters share:
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….
The older I have gotten, pretty old at that, the more I know how little I know. Hence the more I believe in the value of being humble. To my mind, lyric at its best is often a dramatization of such humility; it understands not only the inevitability but also the virtue of uncertainty. Thus in “Mending Wall” does Frost mildly rebuke both the intransigent traditionalism of his aged neighbor but also the presumption of his younger, self-presumably brighter companion.
There is, I conclude, a lesson I can learn myself here: having begun these scattered musings with a wistful but truculent defense of north country culture, I can, without entirely relaxing my attachment to those old mores, understand that there will be another, inescapable angle of vision– nay, many angles–that might be applied to it. In one regard, there will always be a wall between our own convictions and those of other people, so it is doubtless best to govern our impulse to pronunciamento.
I have always been wary of over-allegorizing, and I’m all but certain that the allegory here is mine, not Frost’s (though one never knows with that sly old devil)– wary as I am, I’d venture the act of restoring the stone is not unlike the act of putting a poem together: as I have suggested, that act involves yoking seeming dissimilarities together– but without violence. It is a tricky, maybe even an evanescent gesture:
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…
Any poet, I suspect, longs to cast poetic spells. But we can learn from the likes of “Mending Wall” that none –no person or faction or school– has a sure hold on anything like truth. By my lights, our poems should hint, even if obliquely, at the many variables impinging upon them.
From one perspective, the whole process of balancing conflicting energies in a lyrical poem is, yes, something of a game, a matter of play. But like so many, I strive to turn such play into a successful if momentary casting of a spell; it’s an effort that our iconic poet adumbrates in another place:
… (Y)ield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future’s sakes.
©
