The Truth of Frost's "Directive"Author(s): Robert PetersSource: Modern Language Notes, Vol. 75, No. 1 (Jan., 1960), pp. 29-32Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3040569 .

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well-born or of noble race) is a blasphemous parallel to the ideal of perfection connected with his role. And as his grotesque sacerdotal mannerisms imply, he is participating in a burlesque of the Eucharis- tic sacrament: " proprietorial, adjurant, sweating, he resumed his harsh monologue, mopping his face on his sleeve. 'Come on, folks, it's all on Gene. I aint nothing but a bootlegger, but he never had a better friend than me. Step up and drink, folks." Ironically, of course, this rite seeks to perpetuate the remembrance of sacrificial lust, not selfless love.

This profane Mass for the Dead culminates in a travesty of the crucifixion. When Red is tumbled out of his coffin, he is accidentally vested with a crown of thorns: "When they raised the corpse the wreath came too, attached to him by a hidden end of wire driven in his cheek." This turn of events, consistently enough, is instigated by a " woman in red," Faulkner's surrogate for the Whore of Babylon, who is interested only in temporal pleasures: " ' open the game. Get the damn stiff out of here and open the game."' When the shout is accompanied by " a burst of filthy language," there seems little doubt about her prototype. But this scene is not a prophecy of the fall of the new Babylon. Rather, as the total pattern of action in the novel seems to indicate, the minions of the antichrist have converted the world, even as Faulkner asserts, into a universal " pandemonium."

Washsington and Jefferson College WILLIAM B. STEIN

The Truth of Frost's "Directive" Frost's " Directive " has both gratified and dismayed readers. While

its artistic attainment has been clear, its intellectual complexity has not been, and admirers of the poem have come to conclude that though " Directive " is " easy to love," I it is not so easy to understand. An explication and interpretation will demonstrate the central meaning of the poem and its important place in Frost's thought.

Essentially a religious poem, it derives its basic abstractions from traditional religious symbol and reference, and its title, with its im- perative force, reflects a didactic purpose; but the meaning is uncon- ventional. The lost and the saved conditions are the poet's themes, and the thought pivots, in a way unique with Frost, around St. Mark's

IRandall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (New York, 1953), p. 48.

VOL. LXXV, January 1960 29

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well-known dictum (16: 16): " He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned." 2 This verse Frost subjects to his own special whimsy and quiet irony; the " saved " are those few who are willing to lose themselves in the poet's personal, unsophisticated, and unritualistic discoveries of the spirit.

The poem opens informally and develops into an invitation for the reader to accompany the poet on a journey away from a confusing present to an earlier time " made simple " and deprived of its physical detail by the intervening years:

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..

The reader, Frost assumes, is "lost enough," enough confused and adrift in life, to want to find himself; and the poet, the Virgil-figure "who only has at heart your getting lost," 8 will guide him on his paradoxical route to self-discovery. The poet directs the way: seek out some site, he counsels, where the evidences of man have nearly crumbled away. Pilgrimage to a humble spot, some unobtrusive but now fairly inaccessible place where grain was carted and apples gathered, and where children romped. The specific journey he chooses leads to an abandoned town and farm on a mountain side. The ledges of the road leading up are "monolithic," difficult, and scarred (the prevailing Christian belief that the way to truth is not easy, comes to mind). As they climb, the poet-guide reassures his guest that he has nothing to fear from the eerieness of the trip: a goliath, " Glacier," locked like Dante's Anteus in ice, still haunts the land; from the banks along the difficult route, forty pairs of animal eyes (grotesques) regard the visitors; and the magic woods, excited, send " light rustle rushes to their leaves." The poet further seeks to allay his guest's fears by introducting the homely, salving image of the eyes in the firkins: 4

2 There are echoes too of Christ's instruction to his disciples (Matthew 10: 39): " He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it."

s A Dante-like weariness is also the partial-theme of " Birches ": It's when I'm weary of considerations, And life is too much like a pathless wood Where your face burns and tickles with the cobvebs Broken across it, and one eye is weeping From a twig's having lashed across it open.

'I assume that Frost imagines these quarter-barrel butter-tubs turned on their sides in a darkened root-cellar.

30 Modem L;nguage Notes

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

As they approach the scattered traces of an old farm, the poet directs his friend, if he feels "lost enough to find himself by now," to close the road to any other intruder; his discovery is to be a highly personal one:

pull in your ladder road behind you And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me. Then make yourself at home.

They stand on a height where town and farm once met (" where two village cultures faded / Into each other "). The only remaining field is "no bigger than a harness gall "; where the house once stood is " a belilaced cellar hole " slowly closing " like a dent in dough "; and beneath a pine lie " some shattered dishes " which call to mind " playthings in the playhouse of children." "'Weep," the poet advises his friend, over the transitory nature of man and all his works, over his efforts to shape nature, over his intense life-all of which close over as inevitably as dents in dough.5

Yet, in this forlorn decay, what is eternal and unchanging? The brook from which the house took its water, a brook spring-cold and so proud to be near its source it never rages, is unchanging. Water to Frost is a symbol of life, of that permanent, vital fluid of Nature which man shares with all living things. In " West-Running Brook," the wife explains that the eddy of the stream pays tribute to its source, and adds, " it is from this in nature that we are from." In " Directive," man is, in a metaphoric way, the brook's eddy returning for revitalization to its source. Frost implies that somehow in the pursuit of our intricate, frenetic lives we forget elemental natural verities, and that only by " being versed in country things " shall we be saved: by understanding that birds do not weep over decayed farms and towns; and by recognizing a more supremely difficult truth, a genuinely sceptical view as opposed to orthodoxy, that man is but one in the grand natural cycle and his passing is of no more con- sequence than the drying up of Hyla Brook, the slow decay of an abandoned rick of firewood, or the death of a hired man."

Other poems, "Provide, Provide," "The Census Taker," "In A Disused Graveyard," " The Birthplace," and " After Apple Picking " also make this observation.

I See " Hyla Brook," " The Need of Being Versed in Country Things," " The Wood-Pile," and " The Death of the Hired Man."

VOL. LXXV, Jatnuary 1960 31

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This is only a part of the poet's truth; for more meaningful than our awareness of man's impermanence, is the commitment such knowledge imposes upon us. What remains is the self-the man apart who closes his area of truth to all except himself and his guide. Through drinking from the goblet-Grail hidden in the cedar, we may come to the wisdom that the self alone is all we have-but that is enough; and by contemplating this stark need for a self-reliant view it is possible to become " whole again beyond confusion." 7 The goblet is Frost's poem itself. The communion-baptism, since this goblet is like the Grail, is through water, the wine of Nature, and with the self:

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 experience is a religious one; but it is religious only in a broad, almost existential sense (Frost makes no reference to a deity; his view is that of a world in which man endures with whatever fortitude of mind and spirit he alone can muster against his own imperma- nence)." In Frost's spectrum, the damned are the conventional, shut from any full knowing of their potential worth as individuals of independent act and conviction; the saved are the unorthodox, child- like in their response to nature, who accept the full rewards and obligations of a private integrity and a self-reliant courage.9

Wayne State University ROBERT PETERS

7The independent, sceptical attitudes of " Design," " The White-Tailed Hornet," " The Most of It," and " Neither Out Far Nor in Deep " are especially relevant here.

8 Even though Frost's concern with Nature suggests a kind of Emersonian pantheism, as it does in such other poems as " Good-Bye and Keep Cold," "A Prayer in Spring," and "I Will Sing You One-O," in "Directive " the truth is the universal aloneness of man.

9 The paradox of the child's attitude and the playhouse further suits Frost's method: just as the believer finds himself in losing himself, so he gains wisdom through becoming a child. See Matthew 18: 2, 3: " And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them,

" And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." The stealing of the goblet is symbolic of a child's act.

32 Modemn Language Notes

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