美國人物志:羅伯特·弗羅斯特 （二）（5/9)

Frost was like an earlier New England writer and thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson. They never were good at joining others in programs or movements. Frost was politically conservative and avoided movements of the left or right. He did this not because he did not support their beliefs, but because they were group projects. In the poem "Mending Wall" the speaker and his neighbor walk together along a wall, repairing the damage caused by winter weather: 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. 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 and walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. The speaker questions his neighbor who says, "Good fences make good neighbors.” The speaker says: 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.