"Kitchen Criticism" - A Guide to Practical Matters in Poetry:Frost's "Mending Wall" and Playful Punctuation.

First, a little theory: Frost's principal contribution to prosody is his somewhat elusive idea of "the sound of sense." I won't go into it in detail--any serious Frost scholar has touched on it in some way, shape, or form already. Basically, it relates to the tension between speech and metre, and the creative possibilities for tone therefrom. Poetic metre is an imposition on speech in order to extract tones of voice for dramatic purposes. I might go into detail elsewhere to tidy up the rough edges of that brief explanation.

Regardless of my imprecision, there is one poetic prescription that follows from Frost's idea: we read a poem to the sentence, to the full stop, to get the full sense of the meaning. Tyler Hoffman, whom I will return to a few times, has a neat phrase for Frost's prosody in practice; he calls it "line-sentence counterpointing." I have always been taken with Frost's theory of the sound of sense--also called the theory of sentence-sounds (Frost couldn't make up his mind), hence Hoffman's useful coinage. 

So, we read the poem not to the line, but to the sentence. There's both a prosodic reason for this prescription, but also a conceptual one, and Frost manages to tease out a little play with both. Despite his claims, Frost most certainly relied, as most poets do, on punctuation to manage the pace of his poems, to manipulate the meaning, just as we see in "Stopping by Woods." He also had tremendous fun with the little dots and squiggles on the page; and it's to one such case I wish to briefly turn before I get too serious. 

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In "Mending Wall," one of Frost's most famous poems, and for a time my favourite, Frost leaves what gamers today might be call an "Easter egg," a little reward for those who know where to find it. There's a lot to say about the poem, but I want to focus on this little Easter egg. The poem is forty-five lines long, unrhymed, written in iambic pentameter, Frost's preferred narrative form. "Mending Wall" is more lyrical, but it does tell a little story. Like "The Road Not Taken" there is a deception, or a trick, at the heart of the tale the speaker tells. More on that poem another time. The Easter egg comes in line 23: 

There where it is we do not need the wall

But you won't see it if I just quote the line. You need the lines surrounding it; in fact, you need a few sentences: 

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.

Do you see it yet? There's a tone of gentle mocking in this excerpt, as there is throughout the poem; the speaker finds his neighbour somewhat simple, and makes fun of him, both to his neighbour's face and to us, the reader. 

But there's a little grammatical play being had here, too. Let's look at the middle sentence as a sentence to see: "it comes to little more: there where it is we do not need the wall: he is all pine and I am apple orchard." Surely you see it now: two colons in the one sentence--a very unusual arrangement. Not ungrammatical, but certainly unorthodox. There's no real need to use it in any circumstance. What does it mean? 

The middle most line of the poem, asserting the redundancy of the wall, is bookended by two colons:

: There where it is we do not need the wall: 

Do you get it? The colon makes the line look like a little wall! Specifically, a wall of stones shaped like "loaves and some so nearly balls" that the wall-menders must use "a spell" to keep them in place. 

Unconvinced? There's more. 

The two colons are grammatically unnecessary. They could be replaced by semicolons or full stops. But Frost used two colons instead. The grammar is important here. Colons signify a subordinate relationship. Under normal circumstances, the second half of a sentence with a colon in it is dependent on, or subordinated to, the first half. By contrast, a semicolon is used to divide two independent clauses, or sets of clauses, each with at least one independent clause. 

Two semicolons wouldn't look like loaves and balls of stone stacked on top of each other, but they would indicate parallel clauses. Instead, Frost uses a subordinating grammatical structure to produce an image of a parallel construct: a wall separating two neighbours. But what he is really pointing to is the dependent relationship between the two neighbours, specifically speaker dependent upon his neighbour. 

The speaker mocks his neighbour, about the pine cones and apples, about "elves," and about his (the neighbour's) overreliance on his father's saying, that "good fences make good neighbours." But who called to whom about mending the fence? This from the speaker (my italics):

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line 

And set the wall between us once again.

It is the speaker who lets his neighbour know about the wall. The line is slipped in there and overshadowed by the later joke-making. It's a similar misdirection to the more famous one in "The Road Not Taken." Why does the speaker let his neighbour know about the wall? To make fun of him? Perhaps. That's a question beyond our purposes here; nevertheless, we can say that the speaker is dependent on his neighbour, regardless of how he views his neighbour's dependence on his father's words of wisdom. There are, we might say, parallels of dependency in this poem, and Frost's subtle play with punctuation and grammar is just one layer of the meaning in this poem. 

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That'll do for now. Frost is a meticulous craftsman, right down to the logical implications that follow from carefully selected punctuation marks. This level of grammatical intrigue is common to all poets, but especially formalists I find. Where formal metre is employed, high standards of punctuation tend to be there managing the prosodic tension. In the next blog, I'll look at some more Frost, but I'll bring in some Aussie poets as well. In particular, I'll be looking at silence...