Sic Semper Tyrannis

On Dogs, Robert Frost, and My Paternal Instinct

Speaking of dogs, today I have a special edition for you. What follows is a classic poem by Robert Frost, "Mending Wall,” and part of a dog-related response I wrote way back when I was in college living in my parents’ house.

Mending Wall
by Robert Frost

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."

Like Frost, I too noticed that my back fence was disintegrating. However, the “something there is,” on which Frost blamed the disrepair of his fence is in my case the neighbor’s giant, poop-brown chow.

I suppose the dog had grown tired of regular store-bought dog food and decided to take it upon himself to supplement his diet with huge chunks of my wooden fence. However, this was not enough to provoke me to take “neighborly” action and repair the fence, (I found it sort of cute when he squeezed his whole head through the hole in the fence and looked around.) No, the final straw was when I looked out my back window to the sight of the big, dumb-looking thing running around my backyard, sniffing the butt of my pure and innocent yellow lab Molly. The initial shock of this horrific image soon gave way to a feeling of utter betrayal as I saw how happy my once-pure and angelic Molly seemed while cavorting around blissfully with this piece of trash outsider.

That, kind reader, was the last straw.

After chasing the transient canine across the tracks back to the bad side of town, his native turf, I became a character more appropriate for an Edgar Allan Poe story, rather than for a Frost poem. With frenzied, yet deliberate, movements and the occasional barely-audible, slightly-primal grunt, all the while muttering epithets such as “What’s the matter with you? Didn’t we raise you better than this,” I began to not only repair the fence, but to furiously build an impenetrable, fortress-like barrier out of some loose bricks that happened to be stacked on the side of the house. And as the battlement finally rose to a height I deemed absolutely unscalable by my Molly, who sat and calmly watched each brick go into place with a cocked-head and questioning expression, I thought back to Robert Frost and realized the dreams of “neighborliness” and “brotherhood” were gone.

posted by Mike @ 1:40 PM