(criticism) Directive / Steeple Bush(1947)

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(criticism) Directive / Steeple Bush(1947)

Back out of all this now too much for us, 
Back in a time made simple by the loss 
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off 
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather, 
There is a house that is no more a house 
Upon a farm that is no more a farm 
And in a town that is no more a town. 
The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you 
Who only has at heart your getting lost, 
May seem as if it should have been a quarry—

Great monolithic knees the former town 
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered. 
And there’s a story in a book about it: 
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels 
The ledges show lines ruled southeast northwest, 
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier 
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole. 
You must not mind a certain coolness from him 
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain, 
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal 
Of being watched from forty cellar holes 
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins. 
As for the woods’ excitement over you 
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves, 
Charge that to upstart inexperience 
Where were they all not twenty years ago? 
They think too much of having shaded out 
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees. 
Make yourself up a cheering song of how 
Someone’s road home from work this once was, 
Who may be just ahead of you on foot 
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain 
The height of the adventure is the height 
Of country where two village cultures faded 
Into each other. Both of them are lost 
And if you’re lost enough to find yourself 
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you 
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me 
Then make yourself at home. The only field 
Now less no bigger than a harness gall. 
First there’s the children’s house of make believe, 
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine, 
The playthings in the playhouse of the children 
Weep for what little things could make them glad. 
Then for the house that is no more a house, 
But only a belilaced cellar hole, 
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough. 
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest. 
Your destination and your destiny’s 
A brook that was the water of the house, 
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source, 
Too lofty and original to rage. 
(We know the valley streams that when aroused 
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.) 
I have kept hidden in the instep arch 
Of an old cedar at the waterside 
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail 
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it, 
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t. 
(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.) 
Here are your waters and your watering place. 
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

https://youtu.be/5pZjj0d4FvI

------------------------

Jay Parini : Robert Frost : A Life

Rober Faggen : Frost and the Questions of Pastoral

Helen Bacon : Frost and the Ancient Muses

Roger Gibert : Robert Frost: The Walk as Parable

Blanford Parker : Frost and the Meditative Lyric

Philip Booth : Robert Frost's Prime Directive

Deirdre Fagan : Critical Companion to Robert Frost A Literary Reference to His Life And Work

---------------------------

Frost had difficulty balancing his need for contact with 
people and his desire for solitude; poems, as he often noted, 
rooted in the latter. One new poem written in 1945 was “One 
Step Backward Taken.” It harks back to Frost’s experience of a 
flood in 1927, when he was traveling by train across Arizona on 
his way home to Amherst; looking out the window, he saw a 
bridge washed out with a car balanced on one bank, edging 
backward carefully each time a slice of earth fell away—an 
astounding image that Frost puts to good use in the poem:

Not only sands and gravels 
Were once more on their travels, 
But gulping muddy gallons 
Great boulders off their balance 
Bumped heads together dully 
And started down the gully. 
Whole capes caked off in slices. 
I felt my standpoint shaken 
In the universal crisis. 
But with one step backward taken

I saved myself from going. 
A world torn loose went by me. 
Then the rain stopped and the blowing 
And the sun came out to dry me.

The first seven lines comprise a movement of sorts: a vision 
of the “universal crisis” collapsed into an image of colliding 
elements of nature. Uncharacteristically, Frost refuses to 
punctuate the lines normally; the syntax, in effect, mimics the 
confusion created by the disruption. Like the wary animal in “A 
Drumlin Woodchuck” who makes its “own strategic retreat,” the 
poet (emulating the driver in the car on the edge of the 
precipice) withdraws to save himself as a “world torn loose” went 
by him.

“Directive,” one of Frost’s most central poems, was also 
written during this period. Although past the time of life when 
major poems came regularly, here he recovers temporarily his 
full powers in a poem that reconsiders his entire poetic project, 
interrogates it thoroughly—much as Yeats had done in “The 
Circus Animals’ Desertion” (1939), one of his best late poems. 
“Directive” is both epitaph and poetic credo. As the latter, it 
offers a “directive” to his imagination, a map of his inner 
landscape. As in Milton’s “Lycidas,” the poet confronts one of his 
major themes: how to survive an overwhelming experience, one 
that threatens to destroy the imagination itself.10 Both Milton 
and Frost take the reader through a harrowing reconstruction of 
emotional destitution, confronting the dark aspect of 
sentimentality, which is death to the poet. While Milton looks 
forward to “fresh woods and pastures new,” Frost is able to say 
(to himself as much as to his reader): “Here are your waters and

your watering place. / Drink and be whole again beyond 
confusion.”

At the outset in “Directive,” the poet confronts a nearly 
obliterated landscape, discovering a “house that is no more a 
house / Upon a farm that is no more a farm” within a “town that 
is no more a town.” Like Virgil beside Dante in the Inferno, Frost 
accompanies us “Back out of all this now too much for us.” He 
returns to a time “made simple by the loss / Of detail.” The 
details, perhaps, would hurt too much if we had to experience 
them again freshly. We don’t know, and don’t even want to know, 
the names of the lost.

The reader should be warned that Frost is a guide “Who only 
has at heart your getting lost.” This is the Christian (or, more 
specifically, Pauline) paradox: that only the lost can be saved. 
One must plunge into loss and despair before arriving at a 
condition of salvation. This line also echoes Thoreau, who writes 
in Walden, “Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have 
lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where 
we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”

The traveler in the poem is taken on a “serial ordeal,” coming 
upon a deserted village with its “forty cellar holes.” This is, as 
Katherine Kearns has noted, “a deconstructed land that evades 
the pitfalls of both town and farm even as it repudiates the 
possibility of an uncorrupted wild space.”11 “Directive” seems to 
occupy some of the emotional terrain of Eliot’s The Waste Land 
—that is, the modern world is seen as a broken place, a ruined 
landscape where all traditional symbols are drained of content. 
Indeed, Frost seems to allude directly to Eliot by putting a 
broken chalice in the poem as the guide claims to have hidden “a

broken drinking goblet like the Grail” in the instep arch of an old 
cedar near the brook that runs by the property.

Perversely, the chalice is “Under a spell so the wrong ones 
can’t find it, / So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they 
mustn’t.” Frost refers here to Mark 4:11–12, where Jesus says, 
“Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: 
but unto them that are without, all these things are done in 
parables. That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and 
hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they 
should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.” 
The uninitiated, those spiritually unprepared for the experience, 
cannot participate in the revelations offered here. Those who 
have not received their education by metaphor—their training in 
parables, so to speak—will be left out.

Not all critics have been impressed by Frost’s cleverness 
here. The poem “hints at ironies that cannot be consequential 
except to those who have enclosed themselves within the circuit 
of Frost’s own work, and for them the ironies ought to be of a 
claustrophobic self-reference that is at odds with the 
pretentiously large rhetorical sweeps and presumptuous ironies in 
which the poem indulges itself,” complains Richard Poirier. But 
even Poirier cannot deny that parts of this poem represent 
instances of Frost’s “descriptive and visionary genius,” especially 
the “wildly brilliant” opening.12

The narrative builds to the point where a brook is found: “Too 
lofty and original to rage.” It is near its source, so icy cold. Frost 
seems to invite the reader who has followed him into this wild to 
go back to whatever source has been important for him or her. 
“Go back to a favorite poet, or a place you almost forgot,” Frost 
once said to an audience before a reading of this poem. So the

poet directs the reader to reconnect to some important 
emotional source .

In the end, the poet encounters a torn landscape but still 
refuses to give in to despair. He urges himself (as much as the 
reader whom he serves as guide):

Make yourself up a cheering song of how 
Someone’s road home from work this once was, 
Who may be just ahead of you on foot 
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.

He adds, memorably: “The height of the adventure is the height 
/ Of country where two village cultures faded / Into each 
other.”

Encountering such a charged scene, Frost nevertheless 
refuses to succumb to nostalgia, although (as with many great 
poems) that threat is always present. The exact setting for 
“Directive” doesn’t really matter, but Frost would certainly have 
had in the back of his mind the farm at Derry and the brook 
nearby, Hyla Brook, where his children played. There is also an 
abandoned farm much like the one in “Directive” not far behind 
the Homer Noble farm. But abandoned farms, even whole 
villages, are commonplace in northern New England. “As a hiker,” 
recalls Reginald L. Cook, “Frost came across them regularly. It 
would be a mistake to try to locate this farm anywhere in 
particular. It is typical, even universal, in its complexion and 
details.”13

One geological point of interest in the poem is the appearance 
of some dramatic ledges. In a memoir by the sculptor Walker 
Hancock (who did a bust of Frost), one finds this interesting

recollection: “Frost had explored some of the woods of Cape Ann 
with us. One day I showed him ‘the Ledges.’ These are a wide 
stretch of granite on my property that had been laid bare long 
ago by quarrymen who never thereafter carried out their 
intention to excavate at that location. They are now strangly 
beautiful—quite remote, surrounded by pines and bordered with 
little pools. Still visible are marks of the boulders that were 
pushed across them in the ice age. Frost was especially 
interested in them, and a short time later these lines appeared in 
his poem entitled ‘Directive’ (first published during the winter of 
1946): 

The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest, 
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier 
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.” 
14

“Directive” stands somewhat by itself in Frost’s work, not 
quite resembling anything that came before, but lodged firmly in 
the tradition of what M. H. Abrams has called the Greater 
Romantic Lyric.15 In Abrams’s outine of the genre, typified by 
Wordsworth in “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern 
Abbey,” the poet (as solitary speaker) returns to a place that 
has been meaningful at some past time. He sinks into deep 
meditation, having been forced by the circumstances to 
contemplate lost time, and having had his sense of spirituality 
quickened by the encounter with nature. The poem moves toward 
a resolution that rises to levels of ecstasy or determination—a 
totalizing moment or epiphany of sorts. The reader has the 
experience of having been taken on a journey that is both 
physical and spiritual, one colored and given texture by a 
particular landscape. In attempting such a thing, and succeeding

so magnificently at an age when most writers have long since 
abandoned, or been abandoned by, the muse, Frost was once 
again proving himself worthy of his reputation.

from "Robert Frost : A Life - Jay Parini"

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“Directive” also plays on a quest for origins that begins with the evocation of a traditionally pastoral landscape of simplicity, but one existing in a lost past, a ruin not unlike the cellar hole of “The Generations of Men.” Frost also treats us to lines that seem to parody Eliot’s style in both The Wasteland and in Four Quartets :

Back out of all this now too much for us,

Back in a time made simple by the loss

Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off

Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,

There is a house that is no more a house

Upon a farm that is no more a farm

And in a town that is no more a town.

 This pastor-poet narrator toys with our nostalgia and our longings for home and simplicity, foundations that become uprooted and destroyed over time. He has only “at heart your getting lost.” Whatever one finds there is something we project onto the vast expanse of natural history from which “two village cultures faded/ Into each ther. Both of them are lost.” Perhaps this is an echo of Thoreau’s wisdom in Walden that we need to become lost in order to find ourselves. But the retreat from confusion to simplicity appears an illusion and joke. At this source (a strange Parnassus similar to the spring in “The Mountain”) is a spring and a Grail-like goblet “Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,/So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.” The tone and ultimate meaning of the parenthetic reference to St. Mark’s account of Jesus’ parable about why he speaks in parables say a great deal about Frost’s attitude toward religion and poetry. In St. Mark’s account, Jesus speaks in parables to exclude, to keep the wrong ones out. In the parallel account in St. Matthew, Jesus justifies speaking in parables as a means of education, to heighten attention and thought. 16 Frost loved indirection as a means of education. In “Revelation,” he laments that it would be “a pity if the case require/ (Or so we say) that in the end/ We speak the literal to inspire/ The understanding of a friend.” And in “Mending Wall” the narrator also enjoys hinting, “I could say ‘Elves’ to him,/ But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather/ He said it for himself.” But the idea of parable in St. Mark underscores exclusion and exclusivity rather than education. This does not so much represent an attack on all Christianity but certainly a recognition of the underlying persistence of the will to power. Frost repeatedly brings the passage from St. Mark into question in relation to democracy, revealing his own preference for parable as a wall to be built up and then to be subverted and broken down:

But this thing that I’ve brought up before here. I’ve quoted it, I think, in a couple of places, and it’s always coming into my head: that these things are said in parable so the wrong people can’t understand them and so get saved. It says that twice in the New Testament. It sounds very harsh and undemocratic, doesn’t it. Sounds esoteric. And one of my good friends went forth from my saying that to say that I was esoteric –that my thinking was esoteric. But not at all. Because it also says in the New Testament that except you become as little children, you know. That meant that so professors won’t understand it. It’s so simple and so foolish that only little children can understand it. 17

In his notebooks, he is even more explicit about the deeper relation of parable to “dark sayings” of both Hebrew wisdom literature and ancient Greek wisdom literature. Frost’s comments suggest that wisdom can come from many unexpected sources, all of whom have or can make claims to power and authority:

Athens was the headquarters of philosophy but Sparta of wisdom. Plato is my authority. He says the Spartan had the wisdom and when he felt it coming over him to talk wisdom he ordered all the strangers out of the room so they couldn’t profit by it. (How like Mark’s saying Christians in their exclusiveness must talk in parable so the wrong people won’t understand and so get saved.) Many people consider Plato infallible. Sometime I mean to round up a lot of wise sayings such as we have from the Spartans such as “Good fences make good neighbors.” My guess would be we owe most of these to the wise woman of the tribe or family. 18

 Frost complicates how we read the ultimate “mystery” of “Directive” but he also underscores the tension in “Mending Wall.” Surely he regarded the “old-stone savage’s” dark saying, “Good fences make good neighbors” as much as the saying of the speaker “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” This “savage” is engaged literally and figuratively in putting up a barrier (as St. Mark’s Jesus was). But this has nothing to do with religious mysticism and cultishness that Frost found to be mere obscurity. “Some people don’t know the difference between obscurity and what are called in ancient times ‘dark sayings,’ that you go into deeper, darker in your life. But obscurity isn’t that. Obscurity is a cover for nothing. You go looking for it and it comes out ‘A stitch in time saves nine.’ But there are dark sayings.” 19 Frost’s poetry moves us to a “higher plane of regard ,” as he liked to say (not a higher plane), in enabling us to reconsider different aspects of recurrent and ancient questions.

 Frost throughout his work expresses skepticism toward “metaphysical profundity.” The dialogue in A Masque of Reason is also a pastoral dialogue of competing shepherds. Job rebukes aspects of Christian mysticism. For God’s descent into matter through the incarnation as well as his suffering is not more but almost less than we can understand. The more obscure aspects of theology and mysticism fail to explain the mystery of suffering and existence. But even skepticism comes full circle to doubt itself:

 I’ve come to think no so-called hidden value’s
 Worth going after. Get down into things
 It will be found there’s no more given there
 Than on the surface. If there ever was,
 The crypt was long since rifled by the Greeks.
 We don’t know where we are, or who we are.
 We don’t know one another; don’t know You;

from "Frost and the Questions of Pastoral - ROBERT FAGGEN"

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A relatively late (1945) example of this theme is “Directive,” which seems to be a more concise retelling (62 lines) of “The Mountain” (1914) (109 lines). Both poems deal with a mountain, wildness, harmony, and a mysterious journey on a hidden path to a spring at the very top of the mountain – a journey that suggests to most some kind of  initiation. Harmony and wildness are for Frost two essential and complementary aspects of poetry to which he often refers. In “The Figure a Poem Makes” (1939), he speaks of the mystery of “how a poem can have a tune in such a straightness of meter” and “how a poem can have wildness and at the same time a subject that shall be fulfilled.” And he goes on to say that a poem “begins in delight and ends in clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification . . . but in a momentary stay against confusion.”

 For anyone as steeped in antiquity as Frost, the setting of these two poems (in spite of the obvious Biblical allusions) brings to mind (with its suggestions of initiation and revelation) Mount Parnassus where, near the town of Delphi, the sacred spring Castalia, one of the homes of the Muses, gushes out between its twin peaks. There, Apollo and Dionysus, both gods of music and inspiration, appropriately share a cult. These two gods are embodiments of Frost’s two basic principles of poetry. Apollo represents harmony and order; Dionysus represents wildness and instinct. But Dionysus does not represent instinct run wild, as he so often appears to do in modern interpretations. Though he dances with his barefoot Maenads in the wilderness, he also tames and harnesses savage leopards and panthers to his chariot. He is the god who transmutes impulse into art as already described in the myth of the Syrinx. Harmony and order brought to bear on the chaos of impulse result in a “clarification of life,” which is a “momentary stay against confusion.”

 It is interesting that the opening lines of Wordsworth’s sonnet:

 The world is too much with us; late and soon,
 Getting and spending we lay waste our powers;

is echoed in Frost’s 'this now too much for us” (near the beginning of “Directive”) with a typical Frostian twist. The whole sonnet longs for a retreat to antiquity, where, rid of the distractions of the present, the poet might experience the freshness of an encounter with ancient divinities. It ends:

 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

 Frost’s allusion to Wordsworth reinforces the need expressed in “Directive” to return to our origins in antiquity and thus affirm the timelessness and universality of our inspiration.

from "Frost and the Ancient Muses - HELEN BACON"

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It is not until Frost's last great poem, "Directive," that he manages to reconcile the desire to write a poem that moves toward wisdom or "clarification" with his mature stance as one who has already achieved the wisdom of detachment. His solution is an ingenious one; the poem is written in the second person, in the voice of a guide. Thus it is the reader who enacts the process of moving from play to knowledge, while Frost himself maintains the perspective of an all knowing sage. The walk described in the poem is a walk we are being asked to take, and while we may assume that our guide has covered this route himself, he evidently has no further need for it. "Directive" is thus like a late version of "The Wood-Pile" in which the speaker has retired from the scene to oversee the initiation of new walkers. 

The poem's famous opening lines establish the coordinates and goal ofthe walk we are being sent on: 

Back out of all this now too much for us. 

Back in a time made simple by tbe loss 
Of detail, bumed, dissolved, and broken off 
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather. 
There is a house that is no more a house 
Upon a farm that is no more a farm 
And in a town that is no more a town. 
{Poetry, p. 377) 

Much has been said about the intricate syntactical ambiguities these lines present: should we read the first line, for example, as an imperative or a prepositional clause? And should the word "now" be taken as a substantive rather than an adverb? We are indeed being urged to "back out" of the "now" of present history, to embark on a joumey into the past; yet even the status of this apparently "simple" time is uncertain, for its simplicity seems to be a function of erosion, rather than an inherent property of an earlier era. Indeed the very point of our excursion into this landscape may be to undermine nostalgia, as another version of the sentimentalizing pathos that Frost backs away from in his earlier poems. The simile "like graveyard marble sculpture" hints that not simply attrition but death is the precondition for the kind of bare clarity of outline the poem is leading us to, recalling the image of the wood-pile that survives its maker. The series of riddling phrases that begin "There is a house that is no more a house" further confuses our understanding of time. Had Frost written "There was a house that is no more a house" the ambiguity would be dispelled; as it is we cannot tell whether we are being directed into a past moment imagined as present, or to a present site haunted by its past. We only know that the poem is leading us to a place in which present and past, life and death, being and nonbeing intersect. 

The first part of the poem's itinerary abounds in the kind of playful personification also found in "The Wood-Pile" and "Good Hours," suggesting an initial phase of imaginative projection that must eventually yield to a more sober apprehension. But where the speakers in the earlier poems confined their personifying to relatively small objects, a bird and a row of houses. Frost here magnifies this impulse to include the landscape as a whole: 

The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you 
Who only has at heart your getting lost. 
May seem as if it should have been a quarry— 
Great monolithic knees the former town 
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered. 
And there's a story in a book about it 
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels 
The ledges show lines ruled southeast northwest. 
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier 
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole. 
You must not mind a certain coolness from him 
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain. 

Vast forces of nature are tamed and domesticated by the poet's imagination, and geological histories of the region are tumed into story-books. As in "The Wood-Pile," there is an element of forced playfulness here that seems to call attention to its own excess; the almost cartoonlike portrayal of the quarry's knees and the glacier's feet, representing feminine culture and masculine nature (a typically American realignment of the traditional gender associations), creates an effect of Rabelaisian unreality which I think is meant to put us on our guard. What these fantastic figures hide is the essential destnictiveness of this landscape, its tendency to wear away both at itself and whatever human community seeks to tame it. Once more Frost invents a humanized companion (the glacier is referred to as "him") to disguise his, or rather our, solitude in a barren landscape; and once more this gesture can be perceived as a defensive strategy for staving off tragic knowledge. 

Frost is never more artful than in this part of the poem. The cleverness, the arch tone, the overelaborated conceits, all I think are meant to trouble the reader, to start us of our own accord towards the poem's ultimate destination, which is the antithesis of such distracted play.' As if to move us gradually towards our goal. Frost allows the landscape to darken slowly, permitting more ominous details to enter one by one: 

Nor need you mind the serial ordeal 
Of being watched from forty cellar holes 
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins. 
As for the woods' excitement over you 
That sends light rustle rushes to tbeir leaves. 
Charge that to upstart inexperience. 
Where were they all not twenty years ago? 
They think too much of having shaded out 
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees. 
Make yourself up a cheering song of how 
Someone's road home from work this once was. 
Who may be just ahead of you on foot 
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.

The word "ordeal," with its overtones of quest-romance, fiippantly points us to the true nature of this walk. It is a quest because, unlike the walker in "The Wood-Pile," we know that there is a goal ahead, the "house that is no more a house." At this point, however, only our guide knows why the house is a suitable object of our quest. Unlike us. Frost knows what is to come; having traveled this path many times before, he can no longer be surprised by what he finds. Yet he can still conduct us there in such a way that the full impact of discovery is maintained. To this end he distracts us with jokes, similes, garrulous tales, all meant to offset the stark knowledge to come. 

Again there is a touch of imaginative projection in the reference to the forty "eye pairs," perhaps recalling the "houses up to their shining eyes in snow" of "Good Hours"; but even without the simile we are still "being watched from forty cellar holes," so that rhetorically only the firkins are overtly fictional (perhaps inspired by Ali Baba's forty thieves hidden in their barrels). The use of the simile defiects the walker's deeper fears and uncertainties about the landscape's inhabitants by turning to explicit figurations; yet the literal sense of being watched remains. More importantly, the image of the cellar holes looks forward to the single ruined house that we are seeking, a cellar hole somehow different from the rest, more isolated and more tragic. 

Another blatant projection comes with the "woods' excitement over you," as Frost again offers a complete narrative to account for their humanized behavior. Now, however, the personification has the landscape responding directly to the walker's presence (we may recall the leaf that falls in "A Late Walk," "disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought"). Here of course Frost's tone remains wryly self-conscious; but the story he tells about the trees gives an oblique indication of the landscape's true history. They are "upstarts" because they are young; they think well of themselves because they grew tall enough to block the sun from an apple orchard, thus killing it. The implicit scenario, as throughout the poem, is of nature overwhelming culture, obliterating the products of human labor with frightening ease. The apple trees belonged to someone's farm, and we should remember that Frost himself wrote of apple picking with great authority. (The epithet "pecker-fretted" may provide a hint as to why the orchard was originally abandoned.) The speaker's playful characterization of the woods, then, is another shrugging off of tragedy, an attempt to portray nature as responsive to the humans whom in reality it overwhelms. 

Frost's deadly encouragements reach a climax in his advice to "make yourself up a cheering song of how/ Someone's road home from work this once was." At last the motivations behind his jangling rhetoric become apparent: he, like us, is in urgent need of cheering. Indeed the first part of the poem has been nothing other than a "cheering song," made up to animate a landscape whose truth is too painful to face. The fact that the song we are instructed to make up only brings us closer to the landscape's history of ruin is an irony in keeping with what has gone before. The cheerful vision of the laborer "who may be just ahead of you" is very much a reminiscence of the forgetful wood-cutter in "The Wood-Pile," a human figure imagined as full of life when in fact the scene before us tells only of his death. 

Why does Frost go through the motions of making fictions, endowing a landscape with life when he is only too aware of its desolation? There is something almost sadistic or taunting in the way he seems to offer comfort and reassurance while actually showing us the evidence of human failure at every turn. I would suggest that he is mocking his former self as much as us, the persona of "The Wood-Pile," the sentimentalist of "A Late Walk." He gives us a kind of savage parody of the playful imagination that has been his metier for more than forty years, the mainstay of Frost the whimsical old New England sage. If we miss the irony in this part of the poem, we cannot adequately confront the massive repudiation carried out in the poem's closing section, in which we are made to gaze steadily and remorselessly at an emblem of decay far more devastating than the wood-pile. 

The poem's final movement begins as we reach "the height/ Of country where two village cultures faded/ Into each other." A crucial difference between this walk and the walk in "The Wood-Pile" is that here we are moving upward, toward a summit, a vantage point. This topographical revision is in large measure responsible for the salvational cadence ofthe poem's ending. Before that saving movement can take place, however, we must be brought to witness the scene of destmction in all its sorrow. We are not greatly moved, perhaps, to hear of how the two village cultures are now lost; loss on the scale of culture is difficult to connect with human suffering. But as we are told to "make ourselves at home," the scale shrinks down to the domestic. For it is precisely a home that we have been brought to see. 

Even here. Frost brings us to our goal by degrees: 

First there's the children's house of make believe, 
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine. 
The playthings in the playhouse of the children. 
Weep for what little things could make them glad. 

In the relationship between the playhouse and the house in eamest. Frost brilliantly epitomizes the central movement of the poem as a whole. It is difficult to avoid associating the "children's house of make believe" with all the fiction making and projection ofthe poem's first half; and the repeated emphasis on "play'' in "the playthings in the playhouse" further underscores the relation between children's toys and that higher form of play called poetry.'"* But the dishes are shattered, and this surely suggests that the poem's play is also at an end, its cheerñal fictions broken. We weep for the little things that made them glad because we know they will never make us glad again, and because we recognize how fragile and inadequate a shield such playthings provide before the destmctive forces of time and nature. 

And so we tum from the children's house of make believe to

                    the house that is no more a house. 
But only a belilaced cellar hole. 
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough. 
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest. 

The implicit riddle asked at the beginning of the poem—"when is a house not a house?"—is answered here: when all that is left of it is the cellar hole, the original excavation on which it was built. The image of this hole "slowly closing like a dent in dough" simultaneously captures the lost sense of domesticity associated with the baking of bread and the slow, inexorable process of decay evoked so memorably at the end of "The Wood-Pile." (Frost's source for this image is probably Walden, the chapter entitled "Former Inhabitants": "These cellar dents are all that is left where once were the stir and bustle of human life.") In the next line the phrase "a house in eamest" poignantly summons up all the serious, simple needs and wishes that the house once contained and partly satisfied. But the house and its inhabitants are gone, and we are faced with the mins of their labors slowly blending back into nature. (We should recall that when this poem was written Frost had already buried his wife and two of his children, so that his own "house" had quite literally retumed to the earth.) 

Yet "Directive," unlike "The Wood-Pile," does not end with the image of a rotting human artifact. We have still not attained our goal: 

Your destination and your destiny's 
A brook that was the water of the house. 
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source. 
Too lofty and original to rage. 
(We know the valley streams that when aroused 
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.) 

The house too, it seems, has only been a byway, part of the ordeal rather than the reward. It is the brook that has been our destination all along. Yet why bring us this far to see a brook? The answer lies, I think, in the relation between the brook and the house. As in Frost's other walk poems, meaning arises here from the succession of images, the movement from playhouse to house to brook. This sequence plots a deeper imaginative movement that begins by shucking off the playful defenses indulged in during the first part of the poem, confronts the bare evidence of human transience, and finally finds refuge in the lofty perspective Frost associates elsewhere with stars. This brook is not just a brook, but a figure for a kind of vision and a kind of poetry.'^ It is cold because it is near its source; translated into human terms, we could say that coldness, apparent indifference to human suffering, actually comes from being close to the sources of life, the natural forces that both create and destroy it. The line "too lofty and original to rage" is even more suggestive. Once more impassivity is imaged as height, as a starlike distance from worldly affairs. From this unearthly vantage point, as in "Acquainted with the Night," "the time is neither wrong nor right." The brook's loftiness, then, suggests a refusal to pass judgment on life, a refusal to rage at it for taking away all that it gives us. The parenthetical lines about the valley streams that "when aroused/ Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thom" can be taken to represent both the self-lacerating effects of indiscriminate rage against our given condition, and the very forces that provoke such rage. 

Even here, at the poem's climax, an element of playfulness intrudes as the poet offers us the "broken drinking goblet like the Grail," again an allusion to quest romance. (There is also a touch of personification in the reference to the old cedar's "instep arch," recalling the glacier's "feet" earlier.) Frost's awareness that these playful elements have been smuggled in illicitly is expressed when he tells us "I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse," thus implying that it too is only a prop or toy. Yet in the end it seems we cannot do without such toys, without the leaky vessels of metaphor and parable, although the true goal of our quest is the water itself, emblem of a perfect and inhuman lucidity.

Here are your waters and your watering place. 
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion. 

By drinking this cold water we may attain what Frost says is the aim of all his poems, "a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification such as sects and cults are built on, but a momentary stay against confusion" (Prose., p. 2). The costs of such a clarification are great, however; notice the way the word "whole" in the last line echoes the cellar "hole" that the house has become. Such wholeness requires that we empty ourselves of all our illusions, fictions, toys—except of course the one toy we keep to drink from. The cold wisdom Frost's poems attain can never be wholly purified of play, of the trappings of domesticity; rather, it is only through such play that knowledge can be held and tasted. Yet knowledge for Frost is always knowledge of that which shatters play, home, companionship, leaving us alone in an empty place, beyond confusion. 

"Directive" differs from "The Wood-Pile" in that it takes us beyond the contemplation of decay, to the contemplation of the power of contemplation itself. The poem ends on a celebratory note, but what it celebrates is the ability to see the worst that can hefall us without flinching. It is for this reason that the poem's trajectory up the mountain is significant; whereas the walker in "The Wood-Pile" travels outward, into darkness, in "Directive" we move up, attaining a height fiom which the landscape can be viewed in its totality. As an old man who has seen his own house fall. Frost may have felt he had seen everything, the fated end of every house and every human. Having attained the glacial cold of detachment himself, he becomes a guide in "Directive," ushering the less experienced through the landscape he has already traversed, ending at the water where each pilgrim will leam clarity and acceptance. 

Poems like "The Wood-Pile" and "Directive" bring a new thematic weight to the walk poem. Frost reinvents the genre by building on the formal analogy between poem and walk; both travel from the familiar, the domestic, the human to a renewed sense of contingency and mortality. In Frost's hands the walk becomes a parable for the way the mind comes to knowledge, by encountering realities that resist its domesticating impulse. Thus the walk serves him as a vehicle for charting inner movements, adjustments in perspective, the temporal process of discovery and understanding. His primary goal is not description but what he calls "wisdom," and so each poem narrows itself around some image embodying an insight; facts that may originate in experience are infused with parabolic significance, losing their status as mere data. Yet the way in which wisdom is attained is as important to Frost as the nature of wisdom itself, so that his best poems are never simply statements. Poems like "The Wood-Pile" and "Directive" use the structure of the walk, with its rhythmic principles of movement, succession, and arrival, to illustrate the way wisdom can suddenly emerge in the midst of play, startling us into sadness and understanding. ★★★★

from "Robert Frost: The Walk as Parable - Roger Gibert /

Critical Insights"

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Frost and the Meditative Lyric - BLANFORD PARKER

“Directive” (CPPP, 344) is one of the most widely and variously interpreted of Frost’s poems. Randall Jarrell in his seminal essay on Frost’s poems quoted it at length, and though pronouncing it largely uninterpretable, praised its “humor and acceptance and humanity.”1 Some have connected it to the Romantic solipsism of Emerson, seeing it as a kind of guidebook that one must write for oneself without benefit of the normal moral and intellectual landmarks. But as always with Frost’s audience the appearance of solipsism, sarcasm, and even contradiction could not prevent many readers from seeing the poem as good plain country truth. By the time the poem appeared Frost had long been a figure of folklore, and there is enough of his familiar folksy routine in it to preserve it from a too close inspection by most of his admirers. Even his academic readership had by the time of Steeple Bush (1947) accepted Frost as a poet with the limitations implied by popularity. He was not (as a recent critic announced) “tinglingly alive with a sense of the modern.”

Like so many of Frost’s best poems it may appear to be all things to all readers. In any case “Directive” stands out from the other poems of Steeple Bush as the only poem that can challenge for a place among the best of Frost’s work. It may be read as an epitome of some of his most enduring themes –the origins and purpose of life, the relation of the natural to the human, and the problem of faith and knowledge. At the same time it is a kind of amorphous receptacle into which the whole panoply of rhetorical and metrical effects which Frost had accumulated over a long career could be placed. It is also his last great achievement in blank verse, a form in which he is the greatest twentieth-century practitioner.

The three customary modes of Frostian rhetoric, the prosaic, the meditative, and the lyrical, appear together in “Directive.” By separating these three modes I do not want to suggest a too clear demarcation, but rather a metrical continuum. In Frost the prosaic is used as the chief mode for extended narrative poems. The homology that Frost sometimes claims between poetry and common speech is never absolute. He was capable of extraordinary flights of language.  

It could not have come down to us so far 
Through the interstices of things ajar 
On the long bead chain of repeated birth . . . 
“On a Bird Singing in Its Sleep” (CPPP, 275) 

On the other hand, the prosaic appears as a ballast of common speech somewhere in the rhetorical mix of all but his most rarefied poems. Frost, in continuing the realistic speech experiment that Wordsworth announced in the “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” treads on the boundary between traditional blank verse and mere prose. It was Wordsworth at the brink of dullness that Frost most admired, and he considered the navigation between the dull and the passionately direct to be one of his most important contributions to American letters. 

I think that’s essential Wordsworth. That lovely banality and the lovely penetration that goes with it. It goes right down into the soul of man, and always, always there’ll be one line in it that’s just as penetrating as anything anybody ever wrote. But always this insipid tone, sweet, insipid tone. Now that’s the Wordsworth I care for.2 

In the narrative and dialogue poems of North of Boston Frost produces just such a sweetly insipid tone with the added tang of provincial quaintness. He replaces the Wordsworthian “spots of time,” –those moments of sublime penetration – with his own kind of pungent illumination. 

He thinks if he could teach him that, he’d be 
Some good perhaps to someone in the world. 
He hates to see a boy the fool of books. 
Poor Silas, so concerned for other folk, 
And nothing to look backward to with pride, 
And nothing to look forward to with hope, 
So now and never any different. 
“The Death of the Hired Man” (CPPP, 40–45) 

It must be recognized that the prosaic in Frost is rarely a failure of the poetic. It is always a strategic choice within a range of effects. The prosaic is never a sign of merely flat or formulaic meter as in the Arthurian narratives of Robinson. In his ten or twelve best narrative poems Frost made a metrical experiment as important, and ultimately more successful, than the “vorticism” of Pound or the “imagism” of Williams. “If meter is not the necessary adjunct of poetry,” as Samuel Johnson wrote in “Milton,” neither is verse to be limited to the traditional poetic genres. Frost’s contribution to narrative ranks him with Anderson, Faulkner, Hemingway, and O’Connor among the great practitioners of American short fiction. It is with those great authors of prose that his prosaic pieces must be compared. His psychological and social insights, his mastery of place, and his recreation of local and realistic speech will place him very high among his peers. His novelty was neither as fashionable, nor as imitable as that of other moderns, but one imagines that it will stand the strictest test of future readers.

I have termed the second rhetorical register of Frost the meditative. In this mode Frost illustrates a certain moral or intellectual problem by means of a central (and often simple) event or image. “Mending Wall” (CPPP, 39), “Birches” (CPPP, 118), “Two Look at Two” (CPPP, 211), or “The Most of It”(CPPP, 307) may be taken as a fair range of examples. Again blank verse dominates, though many poems are in irregular rhyming stanzas. The blank verse used in this mode is more measured, elevated, and harmonious. The sources are largely Victorian, Arnold and Browning being the most obvious, though always with a personal idiom and never slavishly imitative. The subject of the poems is never historical as in the monologues of Tennyson or Browning, but always observant, immediate, and local. Eliot and Pound following the Victorian model wrote poems of historical ventriloquism in propria persona of Henry Adams, the Magi, Li Po, and Jefferson. The meditations of Frost always revolve around a fictional and usually contemporary speaker or scene. As in the poems of Dickinson and Stevens they do not so much embody an elaboration of character or situation as pursue a set of important problems. Dickinson, Frost, and Stevens are not America’s great philosophical poets because of a mastery of the nomenclature and curriculum of modern philosophical discourse. In this Eliot was greatly their superior. They are philosophical in a more fundamental sense. They are interested in framing and even answering a narrow range of central ethical and metaphysical questions. It may seem odd to say that Eliot was not in this sense a philosophical poet at least until the opening passage of Burnt Norton and even there only in a very limited way. Trained as he was in academic philosophy even to the brink of a Ph. D, Eliot’s poetry before the 1940s is an open repudiation of the discourse of philosophy on behalf of art at one stage, prophecy at another. In his meditative mode Frost is a philosophical poet in a way that none of the great modernists were. He is attempting with all his evasions and blind alleys to answer a few fundamental questions – and he enlists a varied cast of local and convenient characters to do so.

Of course, the prosaic and the meditative can not be too strictly separated. They serve as both metrical and thematic markers. In the prosaic or narrative poems like “A Hundred Collars” or “Home Burial” Frost pursues the logic of the narrative action with unswerving realism. Although the poemmay bring home truths of great weight to the reader, those truths are not the purpose of the poems. As in the Aristotelian formulation, character is a function of action. In the meditative mode character and situation serve to illuminate an idea –the intellectual substance is given as a solvable puzzle. In “Mending Wall,” for example, the narrative element is quite secondary. We are not to read the poem as either a practical georgic about fence-mending, or as a colorful recollection of an unpleasant neighbor. We are forced to consider a set of intellectual riddles including the relation of primitive to modern man, the problem of territoriality, the nature of work and ritual, and the like. If we fail to consider these matters we are bad readers. Unlike the powerful catharsis of Silas’ death in “The Death of the Hired Man,” the conclusion of meditations like “The White-Tailed Hornet” (CPPP, 253) or “The Wood-Pile” (CPPP, 100) demands from the reader a power of abstraction and application. For this reason the meditative poems have all the pleasures of the parable, while the narrative poems, however complicated, aim at moral transparency.

The third mode of Frost’s poetry is the lyrical. I do not mean by this to group together all of Frost’s shorter rhyming poems. “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” (CPPP, 223) is a short piece of virtuoso rhyme and meter, but it is not in the sense I am using it, lyrical. It is a meditation on the problems of human and animal adaptation and human imagination. By the lyrical in Frost I mean the poetry of personal reflection and memory –a poetry of subjective realization. This mode is meant to preserve a private response or to memorialize an important and decisive moment. 

Love at the lips was touch 
As sweet as I could bare; 
And once that seemed too much; 
I lived on air 
That crossed me from sweet things, 
“To Earthward” (CPPP, 209) 

“Happiness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length” is an archetypal example of the lyrical ideal of Frost. In the poem “one day’s perfect weather” appears not only to epitomize but to constitute all the “warmth and light” of a long lifetime. Of course the “we” which appears unexpectedly at the end gives us a hint of ideal if momentary love as well, though the poem ends with the word “solitude.” The poem makes no claim upon us as argument or action. It is pure evocation. In such moments Frost steps into a familiar Romantic situation –the poet announcing a discovery of delight or anguish which is unconditional and autonomous. We may think again of Wordsworth in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” or “Stepping Westward,” or more exactly of Browning in “Home Thoughts from Abroad” or “Memorabilia.” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” (CPPP, 207) “Come In” (CPPP, 304), and “Dust of Snow” (CPPP, 205) are representative examples of the mode. Those readers who know the common themes of Frost’s meditative poems may be tempted to find them in his lyrical poems as well, but they are likely to be led astray. Frost has preserved for himself in this body of evanescent lyrics a peculiar impressionism, even at times a poetry of escape. Some of Frost’s poems, like “Birches” or “The Road Not Taken” (CPPP, 103) hover on the boundary between the meditative and the lyrical. When Yvor Winters imagined Frost as a “Spiritual Drifter,” – a poet of shifting moods and opinions – he was confusing the lyrical persona of Frost (as in “The Sound of the Trees” (CPPP, 150) which he quotes) with the whole work of Frost, or he was taking passages from Frost’s narrative poems and plays and treating the speeches of characters as Frost’s own ideas. It may have been that if Winters, who is a very great literary critic, had recognized Frost’s central ideas, those the poet had spent a lifetime meditating and clarifying, he would have been horrified nonetheless, but his essay shows that he never recognized the intellectual concerns of Frost.

It will be obvious to the dedicated reader of Frost that a certain danger, a natural potential for excess, was hidden in each of his common modes of writing. The prosaic could, and sometimes as in “New Hampshire” (CPPP, 151) or “From Plane to Plane” (CPPP, 367) did sink to the folksy and banal. The narrative was Frost’s main instrument for preserving his appeal as provincial poet –the representative New England curmudgeon with a gravelly Vermont accent and all the accouterments of what Robert Lowell in his sonnet “Robert Frost” called “the old act taken out of mothballs.” The meditative also sometimes sank to the level of whimsical posing – a poetry of pregnant evasion, or at its worst, irascible political opinionizing. The lyrical carries with it the whole problem of the Romantic self. A poetry of mood without substance is always in danger of being trivial, and it was an unhappy example of Frost’s cynical careerism that he placed one of the worst of all his lyrical pieces, “The Pasture” (CPPP, 3) in the front of all of his collected editions. One could list all the sins against his own art that Frost committed to remain the darling of a large public, but in listing those sins one must also recall that Frost was the single poet who was capable of entertaining and instructing the large amorphous citizenry of the modern democracy while writing poetry of the very highest order.3

Now if I may be excused this long excursus, “Directive,” as I remarked above, comprises the rhetoric of all three of his characteristic modes, but must be considered on balance one of his finest, perhaps his last great, meditative poem. The structure of the poem is complex. There are many typically false starts and ambiguous signs on the journey of the poem. The first ambiguity is the title. A “directive” is a New England term for a guidebook, and the poem maintains the fiction of the guided tour from beginning to end. The poem in fact includes the normal sales pitches for tourists –the colorful history of the place, the beauties of a remote wilderness, a picturesque landscape, and the sense of a get away and a new beginning. The poet is serving throughout as a guide pointing out the origins, historical and geological, of the locale, and assuring the traveler of the restorative power of the trip. One way to understand the larger structure of the poem is to trace the pronominal sequence from “us” to “you” to “I.” The poem begins with the communal “us,” the world being too much for either the guide or the guided. It gives the impression of a shared journey in which both shall reclaim a lost world – “a time made simple by the loss of detail.” But after the first line the first person plural disappears from the poem and is replaced by the second person, “you.” At each stage of the journey instructions are given: “if you’ll let a guide direct you,” “You must not mind a certain coolness,” “pull in your ladder road behind you,” and in the great crescendo of the poem “Your destination and your destiny” and “Here are your waters and your watering place.” In this second sense the poet is issuing “directives” which must be followed. The poet gives the impression that he is reenacting a journey that he has already taken, going down a road which is no longer mysterious to him. In fact when the narrator returns in the final eight lines of the poem he has become a kind of master arranger of all the circumstances of the trip. He has prepared the scene for the visitor. “I [italics my own] have kept hidden” and “I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse” are the only uses of the first person singular in the text. Apparently the poet, we may safely say Frost, is the guide who “only has at heart your getting lost,” and at the same time it is the “I” who finds meaning for the traveler. After all Frost is already an aged guide, a seventy-three-year-old man who recalls the twenty and more years ago to which the poem alludes. He knows the landscape and the history, he understands both the getting lost and the finding yourself. The poet is the “I,” a god in the machine who arranges, and our main question is how and what does he arrange?

The poem begins with an exordium which calls the reader/traveler away from the “now” to an undetermined time in the past which is simple. The tone is at once elegiac and pastoral. We may infer at the start that we are returning to a better world –a golden world of lost youth or the lost youth of the world. The images of childhood and past history which are liberally sprinkled through the poem may lend support to such an expectation. American literature, all literature, abounds with such images of return. We may think for example of the lost world of E. A. Robinson’s “Mr. Flood’s Party,” or his “House on the Hill,” the “Flower Fed Buffaloes” of Vachel Lindsay, the dance of Pocahontas in Hart Crane’s The Bridge, and the whole range of poems of melancholy, remembrance, and reclamation in the nineteenth century by Bryant, Poe, and Longfellow. But we would be very wrong to hope for an Edenic return in the poetry of Frost. Frost had shattered such an expectation in many earlier poems including “Into My Own,” “The Black Cottage,” and “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things.” In the opening poem of his first book, A Boy’s Will, after describing his fearless quest on the open highway of the future, he announces: 

I do not see why I should e’er turn back, 
Or those should not set forth upon my track 
To overtake me, who should miss me here 
And long to know if still I held them dear. 

They would not find me changed from him they knew – 
Only more sure of all I thought was true. 
“Into My Own” (CPPP, 15) 

Like the unseen woodsmen in “The Wood-Pile,” “only in turning to fresh tasks” could Frost find value in his vocation. Over and over Frost eschews the temptation of melancholy idealizing about the personal or historical past. The reader should recognize the direction in which Frost is going by looking closely at the first metaphor of “Directive.” “The time made simple by the loss/ Of detail” is “burned, dissolved, and broken off/ Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather.” The loss of detail that Frost refers to is like the obscuring of the figures of graveyard statuary and gravestones, the erasure of knowledge of the details of the past which makes it appear simple. Ignorance, that is, of the true details lead us to embrace our own fantasies. It is not unusual for Frost to have only one or two metaphors in a given poem. There are a number of Frost poems with virtually no figural content, so we must look at his selection of metaphors with particular interest. This first simile is one of razing the past by effacing sculpture, the elaborate personification of the glacier in lines 15–19 is again that of a sculptor with his chisel, but here the image is one of grinding, scraping, and rearranging the landscape. The third and final metaphor of the poem is of a “cellar hole” of a ruined house “slowly closing like a dent in dough.” All these are metaphors of either active or passive destruction and decay. The metaphorical map of the poem is one of loss – of a constant rearranging and destroying of the past. From the very first simile of the effaced graveyard Frost shows a narrative of regular and continuing destruction under the guise of a vacation in a better world.

What we find in the backwards abyss of time is “a house that is no more a house/ Upon a farm that is no more a farm/ And in a town that is no more a town.” The elegant parallelism which has been compared to the repetitious formulae of Four Quartets leads us again to a world of memory and privation. The scale of habitations from the private to the social is inverted in the structure of the fifty-four lines that follow. The larger poem moves slowly toward the private and subjectivity.

The logical structure of the poem has not till now been thoroughly described. The “guide who only has at heart your getting lost” moves through four main stages of describing the place towards which the journey leads – the geological (lines 10–19), the natural (lines 20–28), the historical (lines 29–35), and the personal (lines 36–39). Frost moves in a series of evercontracting circles of explanation. First the Glacier personified as a mammoth sculptor bracing his “feet against the Arctic Pole” has chiseled out the space of the town. He has left behind “[G]reat monolithic knees” which embarrassed the former townsfolk with their ugliness. As in the rocky neighboring cliffs of “The Mountain” (CPPP, 45), there was a forbidding coolness which could not be removed. The lines of human travel (“the wear of iron wagon wheels”) ran in the same grooves that the geologic titan had scraped. Human culture could not “cover” and has now been outlasted by the marks of geological time. The whole town “should have been a quarry” and is now sinking like its ruined cellars back into the earth – returning to its primeval‎, pre-human scene of rocky coldness.

As Frost enters the sphere of nature he admonishes the traveler that he should not worry about human ghosts staring from the abandoned cellar holes along the roadside “as if by eye-pairs out of forty firkins.” The traveler enters the powerful “excitement” of the trees which “send light rustle rushes to their leaves.” The sound of the woods always brings on the strongest emotion in Frost, even an odd feeling of fellowship as in “Birches,” “Tree at My Window” (CPPP, 230), “The Sound of the Trees,” or “Evening in a Sugar Orchard” (CPPP, 216). However beautiful they may be, the trees themselves have been competing for growing space and the hardier scrub pines “think too much of having shaded out/ A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.” This is no doubt one of the innumerable references to natural selection and evolutionary adaptation which we see in Frost’s poems. We are to imagine that the younger trees as they have grown have slowly eclipsed the light needed by the small apple orchard planted “only twenty years ago” by a citizen of the now defunct town. No one is there to protect the weaker fruit trees, and as they begin to lose sap and grow dry the downy and hairy woodpeckers (so numerous in Vermont and New Hampshire) peck them to their final demise. It is “upstart inexperience” that leads the traveler to fear ghosts where he should be fearing the inexorable powers of natural destruction. Frost had sounded the same theme eleven years earlier in “There Are Roughly Zones” (CPPP, 278). There too the setting was a decayed house and embattled trees. The poet had warned that though human morality is unfixed, nature has definite and often punitive laws. 

Why is his nature ever so hard to teach 
That though there is no fixed line between wrong and right, 
There are roughly zones whose laws must be obeyed. 
There is nothing much we can do for the tree tonight, 
But we can’t help feeling more than a little betrayed. 

Frost is showing the traveler how to avoid just such a Romantic sense of betrayal. The apple trees in “Directive” planted to nourish the townsfolk are following them to early extinction. One could say more about the geological, biological, and sociological Darwinism at the heart of the poem. Robert Faggen’s seminal book, Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin, has given demonstrative and sometimes startling proof of the centrality of evolutionary ideas in the whole range of Frost’s poems.4

The reader now for the first time enters the sphere of the human community and its history. Up till now the histories have been inhuman, and the details of human memory have been effaced like weathered grave markers. The reader is not given direct physical evidence, but asked to imagine the human situation. 

Make yourself up a cheering song of how 
Someone’s road home from work this once was, 
Who may be just ahead of you on foot 
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain. 

The reader is told to make up a joyful song about the people who once populated the village scene; he is to celebrate those who went before him on the road. He is to imagine the products of their labor. It is here in the exact middle of the poem (line 32) that we reach the “height of the adventure.” It is the place where two village cultures, probably those of the local Indians and the later European settlers, “faded into each other.” It is more accurately where one village culture destroyed and absorbed another. This is not a new theme for the author of “The Vanishing Red” and “An Empty Threat.” Frost had chronicled the problem of failure and extinction in those and other earlier poems. What makes this “the height of the adventure,” the emotional high point of the journey, and the goal of the guide’s directive, is the presence of history –the intimate if imagined struggle of the human amid the dangers of landscape, nature, and humanity itself. Yet even at the “height of the adventure” the traveler is given the disheartening message that the two cultures have disappeared – “Both are lost.”

It is at the moment when the human has been swallowed up into the inhuman, preserved only in memory and imagination, that the final stage of the poem begins. Rather than a poem of elegiac emotion or of Edenic return to a lost and superior world, the poem is a studied and systematic foreclosure of human expectations. Having traveled through the stages of the past – the geologic, natural, and the historical –the reader discovers the emptiness of all teleological quests. He is left in a palpable emptiness where all seems lost. Yet the “height of the adventure” for Frost as a guide was just such a realization of human insufficiency. The guide has been a hard teacher and a thorough one. He is not a spiritual guide like the Eliot of Four Quartets, nor has he found the “supreme fiction” of Stevens wherein the reader may forget the naked facts of the world by engaging the imagination. His message is dispiriting and literal. The supreme art for Frost is the art of the real: “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” By the time of “Directive” the real meant nothing less than a sober positivism, a thorough application of those “downward comparisons” which he had described in “The White-Tailed Hornet.”5

But the poem is by no means a simple or direct application of Frost’s maturing positivism. Not only has he presented the empirical truths of geology and biology in a sometimes playful or glancing way –Panther mountain haunted by “a certain coolness,” eye pairs out of “forty firkins” following the frightened traveler through the woods, and the like; he has written a poem that intermittently courts the reader’s appetite for folksy wisdom and New England reserve. The effect of the prosaic, “[A]nd there’s a story in a book about it,” and “a few old pecker-fretted apple trees,” is to dilute the momentum of the argument of the poem, to distract the reader, or at least a certain sort of reader, to deflate the devastating implications of the meditative element of the poem. In fact, the “in and outdoor schooling,” that it takes to follow Frost’s logic, has been lacking in most of his critics, who have often helped to screen the reader from the ugly finalities of the text. The habit of misleading the reader was by the time of “Directive” a central part of the Frost poetic. “Directive,” therefore, is anything but direct, and it becomes considerably less so when Frost turns at the beginning of the poem’s remarkable peroration to the language of the personal and even the solipsist. 

And if you’re lost enough to find yourself 
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you 
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me. 
Then make yourself at home. 

Just as the village worlds are lost, so the self must become lost to regain its composure. Playing with searing irony on the Christian maxim that onemust lose oneself to be found, Frost, having laid waste to the traveler’s hopes to find a better world, asks the reader to effect an escape from the world the poem has described. I am told that “ladder road” is a Vermont idiom for country road, but one cannot help but think of the ladder being pulled in behind the traveler as an image of surrender. The road did not prove to be the golden ladder in Book V of Paradise Lost which leads from the creature to God, nor any of a number of useful literary ladders leading one by degrees to happiness. The rungs of the ladders which Frost has invoked in the text are entirely backwards – the steps of geologic and evolutionary process are not teleological, and the ladder of history has led to a lost world. The guide is asking the traveler to fall back on the only thing he has left – himself –and to triumphantly announce his solitude. He is to place a sign in the wilderness marked in capital letters, “CLOSED.” The unconsoling world is to be closed out and only then can the traveler “make himself at home.”

The sheer willfulness of this gesture has been interpreted in a number of ways. The most ingenious, and at the same time the most serious, explanation that has been offered was that of Frank Lentricchia. The degree to which, and the way in which, I disagree with Lentricchia’s solution to the seeming escapism and solipsism of the poem will help to clarify my own view. Lentricchia’s argument was an attempt to save Frost from the imputation (like that made by Jarrell) that the poem was full of unresolved contradictions, and at the same time to place Frost, even if Frost had resisted being placed there, in the line of post-antian and Romantic thinkers who preserved a special and autonomous territory for the imagination.

Lentricchia’s argument is an elegant argument and a reasonable one. It is made even more reasonable by his realization that the first thirty-one lines of the poem describe a world of abject loss and destruction. Lentricchia was the first critic of the poem to see the significance (at least in part) of the geological and natural images of the poem, and to measure the emptiness of the traveler’s quest at the moment when both villages are lost. Lentricchia does not try to squeeze out of the verbal ambiguities of the poem a wholesome humanism. He sees Frost’s vision as extreme and his spiritual references as ironic. On the earlier sections of the poem he makes only one important error and that is in imagining the narrator as an equal participant in the journey and too closely associating the traveler’s situation with that of the poet. I shall return to this point.

Here is what Lentricchia says about the crucial passage I have just quoted above. 

In the face of the bareness, the imagination begins to infuse its life-giving powers into a long dead human scene. The isolated and wandering knight of“Directive” needs something more than the promise of a special grail waiting for him, one of the right ones, at the end of his long journey. Bereft of community he begins to make his own song (like whistling in the dark?) . . . The height of the adventure, to put it another way, is not the verification of imagination’s humanizing illusions, but the pressing of imagination to its furthest reaches by the discovery of the final evidence of the abject sadness of the human condition in a human-repelling universe. Our climb up into the higher country is a metaphor for the journey of the imagination (echoing the swinging metaphor from “Birches”) and Frost is quick to seize on the conceit of the old “ladder road” to emphasize that the final stage of a journey in the mind has been reached and that it is a journey that can be completed only by solitary men. The imagination pours forth its greatest energies only after it has realized its anarchic potential, severing itself from all connections: “CLOSED to all but me.”6 

We know from elsewhere in Lentricchia’s book that the notions about the imagination in this passage are derived from a variety of modern thinkers and critics –Nietszche, Sartre, William James, Poulet. From James, Lentricchia has derived both the radical isolation of each human mind and the saving communication of imagination, from Sartre the notion of the unbreachable space between the self and the other combined with the unquenchable human need to reveal and explain. “From Frost to Poulet,” we are told in Lentricchia’s preface, “there is really no leap at all.” Frost apparently agrees with the words he quotes from Poulet: 

Every thought to be sure is a thought of something. It is turned invincibly towards the somewhere else, toward the outside. Issuing from itself, it appears to leap over a void, meet certain obstacles, explore certain surfaces, and envelop or invade certain objects. It describes and recounts to itself all of these objects, and these accounts constitute the inexhaustible objective aspect of literature. But every thought is also simply a thought. It is that which exists in itself, isolatedly, mentally. Whatever its objects may be, thought can never place them, think them, except in the interior of itself.7 

This may help us to understand the context of Lentricchia’s reading. The journey of the traveler (and the poet) is to a high and solitary country, the imagination. Never does the imagination feel its powers so fully as when it sees that its reality is inward, that the world is merely the alienated realm of the other, the objective. When met with the landscapes of the inhuman, the infinite spaces of the geological and the evolutionary, it names them and in naming it also contains and tames them. The imagination gives a habitable place, a domicile for the mind stifled by the concreteness, the arbitrary nature, the fearful fixity of the world in which we live. In the battle between the two cultures of science with its objective, extra-mental facticity, and the autonomous act of internal meaning which is poetry, it is poetry which recognizes the primacy of consciousness.

Frost, according to this reading, in pulling in his “ladder road” behind him, frees himself from what Roland Barthes called “the prison of the natural.”8 The closing to “all but me” is the moment when the poet recognizes his internal and “anarchic power.” He is freed from the bondage of the realms of nature and history. Lentricchia goes on to say: 

We have not finally traveled back through public history, but through private, inner time. What we recover, if we brave the various assaults that the poet has subjected us to, is the pristine moment of our childhood imagination – a moment that stands outside time –the embryo moment of our maturer imaginative faculty . . . we shall build up a universe as humanized as the inhuman universe will permit.9 

Finally, Lentricchia indulges himself in a kind of Rousseauian/ Freudian romance. Through the fusion of the child with the adult dreamer the poet returns to his sacred watering place. The brook, “too lofty and original to rage” is the gentle stream of Wordsworthian recollection. We drink again from the grail of youth and are emboldened to stand up to the worst “assaults” of the reality principle. The whole journey of the poem in fact takes place in Pouletian inner time and is merely an excuse to bring us to the baptismal (Lentricchia should have said eucharistic) moment when we are again made whole. Like Freud before him, Frost, according to Lentricchia, has described human life as an internal romance, though he is apparently more optimistic than Freud about our chances to return to childlike wisdom.

Now I do believe this is a valiant effort at explanation. It is an attempt to endow Frost with a whole range of what are, for modern academics, soothing insights. But I do not believe that the poem makes anything like these claims either consciously or unconsciously. On the other hand, the reading does point out the one weakness in a very great poem – the need to escape, or to give to the reader the illusion of escape from the implications of Frost’s meditation. Generally Frost objects to the “easy gold at hand of fay or elf” or (as in the dialogue of “West-Running Brook”) the escape to “lady-land” – the realm of too soothing explanations. But in playing with the reader, in offering a momentary solution or hiding place, Frost has diluted his meditation with a lyrical intermission. I have said that all three modes of Frost’s rhetoric, the prosaic, the meditative, and the lyrical appear in the poem. I did not mean simply the lyrical effect – “sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,” – but also the more profound lyricism which offers an autonomous moment of illumination.

For those like Frank Lentricchia who see the escape to the lyrical as the point of the poem –that which justifies the journey of the poem – mycriticism will seem singularly obtuse. The problem one has in believing in the Romantic/solipsist reading of the poem is that it does not explain the lines that end the poem. It in effect ignores everything before and after the moment when the traveler closes his world. 

It is at that very moment in “Directive” that we are immediately thrust into another world of loss and littleness. “The field no larger than a harness gall,” “the children’s house of make believe,” and finally the remains of the “house that is no more a house,” now “only a belilaced cellar hole/ Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.” Unlike the raising up of a world supposedly lost, as in the end of Wallace Stevens’ “Esthetique du Mal,” William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations,” or even Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Dejection,” Frost returns to his world of loss. If he is seeking the answer to “what to make of a diminished thing,” he is not doing it in terms of the saving imagination, nor is he in the end offering an honest means of escape for the reader. When he asks the traveler to “[W]eep for what little things could make them glad,” can he be asking the traveler himself to be glad? What reason for exultation is given in the poem? If this is a moment of imaginative consummation why would the reader weep for or take pity on the beliefs and ambitions of the children or the adult householders?

“The house that is no more a house” brings to mind a whole range of Frost’s houses. The lost mountain house in “The Census-Taker” (CPPP, 164) “not dwelt in now by man or woman,” which filled the poet with “no less sorrow than the houses/ Fallen to ruin in ten thousand years/ Where Asia edges Africa from Europe;” or the collapsed home (so nearly akin to the one in “Directive”) in “The Generations of Men” (CPPP, 74) which “had literally run to earth/In an old cellar-hole in a by-road.” These, too, memorialized in earnest the fruitlessness of human endeavor and the great waring of time. Each fallen house has its compliment of dying trees, its useless furniture, the shadows of inhuman landscapes of rock. “Directive” was the summary poem of a lifetime, and this “house that is no more a house” stands in for all the lost dreams of the generations. In “The Black Cottage” written thirty-three years before “Directive” a minister discusses an old lady from the Civil War era on a visit to her decaying home. He makes it the pretext for ruing the loss of the moral and religious values of the old abolitionist Protestants who were then almost extinct. 

But what I’m getting to is how forsaken 
A cottage this had always seemed; 
It always seemed to me a sort of mark 
To measure how far fifty years had brought us. 
Why not sit down if you are in no haste? 
These doorsteps seldom have a visitor. 
The warping boards pull out their own old nails 
With none to tread and put them in their place. 
She had her own idea of things, the old lady. 

It happens that the old lady had known Garrison and Whittier and was a religious moralist of the old school, a believer in equality and God; the sort of person that Frost could admire but not agree with (even then). 

I’m just as glad she made me keep hands off, 
For dear me why abandon a belief 
Merely because it ceases to be true. 

That poem ends with the minister wishing he could remove himself to an untainted desert kingdom to preserve the old truths (or untruths) “worth coming back to.” He wanted to preserve them not so much for as from mankind.

But “Directive” is in some ways a more extreme, an angrier poem than those earlier ones. “The house in earnest” is irretrievably lost. The traveler could not be at home there. The guide has intervened to give him instead the “children’s house of make believe.” He has scooped waters from the hilltop spring for the thirsty visitor. Those waters, like the aging poet, are now “too lofty and original to rage.” The poet does not need to raise his voice –to pour out a torrent like the dramatic valley streams that cause so much destruction. The poet is elevated and calm; he has plumbed to the depths of the human situation.

The communion that ends the poem, like the parodic rite in “Design” (CPPP, 275), is not, as many critics have argued, an allusion to some saving grace of God or imagination. Frost’s biographer, Thompson, and others have fallen for the quasi-religious explanation of the poem and used it as an example of Frost’s theism.10 Frost probably felt that such a notion would help to strengthen his position as national sage. I think few readers are so tone deaf as to miss the irony of: 

I have kept hidden in the instep arch 
Of an old cedar at the waterside 
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail 
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it, 
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t. 
(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.) 
Here are your waters and your watering place. 
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion. 

The poet guide (the “I” of these final lines) has contrived a mock ceremony to mark the end of the traveler’s quest. Having survived “the serial ordeal”of seeing this universal spectacle of loss, he is given the final magical draught. His Holy Grail is the toy cup of the children. It is filled with water which is in fact the rudiment of human life –of biological survival. The language of the last twenty lines is laced with Biblical and theological allusions – the chalice, the cedar, the gospel scripture, and others. That language is used not to enlighten but to disabuse the reader. A few poems later in Steeple Bush Frost lashes out even more nastily about the claims of revealed religion. 

If you should rise from Nowhere up to Somewhere, 
From being No one up to being Someone, 
Be sure to keep repeating to yourself 
You owe it to some arbitrary god 
Whose mercy to you rather than to others 
Won’t bear too critical examination. 
“The Fear of God” 

Frost is bringing the traveler as close as he can to the magical truths he desires. Having sunk into himself, alone from the world, the melancholy knight is left with his careful guide. Frost is not Galahad in the poem but Merlin. The journey is contrived to show at first the raw facts of the inhuman world in which we struggle, and in the end to show the littleness of human hopes, the paltriness of the imagination with its shows of fellowship and religion. Frost exposed the bitter truth and “kept hidden” till the end the saving chicanery of the magus.

The feigning and even misleading that Frost has done is not to preserve the “impossible philosopher’s dream” or the “supreme fiction.” Stevens’ decayed house in “Postcard from the Volcano” is a house where spirits made their mark –“cried out a literate despair” against disorder. They were the potent (if forgotten) presences of the world. Those who feel the presence of the human imagination, the “rage for order” have the better half of human experience, however deceptive. “The house that is no more a house” teaches a more sobering lesson to those who can bear it. It is a lesson with the mark of the classical – the acceptance of the inhuman as the terms and limits of human destiny. “Many towns that were thriving and powerful when I was a boy,” remarks Herodotus, “are now lost to war, fire, and the sea. Such is man’s lot.”

Like Yeats’ “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” Ezra Pound’s “Canto LXXXI,” or T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” “Directive” appears to the initiated reader as both elegy and final judgment. Yet Frost reveals little about his own life; there is nothing confessional or self-lacerating, as in other poems of aged reflection. When the obscurity and peevishness of the opening of “Canto LXXXI” gives way to the sweep and power of the “Libretto,” we have no doubt that Pound is pulling down his own monstrous vanity, his lifelonghabit of self-idolatry and delusion, while at the same time he is attempting to save his dignity by paying tribute to the kind of poetry he created and championed over a lifetime. Likewise Yeats has confessed his own shallowness and ambition in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” while defending the claims of the human heart. 

Maybe at last being but a broken man 
I must be satisfied with my heart, although 
Winter and summer till old age began 
My circus animals were all on show, 
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot, 
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.11 

Frost’s great poem of old age is both angry and evasive. While the narrator remains sure of his own ironic sagacity, he lashes out at the delusions of others. Unlike other poems of moral recollection it is written in the second person. It is addressed entirely to the reader’s ignorance –a guide speaking to a lost traveler. “[I]f you’ll let a guide direct you,” “You must not mind a certain coolness from him,” and “if you’re lost enough to find yourself,” recall that other second-person diatribe, “Provide, Provide.” Like that poem, “Directive” has the power of an accusation. Some critics have observed the poem’s ironic connection to Eliot’s Four Quartets which had appeared two years earlier. This, Eliot’s last poem, was a very different kind of guidebook – participative, questing, longing. His quest ended in a saving apocalypse, “all shall be well and/ All manner of things shall be well/ When the tongues of flame are in-folded/ Into the crowned knot of fire/ And the fire and the rose are one.”12

Looking back “Directive” does seem like an answer to Modernism’s great project by offering a powerful and even bitter voice of opposition at what in retrospect was Modernism’s final phase. Most of the crowning works of Modernism relied heavily on the conventions of the romance –the quest story. Joyce borrowed the Odyssean plot to enact his own myth of homecoming; Pound attempted without success to inscribe the Dantean journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven within the chaotic wanderings of The Cantos; all of Eliot’s major work, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” The Waste Land, “Ash Wednesday,” “The Journey of the Magi,” and “Little Gidding,” recreates the teleological structures of the quest; the same can be said of the later Yeats.

Frost turned away from such a project on intellectual grounds. By slow degrees he came, I believe, to see the human narrative as circumscribed by and controlled by the impersonal powers of the material cosmos. “Directive” is a monumental disavowal of the romance and of the poetic oftranscendent desire on which it is built. In an age dominated by scientific realism, he was the single important poet who spoke for science. Recognizing the limitations of technology and power, he nonetheless gave life to the largely unexpressed world of creaturely existence. Although in his lyrical persona he pays high tribute to human passion and to the poetic imagination, in his meditative mask he came to doubt the sufficiency of human hopes, and of the human faculties. He was a dogged intellectual who considered the paradoxes of human community and the self with unblinking realism. In coming to see the tragic limits of the human will and imagination he left a unique legacy for the reader of modern poetry. 

NOTES 
1 Robert Frost: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. James M. Cox (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1962), p. 93. 
2 Borrowed from John Evangelist Walsh, Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost (New York: Grove Press, 1988), pp. 236–37. 
3 For more on Frost’s relation to magazine culture and a large popular readership see Frank Lentricchia, Modernist Quartet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 
4 Robert Faggen, Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1997). 
5 The relevant lines from “The White-Tailed Hornet” are as follows: 

As long on earth 
As our comparisons were stoutly upward 
With gods and angels, we were men at least, 
But little lower than the gods and angels. 
But once comparisons were yielded downward, 
Once we began to see our images 
Reflected in the mud and even dust, 
’Twas disillusion upon disillusion. 
We were lost piecemeal to the animals, 
Like people thrown out to delay the wolves, 
Nothing but fallibility was left us. 

6 Frank Lentricchia, Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self (Durham: Duke University Press, 1975), p. 117. 
7 Ibid., p. 14. 
8 Roland Barthes, Barthes par Barthes (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982) p. 83. 
9 Lentricchia, Robert Frost, p. 119. 
10 Lawrance Thompson and R. H. Winnick, Robert Frost: The Later Years (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976), pp. 135–37. 
11 M. L. Rosenthal ed., William Butler Yeats: Selected Poems and Three Plays (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1962), p. 198. 
12 T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1963), p. 209.

from "The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost"

------------------------------

Robert Frost's Prime Directive(1966) - Philip Booth

"Directive" reads to me like the height of Frost's poetry, the poem he climbed toward for perhaps forty years. Imagery and tone both tell that he's taken this road before: until its last six lines, there's only one image in "Directive" that doesn't appear in, or bear on, some earlier Frost poem. The "children's house" is new; but the apple trees, small animals, and outcrop rock of "Directive" are vintage Frost, here distilled to their metaphorical essence. As his didactic title implies, Frost is familiar with what he's up to. But only here does he newly play guide to his own metaphors and, climbing back to his poetry's wellspring, openly bid a reader to drink at their height.

"Directive" doesn't demand more knowledge of Frost than itself. But the poem gains stature if read as climaxing both the high inclination of, say, "Birches," and the dark temptations of "Stopping by Woods." "Directive" both walks in toward self-exploration and, all but simultaneously, works itself up toward a theologically marginal grace. The poem is simple to get into. But to be worthy of its final ascent a reader must, by Frost's own example, learn to read the nature with which this poem surrounds him. Earlier Frost poems can teach a reader what to make of deceptively simple natural images, but "Directive" must first be read by submitting to its insistence on "getting lost." Finding-in-losing is the poem's crucial paradox, and unless a reader has been scared by his own desert places he may not be "lost enough" to be guided by Frost through this high-country quest. As it tests a reader's earned humanity, not just his book-learning, "Directive" is in its own way a "serial ordeal"; it can't be read, and wasn't written, as a young man's poem. I remember my own undergraduate distrust of its tones, as Sidney Cox first taught me Frost in that year when it climaxed Steeple Bush. I hadn't yet earned reading it. I still perhaps haven't. But now, at least, I know from the mountain poem in North of Boston, from the title poem of West-Running Brook (and the lesser piece in that book that involves "a broken drinking glass" beside a mountain spring), how much of Frost's writing life was committed to the poem that "Directive" would become. As I've grown older, it seems to me that one of the measures of "Directive" is how greatly Frost tried to make it come whole, how long it took him to discover the cumulative import of images he had always known.

"Directive" doesn't invite us to guess what human ordeals finally drove Frost to write it. Though his biography is full of serial possibilities, the poem asks only that we submit to discovering ourselves in its sense of our common experience. Against this world's temptations to seize the day, "Directive" bids us "back out of all this now too much for us." But Frost's strong stresses, roughened across that great iambic line, admit of no defeat. Precisely because he long knew that "the present / Is ... / Too present to imagine," Frost begins "Directive" with his familiar gambit of a strategic retreat. As if with Thoreau, John Muir, John the Baptist, or whatever guide has grown wise through days and nights in the wilderness, "Directive" shares with us the possibility of a long perspective on our own emotional history.

Perspective is what the first thirty-five lines of the poem are about, and Frost—in them—is up to his old delight of preparing us for wisdom. There's more ice than fire in these early images of extinction; they notably begin with that "graveyard marble" which suggests our inability to imagine much beyond death. But after its incantatory devastation of house-farm-town, "Directive" recovers our perspective by lending those close losses the context of geologic history. "Monolithic knees" might seem more native to Easter Island than Vermont; but they, like Panther Mountain's "enormous Glacier," lend scale to our mourning and personify those natural forces in whose universe we stand small. We may not know chapter and verse of this long story, but we begin to read ourselves as being part of its book. By Frost's directive, we find ourselves lost with laboring generations of men, exposed to those forty "eye pairs" which steal our courage from us. Unless we invent our own song in this strange land, as Frost requires, there's nothing "cheering" here. But just when our ordeal seems unbearable, Frost reminds us that beside the upstart trees we are comparatively experienced. By the time we climb line 36, we have, in fact, been initiated into the poem's strange lostness. Just as "two village cultures faded / Into each other," we become one with our guide in having lost the accouterments of our civilization. By his directive at this distance from our daily lives, we are mazed in primitive fears, in a nature we see signs of but can't read, in a history larger than our own.

And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.

"Directive" turns on these lines, not least as they restate Frost's casual introduction of their crucial paradox. From here on in, "Directive" climbs on that strange "ladder road" by which we may find ourselves "at home." Frost's "harness gall" metaphor implies, perhaps, how wearing is the burden of paradox; it surely suggests how bitterly minimal our "destination" will be. But here, at least, lostness gives way to finding, the poem's perspective shortens to focus on those few residual symbols by which our humanity is (if barely) sustained. Frost's lines about the children's playthings are, I think, the most heart-rending in all his poetry. "Make believe" though their house may have been, it is also the house (of the farm and the town) in which we once vested belief. This "house in earnest" is now only a "belilaced cellar hole," as impersonal as a "dent in dough"; its shelter may be lost to us, but we find our hearts still in it. Newly children again, we with Frost "weep for what little things could make them glad."

Yet our tears now are more of empathy than of nostalgia; we weep more in tragedy than in terror. Like figures suddenly legendary, we find ourselves become worthy to drink from a "goblet like the Grail." Broken though that goblet is, by the history we too have been lost in, we learn in drinking from it both where we've been and where we've finally arrived. We learn, in fact, to read "Directive" again, to discover human directions in the natural world through which we've been guided. Until its climactic references to the Grail and to Saint Mark, "Directive" reads like an archeological field trip in Vermont (albeit without much compass). The poem's greatness continues to reside in how painfully native to us its least images seem. But as Frost's reference to Mark challenges our memory of the book in which "Directive" is rooted, the reference further guides us to read Frost's images as he would have them read. Frost long said that his poetry was chiefly metaphor, "talking about one thing in terms of another." Mark (4:11) is even more explicit: "Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom ... all these things are done in parables." After a night of dark talk, Mr. Frost once reassured me that verses eleven and twelve were his "Saint Mark gospel." (Whoever doubts Frost's salvational sense of metaphor could do worse than look up 4:12.)

"Directive" is, throughout, more metaphor than parable; Frost talks Christian in often secular terms. But its explicit biblical reference further directs us to the source of its chief thematic paradox (Luke 9:24): "For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life ... the same shall save it." Frost's sense of being "saved" is as marginal as subsistence farming in Vermont: to sustain one's values, beyond sure losses, depends on being guided by natural signs. Only after we're lost in reading "Directive," and have thus earned a right to its wisdom, do its signs come metaphorically clear. The "cedar" of "Directive," for instance, is natural to Frost's New England; only in the context of the poem's climax does it seem to have been seeded by the cedars of biblical Lebanon. "Barb and thorn" or "ladder road" are similarly metaphors-in-retrospect; they are images of spring floods and steepness before they imply Gethsemane or Jacob. "Directive" is thick with Frost's delight in providing a context that illuminates simple images as the metaphors he intends them to be. The poem is typically Frost in its clear surfaces and complex depths; it's unusual in specifically initiating a reader to what "the wrong ones can't find."

"Under a spell" of metaphor though its ultimate image is, "Directive" is finally a secular poem rooted in residual Christianity. Its biblical references don't, as they might in Stevens, argue for reformation; they don't, as they might in Eliot, invite us back to a church. They measure, instead, both our distance from full redemption and our imaginative thirst for those wellsprings that revive our spirit. Though "Directive" guides us perilously through humanity's common ordeal, its country is no wasteland, there is no chapel at its height. Frost's goblet is merely like the Grail; in drinking from it we are still only "near its source." As with the contrary wave in "West-Running Brook," Frost shapes "Directive" as a "tribute of the current to the source," to the Christian drama in which his metaphors are steeped. But Frost is also asking, as he often does, "what to make of a diminished thing." However diminished its symbols may be, Frost seems to imply, our hearts need not let go the value of Christianity's crucial paradox. Yet to imagine our own ordeals as part of a larger drama is not to cast ourselves as heroes; it is simply to realize our share in the human condition. What is heroic in "Directive" is its quiet acceptance of the role to which experience conditions us. Nothing in "Directive" has guided us to hope (whether for a Grail, Redemption, or hope itself); we began to climb without expectation, and end by quenching the unexpected thirst we've earned in sweating uphill. Reality has been our ordeal, and we drink what the poem finally offers us: clear water from a real spring. We are "beyond confusion" not least in this; we are wholly ourselves both in having wept for the children's playthings and in being gladdened by what we made-believe in drinking from their cup. Our imaginative thirst may only be momentarily satisfied, but the poem fulfills itself with a sacrament which redeems our experience by completing our perspective on it.

I read "Directive" as one of those few rare poems that are, by Frost's definitive hope, "a momentary stay against confusion." The margin of "a momentary stay" is the saving grace of "Directive" and, greatly, its theme. Whoever demands a more ample margin had better be guided up Billy Graham's public aisle; whoever can exist without metaphor had best forget Frost. But whomever "Directive" privately converts (Frost asks no less) can find his margin roughly extended in that strangely unknown Frost poem, "An Empty Threat":

Better defeat almost,
If seen clear,
Than life's victories of doubt
That need endless talk talk
To make them out.

Terribly though doubt assailed him, nowhere in his work is Frost defeated by it. Skeptically as a lot of poems talk, nowhere in them is doubt victorious. Nor is there any poem that argues "almost better defeat," whether seen clear or not. What must be seen clear is the poised sequence of those words I've just disordered. My misquote, "almost better defeat," is narrowly, but wholly and perfectly, different from "better defeat almost." The difference is as great as one man's life might be from another's; the distinction in order is, as Frost would have it, of the order of the distinction between prose and poetry. Defeat-almost was the ordeal of Frost's life; it is the narrow victory his major poems dramatize, and the human margin of their greatness. As it climbs to marginal redemption through a myth made local by image, through an ordeal heightened by metaphor, "Directive" is one of the greatest. It stays defeat by bettering being lost.

---

Copyright © by Philip Booth. Originally appeared in Master Poems of the English Language, edited by Oscar Williams (Pocket Books, 1966). Reprinted in Trying to Say it: Outlooks and Insights on How Poems Happen by Philip Booth (University of Michigan, 1996). Reprinted with permission of the Estate of Philip E. Booth.

-----------------------------

“Directive” (1947)

Described by Jay Parini as “both epitaph and poetic
credo,” providing “a map of [Frost’s] inner landscape”
(361), and by Thomas Dilworth as Frost’s
“most cryptic poem” (26), “Directive” was written
fairly late in the poet’s career. The setting, as Parini
and others have pointed out, is inconsequential
since “abandoned farms, even whole villages, are
commonplace in northern New England.” Frost
himself described the poem in “On Taking Poetry”
as “all full of dangers, sideways, off, and all that.” It
is a poem of pure descriptiveness that may be allegorical,
but it can be read simply for its expression‎
and the scene it so precisely lays out.

A directive is an order or instruction issued by a
central authority, but as an adjective it means
“serving to direct or guide.” The poem begins by
asking us to “back out of all this now” as it is “too
much for us,” and from the start the reader is made
a part of the poem. The “us” seems to refer to both
a listener within the poem and the reader without.
As the reader backs up, away, or out, the poem
goes on lyrically, drifting toward “a time made simple
by the loss / Of detail, burned, dissolved, and
broken off,” and the images begin to echo the modernist
idea of a world that has become a landscape
of ruin, as somberly depicted in T. S. Eliot’s post–
World War I poem The Waste Land (1922). The
poem’s lack of stanza breaks and lengthy blank
verse lines gives it a dreamy, almost otherworldly
aspect. The repetition of certain words, particularly
in the lines “There is a house that is no more a
house / Upon a farm that is no more a farm / And
in a town that is no more a town,” creates an atmosphere
somewhat similar to Eliot’s “Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock,” which begins “Let us go then,

you and I” and proceeds to take the reader on a
similar sort of journey. (George Monteiro notes
several other allusions to Eliot in “Directive.”)

The tone and the scene are dreamy—not wistful
but melancholic. Just as in old graveyards the
inscriptions on headstones are so weathered as to be
barely legible, the place the speaker describes is
indistinct. There are remnants, dim outlines of
house, farm, and town, but that is all. Parini reports
that Frost once told an audience before a reading of
this poem, “Go back to a favorite poet, or a place
you almost forgot”; leading the reader further back
in imagination, the unidentified “guide” travels
down a road so rocky it “should have been a quarry.”
The images are not meant to be understood metaphorically.
The rocky road is described as “monolithic
knees the former town / Long since gave up
pretense of keeping covered.” The wear and tear of
wagon wheels, over time, has created ledges that
“show the lines” and “chisel work” of an “enormous
Glacier” personified, bracing “his feet against the
Arctic Pole.” Roads are life’s pathways in Frost, as
in “The Road Not Taken,” and this poem devotes
many lines to making the image of the reader’s
guided path more vivid, following the road through
changes in season and erosion of time.

As the poem continues to explore the ruins of a
place that is no more, it becomes ever more haunted
and haunting, and we must not mind being watched
by 40 pairs of eyes peering out of forty cellar holes.
A rustling in the trees suggests a shudder at the
eeriness of it all. Halfway through the poem comes
a question: “Where were they all not twenty years
ago?” a reminder that this road leads further and
further back in time. This is a place where woodpeckers
“fretted apple trees” before those trees were
“shaded out,” and where there were two individual
“village cultures” before something, whether too
much change or just disuse, caused them to “fad[e]
into each other.”

In this time and place we can sing to ourselves
“a cheering song” as we imagine someone traveling
the road with us, just ahead, either on foot or
“creaking with a buggy load of grain.” The guide is
reminiscing about a simpler, more bucolic time. By
leading us back to this place, which can be found in
either our mind or the guide’s, we are given the key
to “finding” ourselves. Just as the two villages were
lost when they came together as one, when united
in the guide’s vision we also are lost, so lost as perhaps
to be able to find ourselves. It is by completely
losing ourselves that we can be made whole again,
as the very end of the poem advises.

But for now, we are lost enough to be found, we
need to “pull in [our] ladder” and put up a “closed”
sign, so that we will be the last to be guided down
this road. We must secure the place before time
and encroachment lead to further ruin. If we can
do this, we not only will be found but will be able to
make ourselves “at home.”

The images that follow describe an overrun
landscape. The only remaining field appears to be
no bigger than the sore a harness makes. Of a children’s
playhouse all that remains are “shattered
dishes” those “little things” that once made children
glad. For this, we may weep. Of the house, all
that is left is a “belilaced cellar hole” that is “slowly
closing like a dent in dough.” (The lilacs call to
mind Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the
Door-yard Bloom’d.”) It is receding into the earth,
being obscured by untamed foliage. The spring, the
“brook that was the water of the house,” is the only
thing that is fresh and original because so near its
source; it is “[t]oo lofty and original to rage,” as
does a swollen stream, and is the only thing remaining
in this place that of itself can bring renewal.

In the now imaginary world of the past, the
reader and guide unite, whether at the reader’s or
the guide’s old, perhaps childhood, home. Just as
Marianne Moore speaks of “imaginary gardens with
real toads in them” in “Poetry,” Frost has managed
to steal an actual item from the distant past into
this at least partly imagined world. The guide has
hidden“in the instep arch / Of an old cedar . . . a
broken drinking goblet like the Grail / Under a
spell so the wrong ones can’t find it.” He remarks,
teasingly, that he stole it from the children’s playhouse.
“Now, you must be thirsty, traveler: drink,”
he seems to say. The Grail is the chalice Christ is
supposed to have used at the Last Supper.

Thomas Dilworth calls the poem a “guided tour
through loss” (27), and the reader discovers that
time is made simpler through loss, through going
back. This is how we may find ourselves, but only

the “right” ones, those able to yield to the imaginary
force and travel the road the guide creates,
can do so. The heightened rhetoric is almost biblical
throughout, the Saint Mark reference being
taken almost directly from Mark 4:11–12. While
the poem seems to hint at Edwin Arlington Robinson’s
out-of-time “Miniver Cheevy,” it also recalls a
childhood place as far away as our own childhood
and in its way as fantastical as Samuel Taylor
Coleridge’s Xanadu of “Kubla Khan.” “Directive”
first appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review and
later in Steeple Bush.

FURTHER READING
Bagby, George F. Frost and the Book of Nature. Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1993, 30–31.
Berger, Charles. “Echoing Eden: Frost and Origins.”
In Robert Frost, Modern Critical Views, edited by
Harold Bloom, 147–165. Philadelphia: Chelsea
House, 2003.
Brower, Reuben A. The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations
of Intention. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1963, 232–242.
Charney, Maurice. “Robert Frost’s Conversational
Style,” Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate
10, no. 2–3 (2000–01): 147–159.
Cook, Reginald. The Dimensions of Robert Frost. New
York: Rinehart, 1958, 138–142.
Dilworth, Thomas. “Frost’s Directive,” Explicator 58,
no. 1 (Fall 1999): 26–29.
Doreski, William. “Meta-Meditation in Robert Frost’s
‘The Wood-Pile,’ ‘After Apple-Picking,’ and ‘Directive,’
” A Review of International English Literature
23, no. 4 (October 1992): 35–49.
Doyle, John Robert, Jr. The Poetry of Robert Frost: An
Analysis. New York: Hafner Press, 1962, 18–20.
Faggen, Robert. Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1997, 273–276.
Frattali, Steven V. “Frost’s Critique of Humanism: A
Rereading of ‘Directive,’ ” Robert Frost Review (Fall
1994): 94–100.
Hass, Robert. Going by Contraries: Robert Frost’s Conflict
with Science. Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 2002, 84–86.
Levay, John. “Frost’s ‘Directive,’ ” Explicator 52, no. 1
(Fall 1993): 42–44.
Lynen, John. “Du Côté de Chez Frost.” In Frost: Centennial
Essays, edited by Jac Tharpe, 562–594.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1974.
Marks, Herbert. “The Counter Intelligence of Robert
Frost.” In Robert Frost, Modern Critical Views,
edited by Harold Bloom, 554–578. Philadelphia:
Chelsea House, 2003.
Monteiro, George. “History, Legend, and Regional
Verse in Frost’s ‘Directive,’ ” New England Quarterly
75, no. 2 (June 2002): 286–294.
O’Donnell, William G. “Talking about Poems with
Robert Frost,” Massachusetts Review 39, no. 2
(Summer 1998): 225–250.
Pack, Robert. Belief and Uncertainty in the Poetry of
Robert Frost. Hanover, N.H.: Middlebury College
Press, 2003.
Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York: Holt, 1999.
Richardson, Mark. The Ordeal of Robert Frost: The
Poet and His Poetics. Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1997.
Sanders, David Alan. “Revelation as Child’s Play in
Frost’s ‘Directive.’ ” In Frost: Centennial Essays II,
edited by Jac Tharpe, 267–277. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1976.
Watterson, William Collins. “Gerontion as Jokester:
Humor and Anxiety in Robert Frost’s ‘Directive,’ ”
Robert Frost Review (Fall 1992): 59–67.

From Critical Companion to Robert Frost A Literary Reference to His Life And Work(2007)  - Deirdre Fagan +