Ars Poetica as Ars Moriendi: Robert Frost’s Directive

Truly the light is sweet, And it is pleasant for the eyes to behold the sun; But if a man lives many years And rejoices in them all, Yet let him remember the days of darkness, For they will be many. All that is coming is vanity.

—Ecclesiastes, 11:7-8

This is my thesis: That Directive is a parable of salvation and death; that Frost wrote it in the late autumn of his life to teach a younger generation returning from war how to orient themselves anew in a world that has left them battered and confused; but that such a saccharine reading cripples the beauty of a poem of sublime melancholy. Directive achieves most when we read the addressee as Frost himself, the speaker as anthropomorphised poetic wisdom, and the intent as Frost scouring his dearest source of wisdom, poetry, for reprieve from the suffering around him, and finding salvation in the finality of death.

The terrifying poet of Home Burial, Out, Out, and Design has gazed too long into the abyss of terror, and returns shattered, lonely, and terrified.

Here is the text of Directive:

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.

I

After his close friend Etienne de La Boetie dies, Montaigne attempts to make sense of his scattered thoughts and grief, and starts writing. He removes himself from political life, marries, and retires to the countryside. He philosophizes widely and wildly, but what haunts him most is death. How does one prepare for death when all experience stems necessarily from its counterpart, life? If we can find neither tonic nor barbiturate, must we live life in constant fear of death?

The end of our course is death. It is the objective necessarily within our sights. If death frightens us how can we go one step forward without anguish? For ordinary people the remedy is not to think about it; but what brutish insensitivity can produce so gross a blindness?

—Michel de Montaigne, Philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir

For Socrates, the only solace against death is philosophy. The Elysian fields were barred to those who had not achieved virtue in life, and the straight path to virtue was through the practise of philosophy.

I am afraid that other people do not realize that the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death.

—Plato, Phaedo, 64a

The art of dying begins with the knowledge of death. Death is always present in early Frost, but it happens elsewhere to another. It is glimpsed through the window in Home Burial; it chances in the other room in front of a dying fire in Death of the Hired Man; it leaps and snarls and is forgotten in Out, Out:

No one believed. They listened at his heart. Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it. No more to build on there. And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

Death looms large for Frost in the autumn of his life. It was time to remove the dark veil that obscured it, made of it a problem of the outside, a problem of another room, or another town, or another person, and contend with death directly.

The world had changed. The millions that had fought in the muddy fields of France had returned home only to see their children ready themselves for the same death that had whizzed with the sound of artillery shells. Theirs but to do and die. Those that came back, bruised, battered and broken were lost souls looking for reprieve.

Where can we find salvation? In poetry, says Frost. In death, says Directive.

To Frost, the wisdom or truth of poetry is more real than the truth of fact. Because it need never affirm, poetry makes true statements that prose sees as nonsense. The wisdom of poetic language is preternatural: it sees melancholy in the colour blue, retribution in a lightning bolt, and marks love above all else. Poetry exists in uncertainty, and reflects back on the reader the truth she sees in life; after all, you can only see the world through your own eyes, and who’s to say that what you see is what I see?

II

The age of reason has not been kind to the poet who dwells in possibility. The urn in Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn speaks of truth and beauty as identical:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

This is not the truth of mathematics that one thing and another make a pair, but the thunderbolt truth of inspiration, where meaning is manifold. Modern man does not like to deal in uncertainties and distrusts polyphonic language. Here is Keats again:

… several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason…

—Letter to George and Thomas Keats, December 21, 1817

Directive calls us back from the constant search for answers into pure-hearted wonder at the world. We all live lives of quiet desperation; step back; breathe; wander until you are lost; only after can you start your search in earnest. Here are the first lines of Directive again:

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 scene is set, and we have turned towards the soft days of childhood. Our youthward gaze stumbles on the worn graveyard marble sculpture that serves as a reminder of our final resting place. To recover our innocence, we must reach far enough into the past to a place reclaimed by time and nature, where the present can no longer intrude. Our destination and our salvation lie in the embrace of forgetfulness.

III

Christ tells us that the path to salvation is a path towards getting lost.

He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.

—Matthew, 10:39

One cannot find revelation by travelling beaten paths. And so, Dante’s journey to salvation begins with the poet lost in a dark wood. The guide he finds must first direct him deeper into confusion and hopelessness.

Midway in the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.

—Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto I

Like Dante, we require a guide in our journey back from a world too much for us. Like Virgil, our guide must lead us further into the deep dark before proffering salvation.

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 –

We step through the “great monolithic knees” of a town that once was a thing to wonder at, but now is slowly fading, and through a forest newly grown, untouched by human hands. As we pass the remnants of the village, we are watched and judged. We are on a quest, and what is a quest without a trial:

Nor need you mind the serial ordeal Of being watched from forty cellar holes As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.

Moses wanders for forty years in the desert leading his people to the promised land. Christ fasts for forty days and nights. The holy figure must undergo a trial to prove themselves worthy; they must reject temptation, and hold steadfast as the rabble urges action. The road to salvation is open to all, but it is narrow, unworn, and harsh. In a world shattered by war, that twenty years before Directive gave us the thunder of

The pure products of America go crazy–

and ten years later would howl at us with

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

it is no wonder that Frost looks for his momentary stay against confusion in the one place where the wise man had not been ground to dust. It is time to climb the mountain road towards the Elysian fields and drink from the goblet to be saved, or to forget:

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.

IV

All poems have a speaker. We often think of the poem as an expression of the poet’s thought, and we ask the dreaded question “What did the poet mean by this?” It is easy to identify Frost with the speaker in Directive: the great wise man of American letters holding out his hand to us and leading us to salvation and peace. But what a dull reading that makes; who are you, Robert Frost, to tell me how to live my life? Perhaps that is Frost’s intention, but behind best intentions lies subconscious impulse. A cry for help underscores the poem. This is not Frost speaking to us, telling us how to live; it is Frost speaking to the genius of poetry, and asking for liberation.

This Frost is not terrifying. His poems no longer pulse with the life stuff of the modern man or woman. He has been shaded out. He is terrified.

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.

Giambattista Vico sees poetry as the wisdom to comprehend that which reason is unable to explain. Poetic wisdom tries at understanding through metaphor, and its goal is to make us see anew what we thought familiar.

Poetic wisdom is atavistic: the more we know of a thing, the less we see in it. That the lightning bolt occurs with a sudden drop in the electric resistance of the air and a surge of electrons rushing to fill a void is irrelevant to the man of Ancient Greece who has survived so much electricity coursing through him and sees it as a sign from Zeus to lead a better life. But are we still conduits for revelation with our knowledge of the inhumanity and indifference of physics?

To understand, we must turn our gaze back and trust. Do not succumb to the vanity of knowledge as Uriel does:

A sad self-knowledge, withering, fell On the beauty of Uriel; In heaven once eminent, the god Withdrew, that hour, into his cloud; Whether doomed to long gyration In the sea of generation, Or by knowledge grown too bright To hit the nerve of feebler sight.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Uriel

Directive has asked for our faith twice already. We have first followed a guide whose wish was our getting lost, and then shuttered the ladder road behind us at the speaker’s behest. We have proven ourselves faithful, and thus worthy. Saint Mark says we may be saved:

He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.

—Mark, 16:16

V

We believe, and now we must be baptized with water unto repentance. Here is the water

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.

And here the holy conduit

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.

We have come far from the start of our journey; ascended through the narrow straits of the past; trusted to a meandering guide; and have been judged and deemed worthy. We have read through the parable of the poem that we may see with eyes unveiled and hear with ears unstoppered, and now we must drink from the grail:

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

Directive ends with the traveller whole beyond confusion. Beyond all confusion unto the end of time. Only death offers permanent reprieve from the confusion of life. For what else is there: Poetry offers only a momentary stay against confusion; the divine has been left no hiding place under the bright lights of the present; and the fruits of reason have led to fire and brimstone beyond comprehension.

We are dust and to dust we return.