FROST'S "MEETING AND PASSING": When It's Travel and When It's Only a Shuffling of Feet

Most Americans these days measure travel by the hundreds or thousands of miles, plus introductions to other cultures, languages, features of landscape and human morphology. On its face, that’s all fine, of course; one’s understandings and tolerances might grow because of such exposure.

Or they might not. Stories of rigid, dug-in, self-righteous American tourists are too familiar. The tour buses might as well be labeled Upper Middle Class American Caucasians, peering and aging.  Younger people with backpacks, staying in hostels or actually living in an-Other Place, on some kind of study or exchange program, might become spongier vessels, at least for a few years. 

I’m not ready to say tourists should stay home, but I’m also not jumping to the conclusion that they’ve achieved anything like charitable omniscience and empathy, especially those on the bus. I’m more interested in travel of the mind and heart, which can probably occur in a single chair. That’s an old notion (I think of Emily Dickinson’s “There is no frigate like a book”), but I don’t hear much talk about it.

So here is a Robert Frost sonnet I didn’t know until the Academy of American Poets     www.poets.org posted it as their poem for the day.  Like much of Frost, it feels so casual and general that we might overlook its potential to become The Poem about the nature of human encounters.  

As I went down the hill along the wall
There was a gate I had leaned at for the view
And had just turned from when I first saw you
As you came up the hill. We met. But all
We did that day was mingle great and small
Footprints in summer dust as if we drew
The figure of our being less than two
But more than one as yet. Your parasol
Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust.
And all the time we talked you seemed to see
Something down there to smile at in the dust.
(Oh, it was without prejudice to me!)
Afterward I went past what you had passed
Before we met, and you what I had passed.

In the final couplet’s word play, I sense a purposeful incompleteness, ambiguity, open-endedness, something dangling. These two characters have talked in a seemingly friendly way. Their footprints have mingled in the dust as they cover more or less the same territory.

A lesser mind than Frost’s might have blissfully concluded that there’s been meaningful communication between the two characters, but I think he’s offering that what they’ve missed in terms of knowing each other is at least as significant as what they’ve shared. They’ve met, passed, shared paths, mingled “great and small”—but Frost’s sneaky enjambment demands that we keep going, to discover that what “mingled great and small” was their footprints, not their souls or hearts.  And the outline of those footprints is etched in dust, not moonlight and roses.

If we meet, we talk, we pass, and then sort of cover each other’s steps, like trackers, how much meaningful bonding has occurred? How much can occur?  I think Frost’s position here parallels his wonderful ambiguity in his more famous line, “Good fences make good neighbors.”  (“Mending Wall” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173530).  That need for boundaries is ambiguous because he puts it in the mouth of a less than wonderful character, the speaker’s neighbor. But isn’t there truth in his words? But isn’t it a sad truth?