MASTERPIECEAPRIL 10, 2010.'Hard to Understand, but Easy to Love'
Robert Frost's 'Directive' sounds ornery and ironic, heartbroken and lyrical, all at once
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 left's 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.
Robert Frost
"Directive," from the book, THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1947, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright 1975 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Christopher Serra
.Robert Frost's tour de force "Directive" has disgruntled and captivated readers for more than half a century. Like many of his best poems, it describes a walk in an unnamed wood and, in this case, to an ancient brook, which he calls our destination and destiny. The poem takes readers into the past—the personal past of childhood, as well as our cultural past—and evokes a "time made simple by the loss / Of detail." Typical of Frost's colloquial style, "Directive" sounds ornery and ironic, heartbroken and lyrical, all at once.
Other poems by Frost are perhaps better known—"Fire and Ice," "The Road Not Taken," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Mending Wall," and a half-dozen others. "Directive," first published in 1946, when Frost was in his 70s, must rank with these. The poet Randall Jarrell praised it as "one of the strangest and most characteristic, most dismaying and most gratifying, poems any poet has ever written."
The story the poem tells is deceptively simple: We are led on a walk though the woods by a mischievous guide past the site of a former town. At a brook, beside a "house that is no more a house," the guide produces a broken goblet and encourages us to "drink and be whole again beyond confusion." The poem begins with one of Frost's most striking lines: "Back out of all this now too much for us." A master musician, Frost modulates the pulse of the verse to produce a signature rhythm all his own.
What it was that had become "too much" for Frost, whether a personal grief or the "universal crisis" engendered by the war years, is hard to say. Frost touched on his struggles with a confused present a few years earlier in "Carpe Diem": "The present / Is too much for the senses, / Too crowding, too confusing— / Too present to imagine." Stemming from a similar frustration, "Directive" addresses a "you," but also, ruminatively, the poet himself.
Whatever the cause of Frost's apprehension, his withdrawal from the world is total. His "directive" to readers (for he is also our guide, who "only has at heart [our] getting lost") takes us on an interior journey into a remote countryside, where civilization has been effaced. Only when we are completely lost may we come to our true selves: "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." The poem shares not only Thoreau's passion for nature but also his occasional wariness. Frost recommends we sing a "cheering song" to ward off the fear "of being watched from forty cellar holes, / As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins." Then unease and nostalgia grow as we find a "house that is no more a house" but only an indentation in the landscape, "Now slowly closing like a dent in dough."
Deep in the woods, we discover broken crockery beneath a pine tree, the long-ago site of a children's playhouse: "Weep for what little things could make them glad." Beside the playhouse was the "house in earnest," which has become a "belilaced cellar hole," and, behind it, a brook "Too lofty and original to rage." Here is the origin toward which Frost has been leading us. What he shows us next is both a spiritual vision of considerable power and the crushing realization that clarity and wholeness may remain unavailable to us in this lifetime.
Among the branches of an old cedar, Frost has kept hidden "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." The gospel reference to those who "see" but do not "perceive," who "hear" but do not "understand," may be Frost's wry fillip to those readers whom he felt did not understand or (worse) misunderstood his work. In a crushing bit of irony, he admits that he has stolen the goblet from the children's playhouse—it is a travesty of the Grail, a mere toy. Or is he suggesting that it is only in the innocence of childhood that wholeness is possible?
The final lines ring out slowly, like an incantation, as the goblet is raised: "Here are your waters and your watering place. / Drink and be whole again beyond confusion." This sacramental dream of clarity was, for Frost, deeply rooted in the art of poetry itself. His prescriptions for poetry in "The Figure a Poem Makes" (1939) come very close to describing "Directive" itself. A poem, he writes, "begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification of life, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion."
The poem was for Frost a late flowering—the most ambitious and resonant poem in the largely lackluster collection "Steeple Bush"—and decidedly not to everyone's taste. The noted Frost scholar Richard Poirier called the poem "a prime example of misplaced adulation." Poirier went on to characterize "Directive" as "anxious to please those who want their elevation in an easy chair." He found the poem's argument tricky not because of the complexity of its statement, "but because it is not sure of what it does want to say, or do."
Jarrell, perhaps Frost's greatest critic, had no such qualms. "Is the poem consoling or heart-breaking?" he asked. "Very much of both; and its humor and acceptance and humanity, its familiarity and elevation, give it a composed matter-of-fact magnificence." Frost was not always interested in complete transparency: He understood that there would be those he could not reach. Instead, he produced an emotional artifact that is both immediately appealing and elusive, a poem that, in Jarrell's words, "is hard to understand, but easy to love."
Robert Frost has been many things to many people. The winner of four Pulitzer Prizes, he was that rarest of birds: a poet of the highest achievement who was also widely popular. He has always been a poet we feel we know—the folksy New Englander, the genial bard, the public man—as well as a poet of troubling mysteries, whose poems the critic Lionel Trilling famously found "terrifying." Like so many of Frost's finest poems, "Directive" feels familiar, almost elemental, essential. Yet its darker resonances, rooted very near the source of our hopes and our beliefs, continue to beckon.
—Mr. Yezzi's most recent book of poems is "Azores." He is executive editor of The New Criterion.
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