♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (birds chirping) "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."

DAVID GERGEN: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."

TRACY K. SMITH: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."

JULIA ALVAREZ: "That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, "and spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast."

ELIZA NEW: Robert Frost cultivated the reputation of reliable country poet.

And this image helped him to achieve the status of national icon.

But Frost's poems will surprise you.

For instance, the one that ends with the maxim, "Good fences make good neighbors," that poem begins with an assertion of everything in nature that resists walls and structures.

♪ ♪ (birds cawing, chirping) To arrive at a better understanding of Frost's "Mending Wall" and of the complex poet who wrote it, I gathered four distinguished writers-- a U.S.

Poet Laureate who held the title of Robert Frost Chair of Literature; a poet and translator of Frost's work into Spanish; and two writers who have made their own homes near Frost's Ripton, Vermont, cabin.

Joining the discussion of how walls both divide and unite us was David Gergen, political commentator and veteran presidential advisor, and U.S.

Ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy, whose father, President John Kennedy, had invited Frost to read at his inauguration.

FROST: ...new order of the ages that God... NEW: We began by discussing the poem's mysterious first word.

"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."

A word like "something" as the first word of this poem is a huge choice.

(wind whipping) It initially feels arbitrary.

KENNEDY: That's what really gets you started in wanting to follow him.

You're immediately in the countryside and you're trying to figure out, well, what is he talking about?

And is it winter and is it the cold or the frost?

(wind whistling) RHINA ESPAILLAT: The minute he says, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" and he doesn't give it a name, he calls it "something," which makes it mysterious, and by implication, sacred and greater than we are.

SMITH: We get a sense of the immensity.

It's not a person, it's not an inkling, it's something that's rising up or pushing up from the earth.

ESPAILLAT: This is something with power, something beyond human intelligence, human feelings.

(eerie echoing sounds) NEW: That something beneath human intelligence remains an essential part of Frost's vision throughout his career.

"Mending Wall" is the first poem in a volume whose very title, North of Boston, and many of its seventeen poems, lie chilled and in shadow.

Whatever civilization, whatever social structures humans achieve, will need to address the chaos that throbs beneath rational speech.

SMITH: "Mending Wall" is a poem that's doing something in a primeval way because it's speaking to us under its surface by sound.

It's using this deep, pre-literary, or pre-literate sound of a pulse, or a heartbeat.

MAN (robotic): Something there is that doesn't love a wall.

Poetry is written with the body.

The body is doing it long before the intellect is.

♪ ♪ NEW: Underneath the words of the poem is that expressive hum Frost called "the sound of sense."

(low humming sound) As he wrote in a 1913 letter, the best way to get "the sound of sense" is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words.

(muffled speech, humming) ALVAREZ: English, with its pentameters and its rolling cadences, is part of the way that Frost gets in your blood.

It's a poem written in blank verse, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter.

Five beats to a line, roughly, a throb that goes bu-pum, bu-pum, bu-pum, bu-pum, bu-pum.

But, in fact, it's more delicate than that.

Just look at the first line: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."

No one says "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."

ALVAREZ: There's tension between the formal quality of it and the colloquial voice.

He layers the vernacular of the English language, the speaking voice, the sound of sense.

He layers it like a blanket over the stiff fenceposts of the blank verse.

♪ ♪ NEW: Just as the rhythms of spoken language roughen formal iambic pentameter, so too natural forces play havoc with man-made forms.

SMITH: The gaps in the wall that the speaker is excited about begin to happen in the meter.

"And makes gaps even two can pass abreast."

ESPAILLAT: But it's not just nature.

Because he says, "The work of hunters is another thing."

(gunshots, dogs barking) GERGEN: "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."

Hunters go across pastures, and they go across people's lands, you know, with abandon.

♪ ♪ They can go chase the foxes wherever the hell they want.

NEW: Hunting is sport, structured social play.

(horse exhaling) But the hunt also gives vent to something ancient, something animal in us.

(horse whinnying) SMITH: There's this urge that the poem seems to obey, to bring in the disruptive.

(rocks crumbling) PARINI: That's when he shouts in the middle of a line, "Gaps, I mean."

It's like, whoa, wakes up the reader.

♪ ♪ ESPAILLAT: "The gaps, I mean."

ALVAREZ: "The gaps, I mean."

PARINI: "The gaps, I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made."

NEW: Human imagination has long been stirred by wonderment at forces unseen, unheard.

By Frost's day, causes once ascribed to magic were being discovered in the recesses of the psyche, as psychologists described conscious mind as it is built over wilder instincts beneath.

♪ ♪ (dog barking) SMITH: What this also makes me think of is territory.

(dog barking) ♪ ♪ What do we wish to claim?

What do we have the right to claim?

♪ ♪ GERGEN: There's a very old-fashioned notion that goes way back early in American history, property being so important.

John Locke, who was so important to the founders, wrote about life, liberty, and property.

That was the role of the state.

It wasn't life, liberty, and happiness.

It was life, liberty, and property.

This is my ground, and this is your ground.

Why should we, why should we join them?

Why, what is wrong with having individual rights, individual property?

GERGEN: We have recently spent lots and lots of time building a huge wall, right on the edge of our property.

It's like ten feet up and every time I go by it, I have this real macho feeling.

(laughs) ♪ ♪ ESPAILLAT: "But at spring mending-time.

KENNEDY: "Spring mending-time."

ALVAREZ: "But at spring mending-time we find them there."

♪ ♪ GERGEN: "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."

(birds chirping) ALVAREZ: These stone walls were made with boulders when the farmers came here.

The glaciers had deposited all these boulders everywhere, so they just removed them from the field.

And the natural thing was to put them at the border of the property.

GERGEN: If you live near rock wall in New England, you know things do become messy.

ESPAILLAT: He calls his neighbor, he's going to help him put up the fence.

The two of them have to work together.

KENNEDY: This is something that has to be done to set the wall back to rights after the winter.

NEW: The neighbors mend fences for tidiness' sake, and to set boundaries.

But the irony is that it's building the wall, once a year, that actually brings these men face to face.

SMITH: "We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each."

KENNEDY: And the two of them obviously have done this many times and it doesn't change.

He questioned whether the wall is necessary, physically, but I think it's necessary for he and his neighbor to perform this ritual or keep their relationship going.

ALVAREZ: This is a conversation you can't have with a farmer, but he can have the ritual, you know, and sometimes ritual stands in for what you can't do in conversation or with words.

PARINI: It goes back to the old festival of Terminalia.

Terminus was the Roman god of boundaries, and once a year in the early spring, the Romans would gather and mend fences.

We're talking about the literal wall that they're there to tend to, and we're also talking about a form of decorum that need not be invoked verbally, but it's there.

NEW: You were ambassador in Japan, in a culture, and in a role, where observing the protocols and learning the norms was necessary to building relationship.

KENNEDY: Right, and it was very hierarchical, formal.

Really gave me an appreciation for the value of manners and attention to detail.

And at the same time, it made me so grateful that I was from a society that values spontaneity, and something different, and innovation, and... - "Something there is that doesn't love a wall.

Right, right.

(chuckles) ALVAREZ: "To each the boulders that have fallen to each."

PARINI: "And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance."

ESPAILLAT: "Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"

♪ ♪ KENNEDY: "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."

GERGEN: "Oh, just another kind of out-door game."

The speaker talks about this being a game, almost as if they're playing tennis across a net or something like that.

PARINI: And Frost was himself an avid tennis player.

ALVAREZ: He calls the whole thing an outdoor game, so there's a playfulness to it.

(video game sound effects) NEW: Playful, yes, but just as earlier references to the hunt and to territory invoke both the orderly and the animal sides of human beings, to play "one on a side" is to compete.

The rules and the lines build prowess, but there's joy, too, in the parry and thrust.

Part of the intellectual game, the intellectual life, the life of the human mind, is, is having what Frost called "a lover's quarrel with the world," and being able to constantly argue, constantly balance.

ALVAREZ: I was reading the poem to Bill.

Bill said, "Well, so, what's he saying, that he really doesn't believe in walls?"

I said, "No, not so fast."

You always have to do that with Frost, not so fast.

NEW: The speaker may be skeptical about walls, and he may love pushing boundaries, but he doesn't stay on one side of this argument.

GERGEN: There's actually a debate going on within this poem.

It's not just one party saying walls are a good thing, and another party saying, no, no, no, you want to open boundaries.

It's unresolved.

KENNEDY: "I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; ALVAREZ: Who is the one that contacts the farmer about putting up the wall?

It's not the farmer.

The speaker is the one who goes to get the neighbor.

You know, it's not the other way around.

He goes to get him to walk the wall together.

♪ ♪ ESPAILLAT: "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.'"

"Good fences make good neighbors."

ESPAILLAT: "Buen muro, buen vecino."

♪ ♪ GERGEN: His neighbor doesn't really respond, he just quotes the proverb from his father.

SMITH: The speaker of the poem is engaging with someone who likes received wisdom.

There are people who just want to do the literal thing, and don't want to rock the boat.

ESPAILLAT: But then you have to remember that we are getting a view of the neighbor strictly from one side-- he has not said anything, and he's not going to say much of anything.

He has something on his side, but it's internal, and it's called tradition.

Tradition to him is more important than all of these metaphysical things.

It's not metaphysics, it's my father.

KENNEDY: And it just reminds you how much work it took to settle here and who came before.

GERGEN: Quoting his father keeps alive the wisdom, if you would, of an earlier generation.

You know, maybe he just feels his father when he says those words.

There's something real and beautiful, and tradition speaks to those things for us as well.

♪ ♪ NEW: Though revered as a New England poet, Frost was born in California, and he first published "Mending Wall" in England.

This poem, like others, explores the value of local folkways and norms, but it includes the perspective of the outsider who asks "Why?"

"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 offense."

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

ESPAILLAT: "I could say 'Elves' to him, "But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather he said it for himself."

PARINI: His neighbor is this local Vermont farmer, who disapproves of this fancy poet coming up from Boston every year, and probably disapproves of everything about Frost's life-- apple trees, for instance.

ALVAREZ: This poem is no metaphor.

This happens.

We have the 12 acres here, and next door to us is the sheep farm.

And the sheep came over the first year we were here, and Bill had his extensive garden unfenced, and they ate up all his plantings, he was furious.

And so he told the farmer that he had to rebuild that fence that had gone down.

And the farmer said, "I ain't building it."

They went at it, and they were, they were enemies.

♪ ♪ PARINI: The poem says you always have to at least take in the other side.

KENNEDY: You do have to work with people who may not be on your same wavelength.

The only way to avoid arguments in a society is by having a dictatorship.

Now, the country that I was born in was a dictatorship that lasted 30 years and we had no arguments at all for those 30 years because he did what he pleased.

GERGEN: Walls have had a significant impact in history.

Start with The Great Wall of China, thousands of miles long, and what was the purpose of all that?

It was to keep people out.

♪ ♪ And look at the Berlin Wall, that was a wall not to keep people out.

It was a wall to keep people in.

There was a lot of violence connected with all those walls.

PARINI: "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 offense."

ALVAREZ: You know, as a Latina now, I have a new reaction to this poem, saying, yeah, you know, before you build a wall, ask first, you know, what you're walling in or walling out, and to whom you're like to give offense.

NEW: The apparently innocuous word "fence" is etymologically linked to violence.

It comes from the Latin root fendere, meaning to fight or to struggle, and thus has potential to defend or offend.

ESPAILLAT: When it becomes our rights as men, our rights as the rich, our rights as those with power, to lord it over those without, those are very bad walls.

Robert Frost went and read this poem in Russia.

It was the time of the Berlin Wall and all of that.

And then, I think my father gave one of his great speeches at the Robert Frost Library dedication at Amherst, where he talked about the role of the artist is to question authority and to question power.

JOHN F. KENNEDY: But the spirit which informs... CAROLINE KENNEDY: He said, "Where power corrupts, poetry cleanses."

JOHN F. KENNEDY: This was the special significance of Robert Frost.

♪ ♪ NEW: Whether in the realm of geopolitics or in the local neighborhood, Frost understood that something savage in human beings moves them to guard their territory and to be threatened by difference.

He and his neighbor have this in common.

"I see him there bringing a stone "grasped firmly by the top in each hand, like an old-stone savage armed."

ALVAREZ: "He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees."

PARINI: "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.'"

There's something that my ear in this day cringes at a little bit when I see him likened to a savage.

♪ ♪ But I also recognize he's talking about a darkness that's not literal.

ALVAREZ: He looks like "an old-stone savage armed."

Part of the thing is the savagery in us all.

(footsteps echoing) I identify with that as a female, sometimes walking down a strange city street at night and seeing somebody.

And just for a moment, there's your vulnerability.

(footsteps echoing) We often look to fortifications of one kind or another, give us a sense of security that we wouldn't have otherwise, and you can, you sleep better at night because, in effect, you've erected an electronic wall around your house.

(alarm blaring) PARINI: Frost is aware of the belligerent aspect of wall building.

Later in life, he understood this poem was being misused by people.

I can remember hearing a politician quoting the line.

We have a saying back in Indiana, Mr. Speaker, that "Good fences make good neighbors."

Good fences make good neighbors.

Good fences make good neighbors.

This amendment will put up a fence.

SMITH: If you are not native to a place, native folkways are something that bar you from, really, full integration.

There's a part of this poem that I believe is about eliminating different barriers to belonging.

NEW: Frost might seem to be arguing that all walls should come down.

So why does he call his neighbor and ask him to come mend fences?

- I think it's because he understands that we cannot do away with all of the fences, that we have to be very careful in choosing which fences to take down and which fences to leave up.

When does a ritual and tradition become gated and keep us apart?

And when does it energize and keep us together?

Keep us civil in a civil society?

Which is what happened with our neighbor.

Bill says, "I have all the right, I've checked the law."

I said, "But, Bill, you can win "the battle and lose the war.

"We're still going to have to be neighbors.

"Why don't you just offer you're going to build the fence, each one pays half."

He did that, and now they're buddies.

♪ ♪ PARINI: Thomas Jefferson said that every 20 years, there should be a new constitutional convention, so that we can make amendments, so we could mend the fence that's not weathering very well.

So we have to keep rebuilding the walls.

We have to be mending fences with our neighbors again and again.

Endlessly, the work of civilization is the work of mending wall.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪