The Wall
“Something there is that doesn’t like a wall.” (Robert Frost)
“Not like a wall?”
I sit above the meadow in the glowing fall
Tracing the grey redoubt from square to square
Which bound the acres harvest-ripe and fair,—
And wonder if it’s true?
Nay, ask the sumac and the teeming vine,
That lean upon the boulders,
The crimsoning ivy and the wild woodbine
Whose eager fingers clutch the stony shoulders,
The golden rod, the aster and the rue.
Ask the red squirrel with the chubby cheek
Skipping from stone to stone
By a quick route, his hidden hoard to seek,
Making the little viaduct his own.
Look where the woodchuck lifts a cautious head
Between the rocks close by the cabbage bed;
The honey-bees have built a secret hive
In a forgotten chink;
And there a grey cocoon is tucked away
Shrouding a miracle in mauve and pink
To wait its Easter day.
The wall with pageantry is all alive!
And I who gaze
On the dark border here,
Drawn like a ribbon round the pasture-ways,
Embroidered with the glory of the year,—
Do I not like the wall?
Lo, I remember how in days of old
My grandsire toiled with weariness and pain
To dig the cumbering boulders from the mould;
Piled them in ordered rows again,
Fitting them firm and fast,
A monument to last
Long after his own harried day was past.
He cleared the rocky soil for corn and grain
By which his children throve
To carry on the race.
We live by his life-giving.
I see each stone, rough like his granite face,—
Uncompromising, stern, no slave to love,
Dowered with little grace,
Grim with the hard, unjoyful task of living,
But strong to stand the wrath of storm and time,
And bolts that heaven let fall.
Built of a patriot’s prime,—
I love the wall!
Abbie Farwell Brown