What Robert Frost Sas To Say About Tradition

A Frost poem is in the news this week. One that has a lot to say about tradition. Being a Gardnerian, practicing old rites just as they have been passed down to me, I think a lot about tradition, its values and drawbacks. Here’s the poem:

Mending Wall

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.”

Entropy happens. The universe wants to fall into disorder. Walls don’t stay up forever on their own. Traditions are the same. “We meet to walk the line.” We do. Every month, under the full moon. We don’t know who wrote our rituals, or how long ago. Some people speculate that it was farmers. I’m not a farmer. I live in a condo and work in an office. Am I carrying on a tradition that is no longer relevant, that has been taken too far from its original context? Am I building walls to keep out cows that haven’t been here for a hundred years merely because that’s the tradition?

There are many witches who, rather than changing the tradition or accepting the dissonance, cling to the context. They take out huge mortgages on houses with room for gardens and bunnies so that they can get closer to that agricultural context. They are trying to get deeper into the mystery, to understand what it was that those ancient farmers understood. They buy cows so that they can understand walls.

Frost doesn’t seem to think that the wall is worth keeping, he’s chosen the side of the practical fellow who says we don’t need a wall between trees. I’ve chosen the side that says even though the wall serves no practical purpose, we need it. I believe the mysteries are just as vast and deep to someone who has never planted a seed as they were to those ancient farmers. They are everywhere and everything, every context. The tradition of celebrating the mysteries is valuable all on its own. It does not require its adherents to be any place other than here, any time other than now.