Frostiana for a Sunday morning

Mending Wall - Robert Frost

 

"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 . . ."

I was asked to read Mending Wall by Robert Frost to an adult Bible class Sunday  morning, so I gave it another look before I went out to snowblower the driveway. (snowblower: v. - poetic license #301HER) As so often happens when I revisit Frost--or Eliot, or W. Jansen or V.C.Friesen, for that matter--I can't put the book down before reading just one more.

Some talk about this phenomenon when reading the Bible.

Except that they lack endorsement by ancient canonical councils, our poets could be called prophets. But then, ". . . A prophet is not without honour, except in his own country." (Mark 6:4) Take Frost's Mending Wall, an eloquent, poignant, unpreachifying (See poetic license authorization above) urging us to consider carefully the reasons for--and the consequences of--wall and fence-building, whether physical OR virtual.

Nature shakes our stone walls apart; something in our hearts longs for walls and fences to come down.

Frost's farmer friend insists that "good fences make good neighbours." We would do well as communities--whether they be secular or spiritual, neighbourly or scattered--to study Frost's great poem together and consider our fence-building obsessions, their reasons and their consequences.

" . . . It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need a wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard."

So if your appetite for more prophetic Frostian verse has been whetted, let me recommend Revelation. I give you a link: Frost and his poetry are eminently googleable. (Ibid).