9. A Passing Glimpse / West-Running Brook(1928) - Robert Frost

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A Passing Glimpse

   To Ridgely Torrence

   on last looking into his "Hesperides" 

​I often see flowers from a passing car

That are gone before I can tell what they are.

I want to get out of the train and go back

To see what they were beside the track.

I name all the flowers I am sure they weren't:

Not fireweed loving where woods have burnt―

• ​fireweed : 불탄자리에 자라는 잡초

Not bluebells gracing a tunnel mouth―

Not lupine living on sand and drouth.

• bluebell : 초롱박꽃
• lupine : 루핀, 루피너스
• drouth : 가뭄, 마른 땅

Was something brushed across my mind

That no one on earth will ever find?

• brush across : 을 스치다

Heaven gives its glimpses only to those

Not in position to look too close.

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순간 비전

       리즐리 토런스에게

  그의 “헤스페리데스”를 마지막 읽고

지나가는 열차에서 흔히 꽃들을 보지만

무슨 꽃인지 알기도 전에 사라진다.

기차를 내려 그곳으로 되돌아가서

선로 옆의 꽃이 무슨 꽃인지 보고 싶다.

나는 아니라고 확신하는 꽃의 이름을 대본다.

그건 숲이 불탄 곳을 좋아하는 분홍바늘꽃은 아니다―

그건 터널 입구를 장식하는 초롱꽃도 아니고―

모래에서 가뭄을 먹고 사는 루핀도 아니다.

지구상의 누구도 발견하지 못할 어떤 것이

내 마음을 스치고 지나간 것이 아닐까?

하늘은 너무 가까이서 볼 위치에 있지 않은

사람들에게만 순간적인 비전들을 제공한다.

​-신재실 옮김-

단상(斷想): 사람은 누구나 이상(理想)을 꿈꾼다. 황금사과나무의 꽃과 열매를 보고, 냄새 맡고, 맛보고 싶어 한다. 하지만 황금사과나무는 현실 세계의 서쪽 끝 어딘가에 있다. 이승 너머의 찬연(燦然)한 진선미(眞善美)는 지상의 사물에 그림자를 드리울 뿐이어서 육안(肉眼)으로 식별하기는 불가능하다. 심안(心眼)을 소유한 소수만이 직관(直觀)할 수 있을 뿐이다.

황금사과는 지나는 열차의 창밖으로 얼핏 보이는 꽃과 같은 것이다. 폐허에서 솟아나는 분홍바늘꽃일까? 아니다. 어둠의 터널 입구를 장식하는 초롱꽃일까? 아니다. 영양분과 물이 희귀한 곳에서 번성하는 루핀일까? 아니다. 이것들을 모두 합친 꽃일까? 아마 그럴 것이다. 육안으로 확인하지 못했으니, 그 정체를 어찌 알 수 있겠는가? 잡힐 듯 잡히지 않는 그 무엇이다.

내 마음을 스치듯 지나간 그 무엇이다. 그것은 보이지 않은 어떤 힘이 내게 준 선물이다. 하늘은 저만치서 황금사과의 치맛자락만 보여줄 뿐이다. 너무 가까이서 보면, 그 찬란한 빛에 눈이 멀어버릴 것이기 때문이다. 치맛자락이 보이는 것만도 축복 중의 축복이다. 그저 그림자로 만족하자.

​-신재실 씀-

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youtu.be/1EdQVEnf9tw

youtu.be/DUCuMWExxCc

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The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost

Introduction ROBERT FAGGEN 
1  “Stay Unassuming”: the Lives of Robert Frost DONALD G. SHEEHY 
2  Frost Biography and A Witness Tree WILLIAM PRITCHARD 
3  Frost and the Questions of Pastoral ROBERT FAGGEN 
4  Frost and the Ancient Muses HELEN BACON 
5  Frost as a New England Poet LAWRENCE BUELL 
6  “Across Spaces of the Footed Line”: the Meter and Versification of Robert Frost TIMOTHY STEELE 
7  Frost’s Poetry of Metaphor JUDITH OSTER 

8. Frost and the Questions of Pastoral ROBERT FAGGEN 
9  Frost and the Meditative Lyric BLANFORD PARKER 
10  Frost’s Poetics of Control MARK RICHARDSON 
11  Frost’s Politics and the Cold War GEORGE MONTEIRO 
12  “Synonymous with Kept”: Frost and Economics GUY ROTELLA 
13 Human Presence in Frost’s Universe JOHN CUNNINGHAM 
Select bibliography 
Index

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 typicallyfalse 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 re-enacting 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’sParty,” 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 morea 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"