Laconic Response

THE LACONIC RESPONSE:

SPARTAN AND ATHENIAN MINDSETS

IN ROBERT FROST'S "MENDING WALL"

Matthew Davis

"'";Tlaere is one line in Robert Frost s"Mending Wall" that practically everybody knows, even those who have never read the poem: "Good fences makegood neighbors." This is one of only a few lines in English poetry that havecaptivated the unlearned aswell as the learned. For the most part, the unlearnedseem to think of the line as sufficient unto itself; if they know the rest of the

poem at all, this generally does not prevent them from treating the line as anencapsulation of the poem's meaning, or "message." The learned critics look at

the line from a different perspective, or rather from a set of different perspec

tives,not always agreeing with one another. Nevertheless, several of them have

characterized "Good fences make good neighbors" as a laconic expression.1 By

"laconic" they no doubt mean that the line is pithy and pointed. However, in

this essay I would like to suggest that the proverb-citing neighbor in "Mending

Wall" is not only laconic in this modern, generic sense but also in the older, root

sense of the word, meaning "like an inhabitant ofLaconia—a Spartan," and that

Frost may well have thought ofhim in this way. Although it may sound implau

sible to suggest that a poem about two farmers repairing a wall in rural New

England could have anything to do with a rivalry between ancient Greek city-

states, I will argue that ideas about Athens and Sparta may well have been circu

lating in Frost's head when he wrote the poem and that an understanding of

these ideas can deepen our understanding of the speaker, his neighbor, and the

very different oudooks they articulate from either side of the wall.

Many readers, misled by the rustic settings and plain language of Frost's

poetry, do not recognize the extent of Frost's knowledge of the classics. When

Frost was asked about his knowledge of classical languages, he replied that he

had probably read more Latin and Greek than Ezra Pound, though Pound was

more ostentatious in his display of learning. Nor was this mere boasting. Frost

began studying Latin and Greek in high school and continued his classical

1T.R. S. Sharma, Robert Frost's Poetic Style(Delhi, 1981), p. 67;John C. Kemp, Robert Frost andNew EngIand:The Poet as Regionalist (Princeton, 1979), p. 22.

Literary Imagination 7.3 (2005): 289-305 © 2005 Association of Literary Scholars and Critics

LITERARY IMAGINATION

studies at Dartmouth and Harvard. Indeed, Frost explained that the classics were

what drew him back to college a second time: "When I came back to college

after running away, I thought I could stand it if I stuck to Greek and Latin and

philosophy. That's all I did in those years."Later, when a student "ofmodernistic

tastes" was arguing the case for "untutored inspiration" and cited Frost as an

example of "natural ability without classical background," one of Frost s old

Greek professors happened to be in the room. He excused himselfand returned

with a grade book which recorded Frost s name and, next to it, an "unbroken

series" ofA's in Ancient Greek.2

Frost commented on his own debt to the georgic and pastoral traditions.

About "The Black Cottage,""The Housekeeper," and "The Death ofthe Hired

Man" (three poems in the same collection as "Mending Wall"), he once re

marked: "Vergil's Eclogues may have had something to do with them" (Newdick

409). Frost's knowledge ofancient Greek history and literature appears to have

been substantial. His library included volumes by Aristophanes, Aristotle,

Callimachus, Epicurus, Heliodorus, Heraclitus, Herodotus, Hesiod, Homer,

Lucian, Plato, Plutarch, Sophocles,Thucydides, and Xenophon, as well as mod

ern tides such asJ. B. Bury's History of Greece, M. I. Finley's World of Odysseus, and

Paul Elmer More's Socrates.3 And we have reason to believe that these books

were not for decoration only. Reginald Cook recalls him reading Plutarch, and

we know he taught and lectured on Plato. Frost criticized Thucydides for not

being "sorry enough for the destruction of the most beautiful city that ever was

[Athens]," and asked which historical figure he would most like to dine with, he

namedTheocritus.4 His letters and conversation were dotted with references to

Greek mythology, as well as Greek history and geography. He mentions Greek

provinces and city-states, including not only Athens and Sparta but also less

2James F. Knapp,"The Greek World and the Mystery of Being," in Robert Frost: Studies of thePoetry, ed. Kathryn Gibbs Harris (Boston, 1979), pp. 165fF.;Jay Parini, Robert Frost:A Life (NewYork, 1999), p. 65; Robert S. Newdick, "Robert Frost and the Classics," Classical Journal 35(1940): 406ff. Also see Selected Letters of Robert Frost, ed. Lawrance Thompson (New York, Chicago, San Francisco, 1964), pp. 401-402; Robert Frost:A Life, p. 46; Jeffrey Myers, Robert Frost:ABiography (Boston, New York, 1996), p. 22; Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays (NewYork, 1995), pp. 932,935. All citations to Frost'spoems are by line number and from this LibraryofAmerica edition.

3David W.Tutein, Robert Frosts Reading:An Annotated Bibliography (Lewiston, N.Y., 1997).

4 See David W.Tutein under named authors; Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays, pp. 938, 953—54;Robert Frost: A Life, p. 65.

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well-known locales, like Arcadia, Kos, Patmos, and Boeotia. About this last lo

cale, Frost wrote a curious bit of doggerel:

Boeotian

I love to toy with the Platonic notionThat wisdom need not be ofAthens Attic,

But well may be Laconic, even Boeotian.At least I will not have it systematic.

Nobody would tag this as one ofhis great poems. It is one of those later poems

in which Frost seems somewhat self-indulgent, more interested in editorializing

and joking around than in trying to create great lyric poetry. Many critics see

these later poems as embarrassments, but they do at least give us a window on

Frost's thinking, and sometimes, as in the case of"Boeotian," the lesser poems

can help us see further into the greater ones.

It is obvious that "Boeotian" is metaphorical, perhaps even allegorical, in

the sense that it refers not only to ancient city-states but also to certain trans-

historical characteristics that they exemplified.The starting point of"Boeotian"

is a set of ideas, or, if you prefer, stereotypes, about ancient Greek city-states.

Athens was known for its philosophy and arts, for its intellectual achievements

and its chaotic but prolific democracy, Sparta for its military prowess and tradi

tional ways, and Boeotia for its thick air and proverbially stupid people. Athe

nians were confident that their city-state was the most intellectually sophisti

cated place around, and, from the top of their little hierarchy, they looked down

on the Spartans and, even more so,on the Boeotians. Athenians liked to suggest

that the Spartans were barely literate, and they seem to have enjoyed telling

"Boeotian jokes," much as some modern Americans like to tell Polishjokes.5In "Boeotian," Frost disrupts the smugness and complacency of the Athe

nian view, not by denying that Athens is a great intellectual power, but by re

minding the reader that there may be wisdom in Laconia or Boeotia as well—

not philosophy, perhaps, but wisdom. And from this initial point, the application is

clearly meant to radiate outward, as a reminder that intellectual hubs and classes

in general have no lock on wisdom. The poem suggests that there may be wis

dom at West Point or even in the little towns "north of Boston," as well as in

Manhattan and Harvard Yard.But the implications are not merely geographical:

5 Paul Cartledge, "Literacy in the Spartan Oligarchy,"Journal of Hellenic Studies 98 (1978): 25-37. Also "Greek World," p. 167.

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the poem also suggests that there may be wisdom in oral traditions and prover

bial sayings as well as in systematic philosophy.

This way of using Greek city-states as a kind of shorthand to think about

larger issues is apparent elsewhere in Frost's writings and conversation. Consider

the following remarks, made after his 1962 trip to the Soviet Union, in which

the poet draws a parallel between the Soviet Union and Sparta on the one hand,

and the United States and Athens on the other:

I would rather [see us] perish asAthens than prevail as Sparta. The tone isAthens. The tone is freedom to the point ofdestruction. Democracy meansall the risks taken—conflict of opinion, conflict of personality, eccentricity. We are Athens, daring to be all sorts ofpeople.6

Here Athens and Sparta are used as exemplars of two political outlooks—two

ways oforganizing society. Athens stands for free-wheeling, tolerant, risk-taking

democracy and Sparta, by implication, for planned, collectivistic, regimented

society, of the sort Frost found in the Soviet Union.

Elsewhere Frost used the word "Utopia" to describe such authoritarian

regimes:

Utopia can let no man be his own worst enemy,take the risk to go uninsured, gamble on the horses, or on his own future, go to hell in his ownway. It has to concern itself more with the connection of the parts thanwith the separateness ofthe parts. It has to know where everyone is;it hasto bunch us up to keep track ofus. It can't protect us unless it directs us.7

This Utopian vision of society held little appeal for Frost. He declared that he

had no interest in living in a society which guaranteed security from cradle to

grave. Instead, he characterized himselfas"a natural gambler," who did not want

the "uncertainties" taken out of life (Stanlis 41). In "A Considerable Speck," he

remarked, "I have none of the tenderer-than-thou/ Collectivistic regimenting

love/With which the modern world is being swept" (lines 24—26). This was one

of Frost's many sallies against Roosevelt and the New Deal, which the poet saw

as pushing the United States in the direction of the Soviet Union. His alterna

tive to collectivism and regulation was a society with "the largest possible

number of citizens who could take care of themselves." It did not bother him

6 David Bradley, Robert Frost: A Tribute to the Source (New York, 1979), p. 153; Interviews withRobert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (NewYork, 1966), p. 194.

7 Peter Stanlis, Robert Frost:Tlie Individual and Society (Rockford, 111., 1973), p. 34.

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that a free society would almost certainly involve inequalities, uncertainties, and

conflicts:

A nation should be just as full of conflict as it can contain, physicallymentally,financially. But ofcourse it must contain. The strain must be shortof the bursting point—-just short.s

We have seen that, for Frost, Athens was associated with freedom, demo

cracy,and "all the risks taken," while Sparta was associated with collectivism and

regulation. However, in an interview, Frost also articulated a distinction between

the two city-states, based on the contrast between philosophy and ancestral

wisdom:

Athens was the headquarters ofphilosophy but Sparta ofwisdom. Plato ismy authority. He says the Spartan had the wisdom and when he felt itcoming over him to talk wisdom, he ordered all the strangers out of theroom so they couldn't profit by it. (How like Mark's saying Christians intheir exclusiveness must talk in parable so the wrong people won't understand and get saved.) Many people consider Plato infallible. Sometimes Imean to round up a lot ofwise sayings,such as we have from the Spartanssuch as"Good fences make good neighbors." My guess would be we owemost of these to the wise woman of the tribe or family.9

Here the poet is clearly working some of the same ground as in "Boeotian."

Although "many people consider Plato infallible," Frost reminds us that the

Spartans had a kind of wisdom, too. This wisdom can be set against Athenian

philosophy, but unlike the dialogic,, open-air philosophizing ofSocrates, Spartan

wisdom distills itself in "wise sayings" that are not always meant to be shared:

there is an exclusiveness about Spartan wisdom, which tends to keep it within

the circle of the family or tribe, j

All this is interesting, but what is most remarkable about these comments,

for a reader of "Mending Wall," is Frost's association of "Good fences make

good neighbors" with Sparta. Indeed, on first reading, it sounds as if he is saying

that "Good fences make good neighbors" is actually a Spartan proverb. How

ever, I believe what Frost is trying ito communicate is that he hopes someday to

gather up wise American sayings! in the same way that Plutarch gathered upwise Spartan platitudes, and one of the American expressions in his projected

8 ProseJottings of Robert Frost, ed. E. C. Lathem and Hyde Cox (Lunenberg.Vt., 1982), p. 109.9 Robert Faggen," Frost and the Question of Pastoral," in Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost,

ed. Robert Faggen (Cambridge, U.K., 2001), p. 70.

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collection would be "Good fences make good neighbors."10But, whether my

interpretation ofthis remark is correct or not, it is clear that Frost associated the

Spartans with a reliance on proverbs and recognized a similar reliance among

rural New Englanders, like the neighbor in "MendingWall."

With this background in mind, we can ask several questions about "Mend

ing Wall." For starters, we might ask if the neighbor in the poem is at all like the

ancient Spartans, and if his reiterated proverb,"Good fences make good neigh

bors," can be seen as a typically Spartan, or Laconic, response.

As we noted at the outset, the neighbor's response is laconic in its brevity.

Although many critics have noted this brevity itself,none, as far as I know, have

connected it to the rhetorical idealsofancient Sparta. Spartan boys were taught

to speak only when necessary and to compress as much meaning as possible into

a few words. The importance of concision was impressed upon the youngsters

with the help ofpedagogical strategies that would be hard to justify at a modern

PTA meeting; for example, a boy who gave an incorrect or overlong answer

might be bitten on the thumb by his instructor.11When the Spartan ruler Agesilaus heard an orator praised for amplifying a

petty topic into a grandiloquent speech, he remarked disapprovingly that a good

cobbler does not make a large shoe for a small foot.12 The Spartan alternative to

amplification was distillation, a tactic that was famously deployed in several war

time messages. Before the battle of Thermopylae, in which the Spartans

immortalized themselves by fighting to the last man, the Persian king Xerxes

1(1 When Frost mentions a collection ofwise sayings "such as we have from the Spartans," he isevidently alluding to the collection known as Spartan Sayings, or Laconic Apothegms, commonlyattributed to Plutarch.This includes a set ofsayingsby Spartan kings and another set by Spartanwomen. Frost may have been thinking of the "Sayings of the Spartan Women" when he mentioned "the wise woman of the tribe or family." This collection does not, however, contain aproverb like"Good fences make good neighbors." Nor is it likely that there was any such Spartanproverb.The Spartans had no wall around their city for many years and prided themselves on notneeding a stone wall, since they had a "wall ofmen." Indeed, several of the proverbs in Plutarch'scollection suggest that people who need a wall are weak and effeminate. See Plutarch on Sparta,ed. and trans., RichardJ.A.Talbert (NewYork, 1988), pp. 114,118,124,129,152; J.T. Hooker, TlteAncient Spartans (London, 1980), p. 48. For these reasons it seems extremely unlikely that "Goodfences make good neighbors" was actually a Spartan saying.

11 Paul Cartledge, Spartan Reflections (Berkeley, 2001), p. 85. See also Plutarch on Sparta, pp. 30-32.

12 Plutarch on Sparta, pp. 109,144. See also Sthenelaides the Spartan Ephor in Thucydides: "Thelong speech of the Athenians I do not pretend to understand." Thucydides, History of thePeloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley (London and Toronto, 1933), p. 56.

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sent a note to the Spartan commander, Leonidas, demanding that Leonidas and

his men give up their weapons. Leonidas replied saucily:"Come and take them"

(Plut. 146). On another occasion, when asked how many warriors Sparta had, a

Spartan replied, "Enough."13 But perhaps the most famous Laconic responsewas received by Philip of Macedon, the father ofAlexander the Great. Philip

was bent on reducing all the Greek city-states to obedience. The last holdout

was Sparta. Philip sent the Spartans an ultimatum, urging them to submit,"for if

I march my army into your land, I will kill all your men and destroy your city."

He received a one-word reply: "If."

The neighbor's reply,five words long, is not so pithy as the Spartan response

to Philip, but it is nevertheless an impressive effort in this genre and would have

been appreciated by the ancient Spartans.What's more, the reply is Laconic not

only in its brevity but also in its reliance on ancestral wisdom. The neighbor

reiterates "his father's saying," and, as the speaker of the poem laments, he is

unwilling"to go behind" it. Nothing could be more Spartan. The Spartansboasted

of having preserved the laws of their founding father, Lycurgus, unchanged for

many centuries (Plut. 43). According to the local political mythology, Lycurgus

remodeled the Spartan constitution and convinced the Laconians to adopt his

laws on a trial basis. He then set out on a pilgrimage to the oracle at Delphi.

Before setting off, however, Lycurgus had the Spartans swear to follow his laws

until he returned. At Delphi he asked the oracle ifthese laws were good, and the

oracle affirmed that they were. Lycurgus then committed suicide as a way of

compelling the Spartans to be eternally obedient to his code. In years to come

they prided themselves on scrupulous fidelity to the laws of Lycurgus. When

innovations were proposed, it was said the Spartan senate would reliably pro

nounce: "We will not change the laws of Sparta." New laws that were approved

were generally not committed to writing. Instead, the Spartans passed on their

legal traditions orally and through their distinctive system of education, the

agoge.lAAccording to legend, the great kings ofSparta demonstrated a dedication to

all things old. King Agisilaus,on taking office,announced:"I would not become

a lawgiver to make laws different from the present ones, nor would I add anything

or alter anything" (Plut. 113, 121).The Spartan Archidamos sounded a similar

,J Cf. Plutarch on Sparta, pp. 33,124.14 "Literacy in the Spartan Oligarchy," p. 35.

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note in the debates leading up to the Peloponnesian War when he instead that

"[the] practices . . . which our ancestors have delivered to us, and by whose

maintenance we have always profited, must not be given up."15 In Sparta eventhe reformers reformed in the direction of ancient precedent. King Agis, the

great renewer ofLycurgan traditions, is a case in point:"In his meals,his bathings,

and in all his exercises, he followed the old Laconian usage, and was often heard

to say, he had no desire for the place of king [except] to restore their ancient

laws and discipline."16

In Frost's poem, the neighbor's reply is Laconic in a third sense, too; that is,

in its function, which is to cut off further discussion. Although the speaker

participates in the wall mending, and even contacts the neighbor to schedule

the yearly ritual, he does not participate unthinkingly. His physical work replac

ing the tumbled stones is mingled with the intellectual play of thinking about

walls and wall-making. He ponders what causes the walls to tumble down and

distinguishes the damage done by hunters from the damage done by frost. He

imagines himselfand his neighbor playing an "outdoor game"—and, ultimately,

he begins to ask whether the wall is even necessary:

There where it is we do not need a wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.My apple trees will never get acrossAnd eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

But the neighbor merely replies"Good fences make good neighbors." The speaker

tries again:

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonderIf I could put a notion in his head:"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't itWhere 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 out,And to whom I was like to give offense."

But, again, the neighbor declines to participate in this discussion and deploys his

proverb asa conversation blocker. Indeed, the neighbor's refusal to participate in

15 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, p. 55 (1.85.1).16 Plutarch's "Life ofAgis."The version quoted here is from the Dryden-Clough translation:

Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians andRomans, trans.John Dryden, rev.Arthur Hugh Clough(New York, 1992), p. 320. The parallel passage in Plutarch on Sparta is on p. 56.

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the discussion isalmost complete: as faras we can tellfromthe speaker's versionof what happened (admittedly not an unbiased version), the neighbor speaksonly ten words during the entirewall-repairing process—and theyare the samefive words repeated twice! This refusal to participate in discussion can be seen asa refusal of the sort of neighboriiness Frost describes in other poems, including"ATime to Talk," where the speaker, spottinga neighbor passing by, puts downhis hoe and walks "up to the stone wall/ For a friendly visit." "MendingWall"also involves an attempt to converse across a wall, but in this case the conversation is one-sided and fizzles out.

One couldgo further and say that the neighborrefuses not only neighboriiness but also philosophical inquiry. Suchphilosophical inquiryexists elsewherein Frost's poetry, as, forexample, in"The StarSplitter," where the speaker and hisfriend spend the night looking through a telescope and discussing "our placeamong the infinities" (line 19).

We spread our two legs as we spread its three,Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,And standing at our leisure till the day broke,Said some of the best things we ever said.

Here use of the first person plural pronoun "we" and related phrases like "ourlegs"and "our thoughts" point to the strong connection between the two menas theywaxastro-philosophical. But this meetingof the minds isprecisely whatdoesnot happen in"MendingWall." In"MendingWall," the pronoun "we,"usedseveral times near the beginningof the poem,eventually gives wayto a series of"Is" and "he's": "I tell him ..., I wonder..., I see him ..., He moves in darkness,

as it seems to me . . ., He will not go behind his father's saying." There is noblending of two minds into a "we"; instead, we see a separation into "he" and

In order to understand how the dogged reiteration of "Good fences makegood neighbors" affects the trajectory of the poem,we might askourselves howthe encounter could have unfolded if the neighbor hadnot refused to participatein the philosophical discussion and had not sought refuge in his father's saying.Here's one fanciful possibility:

Speaker: So, it's timeto repair the stone wall again. Sometimes I wonder whywedo it.

Neighbor: Good fences make good neighbors.

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Speaker: Ah yes, that's an old proverb, isn't it?

Neighbor: Yes.

Speaker: Butlet's think about this for a minute. Why is it that fences make goodneighbors? A fence is useful where there are cows, to keep one man'scows out of another man's field. Is that so?

Neighbor: To be sure.

Speaker: Butwhat about where there are no animals—only trees? Ifone man'sland is all pine trees and his neighbor's is all apple trees, is there anyneed for a wall?

Neighbor: Well, I suppose not.

Speaker: There's nodanger in thefirst man's apple trees getting across and eatingthe cones under the neighbors' pines?

Neighbor: No, of course not.

Speaker: And isn't this the case with us? You have apples and I have pine trees?

Neighbor: Yes.

Speaker: In general, then, could we say that the usefulness ofa wall depends onthe need or lack of need to wall something in or out?

Neighbor: Yes, nothing could be clearer.

Speaker: Andisn't there also thepossibility thata wall may give offense to someone?

Neighbor: I suppose there is.

Speaker: Well, then, on balance, dowe have good reasons forrepairing this wall?

Neighbor: I guess not.

I have rewritten the speaker's argument in dialogue form to bring out thesimilarity between the speaker's mode of discourse and the Socratic mode ofinquiry as captured in Plato's dialogues.We have seen that Frost associated Athens withphilosophy and Sparta with ancestral wisdom. And we have seen thatthe neighbor in "Mending Wall" behaves in several ways like a Spartan. If theAthens-Sparta contrast is really at work in the poem, it would not be surprisingto findthat the speaker, who is sostrongly contrasted with the neighbor, exhibits some similaritieswith Socratesand other Athenian philosophers. And, in fact,

he does.

Like Socrates, the speaker proceeds by asking questions, and the questionsare clearly designed to encourage questioning of old truths: "Why do [goodfences] make good neighbors?" (the emphasis on why is in Frost's original).Thespeaker's goal is, as he says, to"puta notion in his [neighbor's] head," which is

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precisely what Socrates does to his interlocutors in the Platonic dialogues. Butthe neighbor already has notions ofhis own and does not want them disturbed.Socrates famously remarked that the unexamined life is not worth living. Theneighbor, with his unwillingness to "go behind" his father's saying, is theunexamined life personified. Offered a chance to participate in a backwoodssymposium while repairingthe wall, he curtlydeclines the invitation.While thespeaker asks, "Why do we walk the line?",the neighbor merelyasserts: "I walkthe line."

This refusal ofphilosophic inquiry is eminently Spartan.When was the lasttime you heard the phrase "Spartanphilosopher"? The wordssit uncomfortablynext to one another.The Spartansshowed little interest in the sort ofquestioning that philosophy entails. As the historian E. N.Tigerstedt has noted, Sparta"did not provide a suitable medium for new ideas," and, as a result, did not

attract many of the peripatetic sophists.17 There is a little joke about this in thePlatonic dialogue Hippias Major, in which Socrates asks the sophistHippiashowmuch money he made philosophizing in Sparta. Hippias admits he couldn'tattract any philosophy students and could only interest the Spartans by tellingthem stories about the ancient Spartan heroes and their genealogies and otherstories about the distant past.18

To someone of a philosophic, wide-ranging mindset, this refusal of philosophic inquirylookspositively barbaric. That's how Sparta lookedto manyAthenians,and it's how the neighbor ultimately looks to the speaker.Thus, near theend of the poem,we get the speaker's dark, uncharitable vision of hisneighbor:

I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the topIn 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.

The last line makes it clear that, as far as the speaker is concerned, the darknessin which the neighbor moves is not a temporary matter of standing beneath atree.The neighborcarries hisdarkness with him:he is an unenlightened man.

17 E.N.Tigerstedt, Tlte Legend ofSparta in Classical Antiquity, vol. 1 (Uppsala, Swed., 1965-74),pp.237ff. InThucydides, the Corinthianscontrast the Spartans with the Athenians: "The Athenians areaddicted to innovation... [whereas] you [Spartans] have a genius for keeping whatyouhave got, accompanied by a total want of invention" (45).

18 Hippias Major, 283b-86a.The Greek word for the old things that interested the Spartans isarchaeologia.

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The primary connotations in these lines seem, to me, to be biblical andanthropological. The Bible distinguishes between those who walk in light andthose who walk in darkness: "If we say that we have fellowship with him,andwalk in darkness, we lie,and do not the truth:But if we walk in the light,as heis in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of JesusChrist his Son cleansethus fromallsin" (1 John 6-7). In addition to this biblicalpassage, one is reminded of Grendel in Beowulf, whois repeatedly referred to asa "walker in darkness." The speaker, casting about for images and terms to express the sudden, powerful revulsion he feels for his neighbor, reaches, naturallyenough, for his society's religious language of good and evil, and the effect ofthe characterization is further enhanced when we recall that Grendel, John's

walkerin darkness, and the neighbor in the poem are all characterized as antisocial figures who refuse to participate in "fellowship" with other men.

In addition to the biblical connotations, there are also clear anthropological

overtones.As scholars have noted, "old-stone" is an Anglo-Saxon translation of

"paleolithic." To the speaker, the neighbor seems like a primitive—a throwbackto an earlier era.

While the most obvious connotations of this passage are biblical and

anthropological, the lines can also be seen as developing the contrast betweenAthens and Sparta we have been looking at.For, from a highAthenian point ofview, the Spartans seemed not only backward andbenighted but also armedanddangerous,just as the neighbor appears to the speaker in the culminating vision.It was said that Sparta was not a country that had an army, but an army that hada country, and the Athenians were acutely aware of their well-armed neighborto the south.

The comparison also works on a philosophical level; for, from the speaker'sphilosophic point ofview, theneighbor is a caveman, not only in theanthropological sense but also in the Platonic sense. He is one of those who will neverescape from the cave that Plato describes in book 7 of the Republic. In Plato'smyth, thephilosopher goes upfrom thecave to thesurface and sees thesunlight;then he returns and sees"behind the wall," where the puppet-masters sit, casting

shadows on the wallofthe cave. But the neighbor in Frost's poem is no philosopher. He will never "gobehind" his father's saying. Philosophically speaking, heremains in darkness.

At least that's how it looks from the speaker'sAthenian viewpoint. However, to give the Spartans their due, we should recognize that there are good

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reasons for declining to play Socrates' questioning game. From a conservativepoint of view, something there is that doesn't like a question, that prefers toleave some questions unasked. Questions have a nasty way ofdestabilizing thingsand undermining the social order. Think how a conservative in the Nixon era

musthave felt aboutsomeof the"why"questions asked byyoungradicals in the1960s: Wliy should we listen to our parents? Wliy should wefight The Man's war inVietnam? Why should we suppress our natural sexual urges? Wliy should we wear clothing? Wliy should we bathe? Thereissomething mischievous aboutasking"why?"—and traditional societies have a low tolerance for mischief.

The disruptive potential of philosophy has been memorably described bythe political philosopher Leo Strauss. Strauss notes that "Prephilosophic life ischaracterized by the primeval identification ofthe good and the ancestral."19 Inpre-philosophic life, laws, rituals, and traditions are seen as divinely instituted,and "it is strictly forbidden to subject these laws to ... critical examination, in

the presence of young men" (85).Yet this is precisely what Socrates does.As aresult, he isseenasa threat to the social order,and perhaps reasonably so,since toembark on a philosophical quest for knowledge implies that the answers thathave been passed downthroughthe generations are not adequate. Strauss spointisthat there issomethinginherently disruptive about philosophical inquiry."Philosophy or science," he says, "is the attempt to replace opinion about 'all things'byknowledge of'all things'; but opinion is the elementof society; philosophy orscience istherefore the attempt to dissolve the element in which societybreathes,and thus it endangers society."20

Since this is so,one can argue that the proper reaction on the part of thosein positions ofauthority, or those who wish to affirm and uphold the ancestralanswers, is to resist and/or suppress the questioning involvedin philosophy. Allowing philosophers in your society is like letting in lots of foreigners withstrange ideas, and Plutarch tells us what Lycurgus, the father of the Spartanconstitution, thought about that:"Foreigners ... bring foreign ideas with them,and novel ideas lead to novel attitudes. Hence inevitably many emotions andpreferences emerge which—ifthe existing government be likened to a pieceof

19 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1953), p.83.20 Leo Strauss, Wliat is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Westport, Conn., 1973), p.221.

Cf.E.N.Tigerstedt, Legend ofSparta, vol. 2:"The principle guiding the Spartiates iscalled tradition, that of the philosophers' knowledge" (74).

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music—are out of tune with it."Plutarch explains that it was"the need to protectthecity from being invaded byharmful practices" which motivated Lycurgusto prohibit immigration (Plut. 40). Obviously similar arguments could be advanced against philosophy. Ifphilosophy is like foreign ideas andhas a tendencyto call accepted ideas into question and "untune" the state, if it is a kind ofuniversal acid that eats away at theancient, ancestral answers, then it makes goodsense to give Socrates the hemlock. By thesame token, it makes sense to rebuildthe wall, even if you're not quite sure why. Don't ask why:justdo it.

From the Spartan point of view, the rejection of philosophical inquiry isnot a disgraceful shortcoming but an honorable andreasonable deed. The Spartans prided themselves onrejecting things that theAthenians held dear. Thucydidestells us that the Spartan Archidamos boasted: "we are ... not brought up to betoo knowing in useless matters" (55). Once,when anAthenian was disparagingthe Spartans as uneducated, a Spartan replied that the Athenian was correct,"since we are the only Greeks who have learned nothing wicked from youAthenians."21 Against the wickedness and tumults of Athenian democracy, theSpartans placed their conscientious preservation of laws, traditions, and rituals.The Spartans were deliberately, proudly pre-philosophical.

It may be useful in this context to remind ourselves of George Monteiro'ssuggestion thatFrost's poem may refer to anancient pagan ritual in honorof theGreco-Roman god ofboundaries/Terminus. During thefestival oftheTerminalia,held each spring, neighbors on either side ofa boundary decked the stones thatmarked the boundarywith garlands, made offerings, and held a feast. Monteirosuggests that thespeaker and his neighbor are participating ina"vestigial ritual,"of which they are largely or wholly unaware, but which was probably in Frost'smind at the time of composition.22 If that is the case, it fits nicely with what Ihave been saying about the adversarial relationship between ancestral traditionand philosophy. The neighbor is a wholehearted upholder of the ritual; thespeaker participates in the ritual but also engages in the sortof questioning wehave associated with philosophy.

In closing, we might consider howthe foregoing discussion of Spartan andAthenian mindsets might impact our overall reading of the poem and, in

21 Legend ofSparta, vol.2, p. 17fF.22 George Monteiro, "Unlinked Myth in Frost's 'Mending WaU\" Concerning Poetry 7.2 (Fall

1974): 10-11.

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MATTHEW DAVIS

particular, our thoughts on where Frost stands vis-a-vis the speaker and the neigh

bor. This is the $64,000 question in criticism of this poem. As Monteiro has

noted, many readings of"MendingWall" are based on a decision as to which of

the two voices in the poem—the speaker's or his taciturn neighbor's—speaks

the truth or, at least, expresses the poet's own view of things.23 Some readers

have assumed that Frost identified primarily with the neighbor; others have

argued that he sides with the speaker. Various middling positions have also been

advanced. Frost, always cagey in such matters, insisted that he could not be

simply identified with either character.When a friend suggested that Frost sided

with the speaker, Frost distanced himself from the speaker by replying, "The

more I say I, the more I always mean somebody else."Another time he remarked

"Maybe I was both fellows in the poem."24

There are good reasons for avoiding a simple identification of Frost with

the speaker. It's a freshman error to automatically identify the speaker with the

poet; since the poet's consciousness must be large enough to encompass all ofthe minds it creates,one can argue that there must be a little ofthe poet in every

character he creates. Then, too, Frost's treatment is carefully balanced in certain

ways:each participant has a line he is allowed to speak twice, so that two itera

tions of "Good fences make good neighbors" are balanced against two iterationsof "something there is that doesn't love a wall."And we have seen how Frost has

a genuine respect for the ancestral wisdom that he associated with Sparta.At the same time, we should also avoid the assumption that Frost simply

agrees with the neighbor, so that the point of the poem—the "message" onetakes away—is simply "Good fences make good neighbors. Period." Indeed, this

hooray-for-the-neighbor interpretation seems to me the more objectionable ofthe two either/or interpretations.The Spartanmentality that the neighbor epitomizes is based on multiple renunciations—and many of the things renounced

are things Frostheld dear.We have seen that the neighbor renounces expansiveutterance and philosophical inquiry,but he also renounces the playful, imaginative thinking that is so characteristic of the speaker. Frank Lentricchia has de

scribed the "imagination gap" between the two characters so well that one cando no better than quote him:

23 GeorgeMonteiro, "Frost's Politics and the ColdWar," in Cambridge Companion, p.231.24 Interviews with Robert Frost, p. 257; Selected Letters, p. 138;TylerHoffman, Robert Frost and the

Politics of Poetry (Hanover and London, 2001), p. 108.

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["Mending Wall"] is a poem ... that distinguishes between two kinds ofpeople:one who seizes the particularoccasion of mending as fuel for theimagination and asa release from the dull ritual of work each spring andone who is trapped by work and by the New England past as it comesdown to him in the form ofhis father's cliche.Tied as he is to his father's

words that "Good fences make good neighbors," the neighbor beyondthe hill is committed to an end, the fence's completion. His participationin the process of rebuilding is sheer work—he never plays the outdoorgame... .The neighbor won't say "elves" ... he will not enter the playworld of imagination The realdifferences between the two people inthe poem is that one moves in a world of freedom; aware of the resourcesof the mind, he nurtures the latent imaginative power within himself andmakesit a factor in everyday living; while the other, unaware of the valueof imagination, must live his unliberated life without it.25

To this I would add that the imaginative vein in the speaker's discourse

intermingles with a scientific vein, which is also characteristic of Frost. Thepoem contains not only a philosophical investigation of why people maintainwalls but also a brief investigation of why walls fall down in the first place.Twohypotheses are considered, one scientific—the frozen ground-swell did it—andone imaginative or mythological—the elves did it.

One finds the same interplay of science and imagination in other poemsgenerally assumed to be written in Frost's own voice. "Birches," for example,begins in the imaginative or mythological vein: "When I see birches bend to leftand right/ Across the linesof straighter darker trees,/ I like to think some boy'sbeen swinging them" (1-3). This is the imaginative hypothesis. However, thescientific voice soon asserts itself: "But swinging doesn't bend them down to

stay/ As ice storms do" (4-5).Science holds sway for many lines but, near theend of the poem, the imagination once again takes over: "But I was going to saywhen Truth broke in/With all her matter-of-fact about the ice storm/ I should

prefer to have some boy bend them."The speaker in"MendingWall" is similar to the speaker of "Birches" in that

he is interested in scientific as well as imaginative explanations of phenomena.His thinking is not either/or so much as it isboth/and. His is a world of mentalplenitude in which things are considered from scientific, philosophic, and

25 Frank Lentricchia, Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self (Durham, N.C.,1975), pp. 105-106.1 am grateful to Steve Scherwatzky andE.D.Hirsch.Jr., for their commentson earlier drafts of this essay.

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MATTHEW DAVIS

imaginative angles.The neighbor does not share these interests. He won't say"elves," he won't ask why, and he won't say"frozen-ground-swell" either.

Ofcourse, another name for frozen ground-swell is "frost," and critics have

seized upon this putative pun as evidence that the "something" that doesn't like

a wall and wants it down is Robert Frost himself. Even if one is not entirely

persuaded by this argument, there are other reasons for suspecting that Frost has

more in common with the speaker than he was willing to admit.To adopt theSpartan mentality wholeheartedly—and one can hardly be Spartan in any other

way—entails forsaking a great deal. One must forswear verbal expansiveness,shun philosophy, pass on scientific inquiry, and keep the imagination reined in.

One must also eschew the kind of mischievousness involved in darting fromone of these discourses to another, seeing wall repair as "just another kind of

outdoor game" and trying to "put a notion" in another man's head. Is it possible

to imagine Frost accepting all these renunciations?

While we should not identify Frost entirely with either the neighbor or thespeaker, it is possible to imagine the speaker writing the poem as we have it

while it is impossible to imagine the neighbor writing it; this is true not merely

because the speaker speaks the poem but because he speaksand thinks in a waythat often reminds us of Frost himself. Thus we might argue that the poet iscloser to the speaker than he is to the neighbor. Although Frost doubtless recognized the ancestral wisdom in the neighbor's proverb and respected it in the

same way he respected the austere, taciturn ways of the ancient Spartans, one

suspects that he ultimately identified more closely with the speaker, for the same

reasons he preferred Athens to Sparta and the United States to the USSR. Here

it may be relevant to recall a quotation from the beginning of the essay:

I would rather [see us] perish asAthens than prevailasSparta.The tone isAthens. The tone isfreedom to the point of destruction. Democracymeansall the risks taken—conflict ofopinion, conflict ofpersonality,eccentricity.We are Athens, daring to be all sorts of people.

The tone of the narrator's discourse in "MendingWall" is also Athens.The nar

rator is full ofopinions, ideas,notions, and questions. He is a freethinker. He is,by turns, a philosopher, a scientist,a poet, a myth-maker, and a mischief-maker.In all ofthese regards, one feels there is, in the narrator, more than a little Robert

Frost.

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ROBERT FROST: THREE POEMS

Translated by Rhina P. Espaillat

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, asjust as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though 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.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere agesand ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

"Stopping byWoods onaSnowy Evening,""The Oven Bird," and "TheRoadNotTaken," fromThe Poetry ofRobert Frost edited byEdward Connery Lathem, © 1916,1923,1969 byHenryHoltandCompany,© 1944,1951 by Robert Frost. Reprintedbypermission of Henry Holt andCompany, LLC.

Literary Imagination 7.3 (2005): 306-n © 200s Association of Literary Scholars and Critics

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