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:
“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.”
