This is an edited version of an article published online by The Explicator, 9/11/2020.
-- By Tom Phillips
Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” contrasts two New England farmers as they meet to repair the stone wall between their properties. While much has been said about their opposing characters, the difference between their farms has barely been noted. The speaker cultivates an apple orchard, his neighbor a pine forest. These are two of earth’s hardiest and most common trees, ubiquitous North of Boston (as Frost titled the 1914 collection in which the poem appears) and profoundly different in their physical properties and symbolic meanings.
The apple tree is small and shapely, a tree of the field, sun-loving, deciduous, blossoming in spring and bearing an irresistible fruit in summer and fall. It was a golden apple that set off the Trojan war, when Paris awarded it to Venus in exchange for Helen of Troy. In Christian tradition, the apple is a symbol of both sin and redemption. The forbidden tree from which Eve ate in the Garden of Eden becomes “Jesus Christ, the Apple Tree” in an 18th-century hymn.
The pine is its polar opposite – tall and straight, a tree of the forests and mountains, a thousand-year survivor bearing hard and inedible cones. In the Bible a member of the pine family, the cedar, is associated with worship of God; Solomon’s temple is hewn from cedars of Lebanon (NRSV, 1 Kings 5). In folklore the pine forest is a dark and forbidding place, a scene of lethal trickery in Grimm’s tales, of murder and mystery in the American folk-song “In the Pines.” In Frost’s own “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the forest is “lovely, dark and deep” --- a path to oblivion (224). If the apple tree is a temptation to life, the pine forest is a temptation to death.
Both pines and apples were part of the everyday world of Robert Frost, the New England farmer. They were also the property of Frost the classical and biblical scholar, who saw his poems as dialogues with the whole history of literature, sacred and secular. In “Mending Wall,” he uses the symbolism of the apple and the pine to underscore the qualities of the two farmers. He also uses it to mimic and challenge a foundational text --- the dialogue between the serpent and Eve:
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| Eve and the Serpent -- Henri Rousseau |
“Now
the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal the Lord God had made.
He said to the woman, “Did God say you shall not eat from any tree in the
garden?” The woman said to the serpent,
“We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said ‘You shall
not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall
you touch it, or you shall die.’” (Genesis 3: 1-2)
On a literal level, all he wants to do is talk – about the absurdity of keeping a wall between an apple orchard and a pine forest. He mocks his neighbor’s fears: “My apples won’t come across and eat the cones under your pines.”
The neighbor won’t bite. For him the wall is not a barrier between trees but between people, a boundary that defines their proper relations. As his father said, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Just as in Eden, it is a father’s unexplained word that sets the limits.
Like the snake, Frost’s apple grower raises the stakes, pointing to his neighbor’s lack of knowledge and curiosity, and the loss of relationship that comes from it: “Before I built a wall I’d want to know /what I was walling in or walling out/ and who was like to take offense.” Just as the serpent tempts Eve with the prospect of wisdom, the speaker offers dialogue as a path to knowledge and understanding, friendship and communion. At this point the stories diverge. The neighbor will have none; he does not “want to know” his neighbor. In Genesis:
“… when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked… ”
Imagine the serpent’s frustration if Eve had simply repeated God’s edict. This is the source of the speaker’s anger as the poem draws to a close. He sees his neighbor as a savage, a stone-age warrior armed with heavy rocks, but using them only to defend his isolation. He remains unchanged by the annual “outdoor game” of fence-mending, and returns to his realm of “darkness … and the shade of trees,” repeating his mantra: “Good fences make good neighbors.”
A few years later in 1917, the Genesis passage comes up explicitly in Frost’s “The Axe-Helve.” It is another tale of two country neighbor this time chopping wood. Here the property line is crossed, thanks in part to the influence of Latin culture in northern New England. The narrator’s French-Canadian neighbor is the provocateur. Looking askance at the narrator’s machine-made axe, he invites him to his house to show off his hand-carved wooden handles.
The speaker accepts the invitation, and the eventual gift of an axe-helve, lovingly finished in the sight of the guest and the Frenchman’s beaming wife. Here, significantly, is a woman. Her English too poor to join the conversation, she rocks in a chair by the hot stove. At one point she rocks so close the narrator fears she’ll fall into it, but she catches herself in time.
The axe-helve is lovely, its “long white body” cut along the natural curves of the wood. Fitting the shaft into an axe-head, the host stands it up – “Erect, but not without its waves, as when/ The snake stood up for evil in the Garden.” The artisan -- not incidentally named Baptiste -- concludes by admiring his creation: “See how she’s cock her head!” The image is blatantly phallic and erotic, but any Puritan qualms the narrator may feel about this tete-a-tete are eased by the presence of the wife, who warms herself but doesn’t fall into the fire. The men then discuss issues of knowledge, and how to get it – specifically, whether the French couple should send their children to school, or let nature be their teachers. No conclusion is reached.
In each of these poems the narrator, like the serpent, implicitly “stands up for evil.” Frost’s thoughtful, articulate speakers stand for the value of knowledge, and they willingly pay its price – to live outside the gates of Eden and toil for a living, wear their fingers rough. As Richard Poirier has suggested, it is in this toil that Frost’s poetry finds redemption. To mend a wall, to craft an axe, to do things together and do them right are the works that reconcile neighbors to each other and God.
Beyond this is what Poirier calls “the work of knowing.” In these poems and others, Frost describes life as a quest for knowledge -- carnal, practical, intellectual, spiritual, etc. Readers may recognize it as a Puritan view of life: a walk in the wilderness, with obstacles and pitfalls and paths diverging, where choices seem to make “all the difference,” as in Frost’s 1915 “The Road Not Taken.” In “Mending Wall,” choices may be implied by the two men’s properties -- pine forest and apple orchard. But in the end no judgment can be rendered against either.
Readers may identify with the loquacious apple grower and prefer his inquisitive, teasing style. But in giving the best line and the last word to the tight-lipped forester, Frost also stands up for his way, providing room for silence and solitude, and the longevity of proverbial wisdom.
--Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips
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