Standing Up for Evil: The Price of Knowledge in Frost's "Mending Wall"

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 18^th-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:  

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)

Frost begins by identifying the people with their plants.  “I am all apple orchard and you are all pine,” says the crafty narrator.  Personified as the fruit, he becomes not just the tempter but the object of temptation.  The speaker extends it further when he teases, “here there are no cows.”  No females will intrude on this encounter.

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.”     

Viral Spring #19: Dreams and Visions

                           And afterward. 

                       I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;
               your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
                       your old men shall dream dreams,
                       and your young men shall see visions.  
                                      Joel 2:28

I dreamed that I was fighting for a new America, a better America, in a rebellion that had just been named the "Green Patriotic Uprising" or something like that.  I was in a school gymnasium, waking up at dawn next to a young woman who was my wife or girlfriend.  She told me the name of the uprising; and I said -- OK that's what they call it, now let's go fight it!  I was gung-ho, as they say.   
 

We were to move out at dawn.  My assignment was to run to the front lines pushing my upstairs neighbor, a fellow septuagenarian and a long-time activist, in a wheelbarrow.  She wanted to fight, but had a bad leg and couldn't run.  I grabbed the wheelbarrow with Myra lying down in it and began to run, full tilt along a narrow wooden track, with the rest of the force close behind.  But the wheel got caught in a crack and stuck.  I was holding up the charge, so I worked frantically to free the wheel.  Then  it occurred to me that neither Myra nor I had any kind of weapon.  How did we expect to fight?  

Then I woke up.                    

What Is Art?

Botticelli: Birth of Venus

Readers of this blog may have noticed the slogan above – “All legitimate art is protest .. a demand for a more human world.”   I wrote that in October 2011, at the height of the Occupy Wall Street protest, describing the occupation of Zuccotti Park as “a continuous work of art.”  It was my closing line and while it sounds like a theory, it was just an emotional outburst.  I kept it because I liked it, it had a ring to it.  Now, is it true?  

No one has complained about my slogan, or even questioned it.   But as a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, I felt all along that I should either defend it, or take it down.  After more than a year of rumination and several recent “aha” moments, I have decided it’s my final answer.  I’m sticking with it.