Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall

Robert Frost challenged the validity of wall-making and mending

I read anew Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall." 

In light of an ongoing political obsession by some for a wall across the USA southern border and isolationist boundaries in general, this 70-year-old poem takes on fresh meaning.

In the poem, Frost challenges the worn-out adage that "Good fences make good neighbors." He tells how he and his neighbor mend the stone fence between their properties each spring. He ponders why they bother, for neither keep animals. His neighbor, however, is insistent on the practice and repeatedly quotes the dictum.

But Frost suspects there is perhaps a divine or natural power that brings down parts of the stone wall each year.

I especially note the following lines:

"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..."

"Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was likely to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down..."

Frost reflects on his neighbor's quoted phrase and stolid actions:

"...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..."

There is a sense that larger-than-life or deeper-than-natural forces are at work in and through Frost and his  neighbor and the repeatedly self-dismantling wall that separates, divides.

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down..."

Consider: Why walls?

And: What--or Who--is it that wants the superficial walls between us down?

Seems to me it would be wise to cooperate with that "Something."