Man-Made Boundaries: Walling In and Walling Out

The idea that “good fences make good neighbors,” postulated in Robert Frost’s well known “Mending Wall,” is oft quoted and used as to describe a suburban truth where everyone lives within their own spaces. However, that was only one half of the conversation in that poem and it was the neighbor who held this view. Frost’s narrator voice, by contrast, didn’t really see the need for a fence and said as much in lines that are less revisited:


“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.”

I was thinking of this today while reading the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine which highlights Hadrian’s Wall which stretches the width of Britain. While its stones no longer top their original 15 feet in height and in some places the wall itself is just a small rock outline, now 84 miles of this stone wall's middle flows alongside a refurbished National Trail and may be host to new visitors rather than a few historians and hard core hikers.  (See the article at www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/Trekking-Hadrians-Wall.html)

From nearly the oldest recorded history to modern architecture walls have been constructed as barriers, to keep invaders or others out, which is the purpose and definition of a wall generally—a partition, a separation—of one room or side or people, from another. That was the purpose behind the most famous Great Wall, to protect China from raids of Mongols, Turks and other tribes from invading their lands.

But what of the Berlin Wall? Was it really constructed to physically keep people from crossing over? Maybe, but plenty of people were able to gain transport to and from either side legally, (through Checkpoint Charlie), or illegally by sneaking around or under or through by disguise. The Berlin Wall was a symbolic barrier, a separation of ideologies, powers.

Coming full circle, and perhaps the central theme in my mind when reading about Hadrian's Wall, is to return to Britain. Roman Emperor Hadrian—that is Caesar Publius Aelius Traianus Hadrianus Augustus--commissioned the wall that bears his name after travelling to his conquered outlier and ordered it built across the land in 122 AD. One of the most interesting passages of the Smithsonian article had me nodding my head and smiling…for once archaeological findings are in agreement with sociologists, political scientists and even psychologists. Why did Hadrian have this wall built, to ward off the invading or offending Brits? Sadly there was hardly a Braveheart type of atmosphere at that time. Here’s what the experts say:

“What were the Romans so worried about? [Scottish Archaeologist David] Breeze says the Roman frontier wasn’t primarily about defending the empire against barbarian attacks, as some archaeologists have argued. 'Built frontiers aren’t necessarily about armies attacking but about controlling the movement of people. The only way you can really control things is to build a barrier.'"

It seems that over the ages the British learned well from being subjects of the imposing Romans. We all know their colonial history, but when it comes to psychological walls well built, the checkpoints coming in and out of Northern Ireland were perhaps the best psychical representations of how modern day control is meant to appear. I bet most people who live there, or lived there up until the late 1990’s before most were dismantled, would tell you the checkpoint towers set up along the border of Northern Ireland did more to the psyche than actually keep people from going in or out. They were intimidating agents, a show of who was in charge—after all, who feels invited to enter a place with soldiers holding machine guns in towers? And I bet that's what the Romans figured.

In perhaps the most irony, here is a poem for the day by the British Rudyard Kipling, born in India, educated in Britain and then, when back in India, wrote this poem, about the thoughts of a lonely guard in the Roman Empire, sitting atop Hadrian’s Wall.

Walls, mental, metaphorical, physical or imagined, seem to be very powerful indeed. So often the Other being banned from the those sitting inside the walls, have so much more in common, so much more history together than anyone else. Kipling knows that well and articulates it in the voice of the Roman who doesn’t want to leave Britain.


The Roman Centurion's Song

By Rudyard Kipling


LEGATE, I had the news last night--my cohort ordered home
By ships to Portus Itius and thence by road to Rome.
I've marched the companies aboard, the arms are stowed below;
Now let another take my sword. Command me not to go!

I've served in Britain forty years, from Vectis to the Wall.
I have none other home than this, nor any life at all.
Last night I did not understand, but, now the hour draws near
That calls me to my native land, I feel that land is here.

Here where men say my name was made, here where my work was done;
Here where my dearest dead are laid--my wife--my wife and son;
Here where time, custom, grief and toil, age, memory, service, love,
Have rooted me in British soil. Ah, how can I remove?

For me this land, that sea, these airs, those folk and fields suffice.
What purple Southern pomp can match our changeful Northern skies,
Black with December snows unshed or pearled with August haze--
The clanging arch of steel-grey March, or June's long-lighted days?

You'll follow widening Rodanus till vine and olive lean
Aslant before the sunny breeze that sweeps Nemausus clean
To Arelate's triple gate: but let me linger on,
Here where our stiff-necked British oaks confront Euroclydon!

You'll take the old Aurelian Road through shore-descending pines
Where, blue as any peacock's neck, the Tyrrhene Ocean shines.
You'll go where laurel crowns are won, but--will you e'er forget
The scent of hawthorn in the sun, or bracken in the wet?

Let me work here for Britain's sake--at any task you will--
A marsh to drain, a road to make or native troops to drill.
Some Western camp (I know the Pict) or granite Border keep,
Mid seas of heather derelict, where our old messmates sleep.

Legate, I come to you in tears--My cohort ordered home!
I've served in Britain forty years. What should I do in Rome?
Here is my heart, my soul, my mind--the only life I know,
I cannot leave it all behind. Command me not to go!