Discussion today about Mending Wall had me thinking about a lot of possibilities and connections that the wall could mean. After reading "Metaphor and the Authenticating Act of Memory," I came across a line that said, "every metaphor is a riddle." In Frost's poem, it is the wall that is the riddle. We have already established that it is separating the neighbors, but it is doing this in a multiplicity of layers: literally, it separates them. Philosophically, it separates them. It is a segregation between two different intellectual capacities: one that can live with whatever comes his way, the other afraid to step outside the boundaries that "the way things OUGHT to be" have laid out for him. While the speaker is listening to his inherent and natural questioning of the wall's purpose, the neighbor is stubborn, ignorant, unwilling to undergo CHANGE.
While we were talking, I kept thinking of historical references: Why did people in the dark ages allow themselves to be ruled by a small group of elite people, fat with wealth and greed. How did they come out of the dark ages? By GRASPING change, not resisting it. By embracing a broken down wall and allowing the "gaps" to be explored as windows of opportunities to a new outlook on life. Positive events happened because of this change: the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, America's independence from England, and countless other things aside from European history. One can view the wall as the element of tradition, with it's firm foundation built "stone on a stone." But that "SOMETHING," whether it's a stream of unconsciousness, intuition, God's will, or an inexplainable force of nature, invites the speaker's curiosity to question....why?
"I could say "Elves" to him, But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather He said it for himself." One interpretation of this could be that the speaker is suffering to see his neighbor not question the wall's existence, or (LACK of existence when it continues to fall.) He yearns for his neighbor to realize that "Elves" aren't "exactly" the explanation. It could be a martian or deranged gnome for that matter! The speaker is witnessing someone who is unable to think for himself and make his own decisions because he is haunted by "his father's saying." Even though the neighbor is not physically suffering, he may symbolically succumb to the oppression of the norm. And the norm may not always be the right path for everybody. People blindly follow the norms without realizing it, and won't realize they know something until somebody spoon-feeds it to them. The exciting part of a human's mental development is being able to engage in mystery of the unknown. How is it mystery if somebody tells you it's "elves?" There may not always be an answer for everything even though that is what we are constantly searching for.
