Religion
Related: About this forumBefore I built a wall I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out (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,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where 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 walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In 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.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/frost-mending.html
elleng
(130,860 posts)Deep13
(39,154 posts)pinto
(106,886 posts)Warpy
(111,237 posts)were just convenient places to put all the stones that appeared on top of the fields after every rain storm, on the property line or where the property line was surmised to be by all considered at the time.
Wresting an agricultural living out of glacial moraine turned out to be a losing proposition, so once the walls were built and there was no place to put all the wretched new rocks that worked their way to the surface, people quite wisely went into shipping, whaling and manufacturing.
My own family in upstate NY did much better with racehorses and wine making than they had with traditional farming.
My own effort was limited to an organic kitchen garden. I still raised mostly rocks.
pinto
(106,886 posts)and for those that "went down to the sea" it was similarly a risky call.
Many of my own family worked in manufacturing - the New England mills. It was their best choice at the time. Not ideal by any means.
So I see Frost's musings in a larger context.
Jim__
(14,074 posts)Language is amazing.