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The Wife’s Lament is an Anglo Saxon poem from the Exeter Book. There are numerous articles on the poem and scholarly analyses—including the linked Wikipedia article—so I won’t go into it; but the poem has a fascinating history. My own version is not a translation but is based on the original. There are a variety of “faithful” translations and they are all good (I included a handful below), but I put “faithful” in quotes because the original poem is surprisingly ambiguous (partly due to the nature of Anglo Saxon/Old English). The original lends itself to a wide range of interpretations, meaning that any given translation can read as though it were based on a completely different poem.
Another poem in the Exeter Book (and written later) seems to answer this poem, called The Husband’s Message. No one is sure if it was written in response to the Wife’s Lament, but is hopeful and joyful, and seems to answer her. I included some lines from that poem in my own, as though anticipating it.
My own retelling was written for the fourth novel of WistThistle, called The Tree of Life. In my reading/audio of the poem below, I did something a little different, I read over the soundtrack of Sibelius’s Swan of Tuonela. The Swan of Tuonela is Sibelius’s musical realization of the swan that swims in Tuonela, the realm of the dead, circling the isle of the dead and forever between life and death. For this reason, though swans are said to only sing at the moment of death, the swan of Tuonela (the oboe) sings perpetually, being perpetually between life and death.
Song of Sorrows
The cruelty of my fate, the malice,
And suffering of my youth and age, I sing you,
My journey into banishment, my song
Of sorrows. Hear me, weep, accompany me,
I know no other song.
My grief began
The day my Lord and I were parted, days
When winter breasted the gray shores and hailstone
Scored the waves. I visited the shore
Each day thereafter, longing to embrace him,
To know what peoples hosted him; if with
The love and honor that I bore him. Through
The turning seasons I awaited him
Until the day that I myself departed—
Heart guided by the same unfurling winds,
A willing exile yearning for the shore
And harbor of my Lord, yet little knowing
My Lordship’s kin conspired against us both
Wedging the world’s wide realm between us, a misery
As depthless as the seas.
They made another
Our people’s Lord, condemning me
To house beneath an oak tree, to bed
Among its roots and leaf-fall: absent love
Or lover, friend or neighbor; absent hearth
And roof. And then at last came word: my Lord
Was suffering as I suffered, broken-hearted
Condemned, as I, to wander in a wilderness
Of hate and murderous thought, we two, who vowed
To love until the final taper fell;
Until the wane and waxing of the moon
Be done; until the toppled world had spilled
Its lantern oil into the burning seas:
And we and all our days go down to darkness
To rise no more. All that is changed as if
Our vows had never been—each of us suffering
The grief of each.
I was driven out, condemned
To house beneath an oak—a gap of earth
And stone, root-hollowed—cursed to be alone,
My grief the bed, and every winding leaf
A sheet as though I lay already dead,
My bones already raked by wind and snow
While friends lay by their lovers’ sides: the friends
Who slept while I was bloodied by the briars
And thorns and by desires when dawn had yet
To breach the seas, and I had searched the sea's
Horizons again and yet again
To still be lost, bereft and pathless, exiled
To that abyss of earth where bitterness
And misery were water to the tree,
To hoar-bound roots that turn the oak-leaves white
With grief and will—forever will.
Perhaps
His sorrows drink as deeply from the heart
As mine—beyond replenishment. In dreams
He shuns despair's demeanor—staunch, stout-minded,
Joyful; in dreams he wanders, banished, friendless,
Only stars to blanket him. In dreams
I go to him. He neither sees nor hears me.
A ghost whose touch leaves nothing more than a mist
And sea-spray at the lips. I kiss him—
A kiss of icy beads. Downhearted lord,
My lord of wave-lashed cliffs and chasms,
Of vacant halls of ice and salt-rimed scree
Forever lapped by floods—forever flooding
The fissures of the heart—dour lord of ghosts
And bitter seas. But if he send for me,
Then I will answer by the seagull’s way,
I will sail the paths of foam, the swell and storm
And no man hinder me.
But if my Lord be lost—
No winter longer. Those horizons, farther
Those stars, and what shores farther than those stars—
To those lands I will sail.
by me,. Patrick Gillespie | November 27th 2025
Robert Frost’s Directive is, in my opinion, his last great poem, and is found in Steeple Bush, his second to last book. No two books of Frost are more New England than Steeple Bush or In the Clearing. They beautifully capture that northeast “old timer” who turns a lifetime’s rich mine of wisdom into cynical, cracker-barrel philosophizing. But Directive is different. This isn’t “old-timer Frost” talking at you whilst enthroned on his front-porch bench (unzipped after too much hash browns and beans), but that other New Englander who talks with you as he decides which road to take.
Many years ago—like when I was in my twenties—I read an analysis of this poem to end all analyses. It was beautiful, and I don’t remember a word of it. I just remember being gobsmacked. I’ve tried to find it online but can’t. I recall it’s being in a book about several American poets and Frost’s Directive just happened to be the poem discussed. I guess that’s a good thing. because if I found it, I’d just post a link and call it a day. Short of that, I did find a bunch of other analyses, and they are gawd-awful. From what I can tell, they are mostly—maybe all?—products of AI. This isn’t the first search in which I’ve noticed analyses of poetry being flooded by junk AI. I also found this to be the case with Dickinson’s poems. AI can’t interpret metaphor, let alone the kind of full-blown metaphysical conceits one finds in Donne’s poetry—for example. The best AI can do is to find a human being’s discussion of a given poem (like one of my own analyses) and pass it off as—I don’t know what—something other than intellectual theft, all while spiking electricity prices and feeding at the trough of taxpayer subsidies.
But I digress.
How about we back out of all this now too much for us?
The first thing to say of Frost’s Directive, is that it’s blank verse written with the confidence and ease of an old master. He takes much less license with the meter than in some of his earlier blank verse poems, such as Birches. In my judgement, Frost went so far as to develop his own fingerprint in blank verse (writing it in a way that one wouldn’t have seen in the 19th century) but with Directive he returns to an almost Miltonic tone. For me, it adds to the feeling of the poem as a sort of capstone to Frost’s greatest works. First, read it below, then we’ll get into the nitty gritty, a few lines at a time.
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.
1Back out | of all | this now | too much | for us,
Back in | a time | made sim|ple by | the loss
Of de | tail, burn | ed, dissolved, | and bro| ken off
Like grave | yard mar|ble sculp|ture in | the weather,2
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.
Frost’s blank verse was far more variable than the blank verse of the 19th century, showed considerably variability depending on the poem’s subject matter. In the case of Directive, the fairly strict mater gives the poem (to me) a grounded and weighty feel. The opening line sounds like an exhortation, but by the fifth line it becomes clear that the poet is telling where we are. We are ‘back in a time made simply by loss’. We are ‘back out of all this now-too-much-for-us’. We are back to a place where “There is a house that is no more a house”. From the very outset, in a way that characterizes the contradictions throughout the poem, the poet tells us that this past never existed. In order for it to exist, it is to be made “simple” (by loss). The complications must be burned, dissolved and broken off. The past the poet is describing is like a weathered graveyard’s marble sculpture, blurred and simplified by the weathering of decades.
That’s the first internal contradiction. The poet is taking us to a past that never existed. The contradictions continue when he tells us he’s taking us to a house, farm and town that are no longer a house, farm or town.
🚧 Rabbit Hole 🚧
As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, Frost isn’t describing a real place although there actually is a Panther Mountain (more than one). And at one of them (at least) there may have been some small-scale bluestone quarrying, according to this Wikipedia article, although Frost makes clear that what he’s describing, or imagining—the road—only appears like a quarry. The Panther Mountain that most out-of-staters would probably visit (and my vote for the most likely Panther Mountain if Frost is describing an actual place) is the site of a several hundred million year old impact crater!—and it’s huge. But, as far as I can tell, there are no abandoned towns (on this particular Panther Mountain). But for the sake of thoroughness, we can entertain three possibilities.
And just to really muddy the waters. The linked site below states that there are not one, not two, not three, but eleven Panther Mountains in New York State (all of which would have been within driving distance of Frost’s Bennington homestead). The one in Shandaken is home to the meteor crater above, and then there’s one in Arietta, New York, and one in Chestertown, NY. Meanwhile, there are no Panther Mountains in Vermont or New Hampshire. Go figure. But, whether Frost was describing an actual place doesn’t matter to the poem one whit, only to inquiring minds.
But what does Frost mean by a house that is no longer house? I think it’s simpler than some would make it. When one sees a ruin, be it Roman or a New England cellar hole, most of us wonder what originally stood there. Our imaginations create the house. In this sense, the poet is taking us to a house of our own imagination—the place in which our past still lives. What drives us, of all the world’s creatures, to imagine what has been lost? Perhaps a homesickness and melancholia for what was and could have been. Frost’s own experience of loss was considerable. Four of his six children died before he did. A daughter died shortly after birth, a son died of cholera, a daughter from puerperal fever after childbirth and his son Carol committed suicide. Each death left its own cellar hole in Frost’s psyche. But there’s another way to interpret these houses that are no houses (and that comes from an earlier poem I’ll discuss below). They are now the houses of decay, dissolution and rupture with the intention of men, filled with leaf-fall, bramble and the inward collapse of cellar walls.
In that respect, Directive can be read as a journey through Frost’s own painful terrain. The ruined town, house and farm is the family and future he had dreamt of. His reference to the weathered graveyard marble sculpture could be interpreted as all that’s left of four of his six children—and wife. (Directive was published in 1947 while his wife, Elinor, had died in 1938.)
The road | there, if | you'll let | a guide | direct you
Who on|ly has | at heart | your get|ting lost,
May seem |as if |it should | have been | a quarry -
Great mo|nolith|ic knees |the for|mer town
Long since |gave up |pretense |of keep|ing covered.
And there's |a stor|y in |a book | about it:
Besides |the wear| of i|ron wa|gon wheels
The ledg|es show| lines ruled3 |southeast-| northwest,
The chi|sel work |of an |enor|mous Glacier
That braced |his feet |against |the Arc|tic Pole.
These lines cause a lot of confusion among human and AI interpreters because of their compression. But I’ll keep it simple: There is no road. There is no quarry. There is no guide. “The road there” is actually glacier-scarred ledge that is like a road but so rough as to seem like a quarry. (Many read this line as the narrator referring to himself, in the third person, as “a guide”; this is not wholly unreasonable, but nowhere else in the poem does the narrator refer to himself in the third person, only in the first person; and the comparison of the ledge to a quarry makes much more sense given the third line. In other words: “The road there” is so rough that if you treat it as a guide to the town, it will seem like a quarry whose only intention is to get you lost.) As regards the road, all that’s left of it is the glacier-scarred ledge (a mountain’s great monolothic knees) that may have been part of the original road (given that it’s scarred by iron wagon wheels). There is actually a small ledge like this within walking distance of my house (the remains of an old copperas mine).
The line “Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered” refers to towns keeping their dirt roads “covered” in gravel (not the quarry as some sites using AI would have you believe)—in short, maintaining them. The former town has long since given up the pretense that anyone would be interested in using what’s left of the road. There’s no more town to travel to or from. What we have is a road that is no road and a guide that is no guide. But Frost’s descriptions do work as metaphor or analogy. Our memories are a road that can mislead us. And if we’re not mislead, then we may lie to ourselves. We may yearn for a past that simply never existed. In that sense, our yearning for a cherished past is a road that only has at heart our getting lost—and perhaps for our own good.
But Frost isn’t content to merely read the signs of a recent past. He next compares the ledge, the monolithic knees scarred by glaciers, to a book that tells of a past that dwarfs our own, that ostensibly makes ours trivial and meaningless. The reach of time going back to the ice-age is immense. Just as we are a trivial part of the town’s history, the town is a trivial part of the mountain’s history. The immensity of time also can’t help but express an immensity of loss.
You must | not mind| a cer|tain cool|ness from him
Still said |to haunt |this side |of Pan|ther Mountain.
Nor need |you mind| the se|rial |ordeal
Of be|ing watched |from for|ty cel | lar holes
As if |by eye |pairs out| of for|ty firkins.
Here again, many interpretations seem to think this refers to the “the guide”. It does not. The “him” is Panther Mountain and the guide remains his—the mountain’s—road-like ledges. The coolness that haunts the mountain is the still remaining iciness of the glacier.
And that brings us to firkins.
And the image above is the general consensus as regards online interpretation. A fierce little keg of 9 imperial gallons eyeing you as you pass by. Did you know? It’s a centuries long New England tradition to leave firkins of wine and beer in the cellar when you abandon a house. Not. A firkin, the Oxford English Dictionary will tell you, is “A small cask for liquids, fish, butter, etc, originally containing a quarter of a ‘barrel’ or half a ‘kilderkin’.” Wordnet calls it a small wooden keg. Wikipedia will additionally tell you that:
A firkin was also a British unit for the sale of beer. It is one quarter of a barrel and its value depends on the current size of a barrel, but at present:
1 firkin = 0.25 barrel = 9 imperial gallons = 10.8 U.S. gallons = 41 litres
A wine firkin was much larger: 1 wine firkin = 70 imperial gallons.
One site, sensing something is amiss, describes the firkin as a “storage container”. Are we to imagine Samsonite luggage? Are we to think that whilst the entire house—nay, the entire town—has rotted into doughy oblivion, forty little barrels of beer, butter or lard (as the case may be) have survived this fate? And everybody who interprets this poem says: “Yeah, okay, that tracks. Moving on.” Now I ask you, brothers and sisters in Christ, if there were forty firkins of beer and wine in forty cellar holes, would you dig up a child’s chalice and drink from a giardia-laced brook; or would you crack open one of those little beady-eyed bastards staring at you from a cellar hole?
No. There is no house. There is no farm. There is no guide. There is no road. And there are no little kegs.
Frost’s poetry is full of supernatural creatures causing mischief and mayhem: fays, ghosts, tottering skeletons, elves, gnomes:
Interestingly, in three of the poems above, the supernatural creatures are associated with decay and dissolution (Frost seems to associate supernatural creatures with the destruction of both the natural and man-made worlds.)
A little more reading and one will discover that Frost’s Firkin is more akin to an elf or ghost than a keg of beer. The term firkin, according to the OED, may be “humorously applied to a person”, and gives some examples: “Rather than see our school defiled with yon firikin of foul stuff…” But Frost, typically, while he sees in Firkins something small, like it’s namesake, he also sees something less than humorous or benign.
In fact, now might be a good time to post all of The Ghost House, because, in a sense, the poem is a version of Directive written when Frost was possibly still in his teens, and was only the second poem to appear in his published works. The Ghost House and Directive, in a sense, bracket a lifetime of poems, sharing a similar preoccupation and tone.
I dwell in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
And left no trace but the cellar walls,
And a cellar in which the daylight falls
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.
O'er ruined fences the grape-vines shield
The woods come back to the mowing field;
The orchard tree has grown one copse
Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;
The footpath down to the well is healed.
I dwell with a strangely aching heart
In that vanished abode there far apart
On that disused and forgotten road
That has no dust-bath now for the toad.
Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart;
The whippoorwill is coming to shout
And hush and cluck and flutter about:
I hear him begin far enough away
Full many a time to say his say
Before he arrives to say it out.
It is under the small, dim, summer star.
I know not who these mute folk are
Who share the unlit place with me—
Those stones out under the low-limbed tree
Doubtless bear names that the mosses mar.
They are tireless folk, but slow and sad—
Though two, close-keeping, are lass and lad,—
With none among them that ever sings,
And yet, in view of how many things,
As sweet companions as might be had.
The parallels are striking. In both poems, the house has been reduced to a cellar hole. In both, the road is disused and forgotten (no longer covered in Directive). In both poems the houses are afterward inhabited by supernatural creatures. If you want to know what Frost imagines firkins to be, you will find them in this early poem—the mute folk, tireless folk (for being dead), slow, sad, and who never sing (“those stones” are “graveyard marble”, such as appear in Directive). Like the house that is no house in Directive, the poet of The Ghost House dwells in a lonely house, a ghost himself, that “vanished many a summer ago”. He could as easily have written that he dwelt in a house that was no house.
As for |the woods' |excite |ment o |ver you
That sends |light rust|le rush|es to | their leaves,
Charge that |to up|start in |exper |ience.
Where were | they all |not twen |ty years | ago?
They think |too much |of ha |ving sha |ded out
A few | old peck |er-fret |ted ap |ple trees.
These lines are one of those Frostian asides, such as we find in many of Frost’s soliloquies, that in the hands of a lesser poet might seem superfluous. I”m happy to be corrected, but as far as I know, Frost might have been the first poet (in non-dramatic poetry) to introduce these kinds of colloquial asides. In the entirety of Wordsworth’s Prelude, the droning poet never breaks character, never confides, never makes the snide or sarcastic aside (the way a friend and confidante might). Neither did Keats, nor Browning, nor Tennyson, nor that thesaurus of the new world, Whitman. For that matter, I can’t think of any examples from TS Eliot or even EA Robinson (who most directly anticipated Frost’s colloquial meter). At any rate, Frost, with sarcasm, observes the return of the forest. Where was this forest twenty years ago? he asks; giving us some notion of the time that has passed since the town was abandoned. Mentioning the “pecker-fretted apple tree” suggests the remnants of an apple orchard—or at least a tree in what was once someone’s dooryard.
Make your4| self up | a cheer| ing song | of how
Someone's | road home | from work | this once was,
Who may | be just | ahead | of you | on foot
Or creak| ing with5 |a bug|gy load | of grain.
The height |of the |advent|ure is | the height
Of coun|try where |two vil |lage cul |tures faded
Into |each o |ther. Both |of them |are lost.
The second line is interesting, metrically. There’s really no way to read the line as iambic pentameter unless we read the final foot as monosyllabic:
Someone's | road home | from work | this once | was,
But I don’t find this terribly convincing. The more likely explanation is that Frost, as others have noted, put idiomatic speech before metrical fidelity. A 19th century poet would have kept strictly to the meter, no matter what the damage to idiomatic expression. So, for those of you interested in the nitty gritty of meter, I read the line as tetrameter with an anapestic final foot (Frost was quite fond of anapestic final feet and some with a feminine ending). Some might read the final foot as having an unstressed syllable followed by two stressed syllables—as “this once was“. This would make the final foot the exceedingly rare Bacchius; and this might be the first time, in the entirety of my blog, that I’ve mentioned this foot. So, a lesson for modern poet’s of rhyme and meter: Frost gives you permission to vary your meter for the sake of idiomatic expression.
By “song”, Frost might be making a sly reference to his own ‘making of the poem’—Directive—although I’m not sure how “cheering” it is. I sense a wistful tone here because, just a few lines later, he’ll be asking the reader to weep. But isn’t this the way it is with nostalgia? One moment you’re laughing, remembering what you had, and the next you’re weeping, remembering what you’ve lost. I wasn’t quite sure what Frost meant by “two village cultures faded/Into each other”, so I consulted some other authors who have written about the poem. But before doing so, my first guess is/was that Frost is referencing the village cultures of men vs. women. That wouldn’t at all surprise me, given a poem like Home Burial. I know from my own experience exploring abandoned houses in New England that the field and ribs of the house are what remain of the man’s work. What remains of the woman’s work is within the ribs of the house, the heart that is the floral wallpaper peeling in every room, the torn and faded curtains, the remnants of homemaking and comfort found throughout. These were the ways that women made a “momentary stay against confusion” for themselves, their husbands and children. But these two cultures were not always a source of comfort—not for Frost. Again, one need only read Home Burial for a glimpse of the misunderstanding and tragedy that could attend these two cultures. In their fading “into each other”, one is reminded once more of The Ghost House, of “Those stones out under the low-limbed tree” that have also all but faded into each other, despite what differences may have troubled them during life. And like the mosses that mar the names of those buried beneath, both village cultures are lost. All their daily concerns, joys and contention, are silenced and gone, growing into the shade of a growing forest.
In his book The Ordeal of Robert Frost, Mark Richardson suggests that Directive might be a poetics of redemption, a “countermythology” he calls it, in which Frost seeks a “vision of self-redemption and regeneration” noting that “poetry was among Frost’s profoundest pleasures” [p. 237]. Although Richardson doesn’t specifically say so, I think he too would consider Frost’s reference to “two village cultures” as a reference to the lives of the men and women within them. Richardson prefaces his discussion of Directive with this passage from Lawrence Thompson:
Lesley, almost overcome by her own grief immediately after the cremation [of Elinor’s body], unintentionally revealed a habit of vindictiveness she had acquired from her father. When he asked if he could make his home with her during the remainder of his life, she bluntly said no. Then she burst into an almost hysterical accusation which further amazed him: she said she had seen him cause so much injury in the lives of his own children—particularly to Irma, Carol, and Marjorie—that she would not permit him to come into her own home, where he might also injure the lives of her two daughters. Her rage increased as she went on to insist, through tears, that she would not forgive him for his having ruined her mother’s life. It was his fault, she said, that her mother was dead, for it was his own selfishness which had forced her mother to climb those stairs to the upper quarters, repeatedly. Lesley had pleaded that she and her children should live up there, so that her mother wouldn’t need to climb. But her father hadn’t wanted to hear the children’s feet over his head, and that was typical of his selfishness, Lesley cried. Then she hurt him most by concluding that he was the kind of artist who never should have married, or at least never should have had a family. [Years of Triumph 495-96]
If Directive is a poem of Frost’s inner terrain, then it’s little wonder that we find nothing but desolated houses. Richardson will go on to note other poems, beyond Home Burial, in which Frost describes the woman’s suffering.
In imagining what this farmer’s wife’s existence might be like [referring to Frost’s The Times Table] I think of the darker representations of the circumscribed lives of country wives in Frost’s work: “Home Burial,” “A Servant to Servants.” “The Hill Wife,” “The Fear,” “The Housekeeper,” and “The Witch of Coös,” to name a few. In all of these poems, as other readers have argued, the home has become for the women an environment more oppressive than sheltering. Under such conditions, these women, denied all healthy and manageable expressions of extravagant impulses, are compelled into the final extravagance of flight—or even madness (another kind of flight). [The Ordeal of Robert Frost p. 239]
In this regard, Richardson also compares Directive to The Times Table:
More than halfway up the pass
Was a spring with a broken drinking glass,
And whether the farmer drank or not
His mare was sure to observe the spot
By cramping the wheel on a water-bar,
turning her forehead with a star,
And straining her ribs for a monster sigh;
To which the farmer would make reply,
‘A sigh for every so many breath,
And for every so many sigh a death.
That’s what I always tell my wife
Is the multiplication table of life.’
The saying may be ever so true;
But it’s just the kind of a thing that you
Nor I, nor nobody else may say,
Unless our purpose is doing harm,
And then I know of no better way
To close a road, abandon a farm,
Reduce the births of the human race,
And bring back nature in people’s place.
Here, as in Directive, the reader will find a drinking glass. Frost, in this poem, makes explicit how the farmer’s cruelty, comparing the treatment of his mare to that of his wife, offers no “better way” to “close a road, abandon a farm” and “bring back nature to people’s place”. This all but describes the landscape of Directive. Are we to think that this is what happened in every house on Panther Mountain? Of course, these are two different poems and we should probably resist applying the math of one to the other, but the reader isn’t wrong in noticing a dark and common undercurrent among all these poems. One can’t help but notice similarities, despite the differences, between the implied driver and his “a buggy load of grain” in Directive (which encourages us to sing a happy song), and the cruel farmer in the Times Table. Frost gives us, without intending to, two different visions of who passed into the village of Panther Mountain.
Again, this all hearkens back to the meaning of “two village cultures”, and I’m inclined to think I’m right in reading this as a reference to the marriages that were made, thrived or failed within those 40 houses. Yet even in failure, stark differences fade together like the houses that collapse and vanish into their own cellar holes.
And if | you're lost | enough | to find | yourself
By now, | pull in | your lad |der road | behind you
And put | a sign | up CLOSED |to all |but me.
Then make |yourself |at home.
What does Frost mean by being “lost enough to find yourself”? My best guess is this: If we reach the point wherein we can no longer locate ourselves (our identity and self-worth) in externalities like bank accounts, automobiles, the size of our house and income, fame and reputation, then, and only then, will we truly find ourselves. Frost, at the close of his career, may be expressing the same sentiment as regards himself. He lost his self in his pursuit of artistic fame and reputation (think of his daughter’s accusations). What did he find at the end of his journey? An abandoned town. If, like him, you have become so lost in all that you thought you wanted that all that’s left of your dreams is a ruined village; if you’re finally forced to seek yourself in yourself, then “pull in your ladder road”—withdraw yourself from all those ambitions that pursue you. Put up a sign that says CLOSED “to all but me”—’me‘ being the essence of what you truly are. And now that you have once more found yourself, leave behind all that misled you. Make yourself at home.
The critic Frank Lentricchia reads this quite differently:
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 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.” [Quoted from Frost and the Meditative Lyric by Blanford Parker pp. 189-190]
This seems like an overly bleak interpretation of the poem, to me, but I do like his drawing attention to Birches as it relates to Directive.
The on|ly field
Now left's |no big|ger than |a harn|ess gall.
First there's | the child |ren's house |of make |-believe,
Some shat|tered dish|es un |derneath | a pine,
The play| things in |the play |house of | the children.
Weep for | what lit|tle things |could make |them glad.
Then for | the house | that is |no more |a house,
But on |ly a |beli |laced cel |lar hole,
Now slow|ly clo |sing like |a dent |in dough.
This was |no play|house but |a house |in earnest.
A “harness gall” is a sore where the saddle overly rubs a horse. It’s also called a Girth Gall or a Saddle Sore. If this is indeed what Frost meant, then he seems to be comparing the last remaining works of the village to a saddle sore on the side of the mountain; and from the mountain’s point of view, this could be apt. As elsewhere in Frost’s poetry, one senses Frost’s adversarial view toward nature. As far as nature and mankind goes (in Frost’s universe) each feels the wounds of the other.
From this assertion, Frost has the reader observe the children’s make-believe playhouse underneath a pine. There’s a comparison to be drawn between the imagined house of the children and the house that we/the poet imagine over the belilacked cellar holes. The children imagine what will be, and we imagine what has been. There’s also a comparison to be made between “in a time made simple by loss” and the “little things that could make [the children] glad”. The imagination of children touchingly attaches great importance to simple/little things, whereas the adult, looking back, yearns for that simplicity (sometimes, if not wholly, falling on self-deception to find it). ‘Weep’, says the poet. What does he mean? Perhaps we should weep because this innocent capacity for joy in simple things was somehow lost to us in our uphill pursuit for wealth, fame, reputation. And look what has come of it. One suspects in Frost’s own psyche a yearning for a past that was like the one he imagined as a child—not four of his children dead, his wife dead, and his remaining children alienated, who turn their back on him (wishing he had never been their father). They are long past his ability to make glad with little things, and he weeps for that, and invites us to weep as well—for what we all have lost who have seen our children come and go.
He next compares the children’s playhouse to the remnants of a house “in earnest”. One gets the feeling that we’re seeing the children’s playhouse and the same children’s house, having become adults, as though time were compressed and all their lifetimes before us. Each is in ruin—even the house in earnest. The house in earnest may feel like a permanent thing in which to build a more permanent life, but it and the playhouse have subsided side by side. Is there a difference between a playhouse and a house in earnest? Not according to their ruins. The feeling of hopelessness and loss is absolute.
Your des |tina |tion and |your des |tiny's
A brook |that was |the wa |ter of |the house,
Cold as |a spring | as yet |so near |its source,
Too lof|ty and |ori|ginal |to rage.
(We know |the val |ley streams |that when |aroused
Will leave |their tat|ters hung |on barb |and thorn.)
I have | kept hid|den in |the in |step arch
Of an | old ce |dar at |the wa |terside
A bro |ken drin |king go |blet 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 gob |let from |the chil |dren's playhouse.)
At the moment of our weeping and loss, Frost tells us of our ultimate destination. Is this a kind of reprieve? What does it mean that the brook was “the water of the house”. We can’t live without water. Water refreshes and rejuvenates. Our blood is primarily water. I tentatively interpret this line as a reference to a greater, spiritual force that is indestructible and nourished the lives that were led in these necessarily temporal dwellings. Frost’s relationship with religion was strained, at best, and yet his poetry does evince a deeply spiritual person willing to use the familiar language/signposts of Christian religion/mythology when it served his poetic intent—somewhat like Emily Dickinson. I suspect that’s the case here, especially because Frost will make the analogy explicit in the closing lines. In this sense, stating that the brook is “near its source” takes on added spiritual resonance. This source, that was life and gave life to all those in the house, is, according to Frost, “too lofty and original to rage”. What does he mean by “rage”? There’s the obvious meaning, but could he also be slyly referencing both religious and scientific dogma? (He picks fights with both.) The poet elaborates on “the source” as “lofty” (think of heaven) and “original”, implying the power to create. This brook, so near its source, is not the muddied streams (and here Frost might once again be referring to the world’s belief systems—both sacred and secular) of the valley (Earth) that leave “their tatters—beliefs and dogmas?—hung on barb and thorn.
This may all seem far-fetched, but Frost goes on, I think, to make the analogy explicit. “Like the Grail” (capitalized) is clearly a reference to the “Holy Grail”:
The Holy Grail (French: Saint Graal, Breton: Graal Santel, Welsh: Greal Sanctaidd, Cornish: Gral) is a treasure that serves as an important motif in Arthurian literature. Various traditions describe the Holy Grail as a cup, dish, or stone with miraculous healing powers, sometimes providing eternal youth or sustenance in infinite abundance, often guarded in the custody of the Fisher King and located in the hidden Grail castle. ~ Wikipedia Nov. 9 2025
The brook is “the source” and the goblet is the grail from which to drink from this “source”. If we are to interpret this poem is Frost’s journey into his own psyche, knowing that “poetry was among Frost’s profoundest pleasures”, then it may not be unreasonable to associate the grail with the act of writing poetry and the brook as the creative “source” that makes poetry possible. Poetry, like the grail, becomes a source of healing, sustenance and infinite abundance. Frost is himself like the Fisher King, and we are the knights who must journey through his and our own loss. We heal him and ourselves when we drink from the grail that is fittingly a child’s goblet—a thing of simplicity and innocence that will transform the waters into poetry.
Frost’s reference to St Mark comes from the Bible:
“And [Jesus] said unto them, 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. (Mark 4:11-12)
This passage is as difficult to parse as a Modernist poem. Jesus seems to be saying that he speaks in parables in order to prevent people from understanding him, from being converted, and from being forgiven. Many, according to my reading, interpret this as Mark’s self-congratulatory editing of Jesus’s words (rather than Jesus’s actual words); but there’s zero evidence to support that (other than its a very uncharacteristic thing for Jesus to say and, to put it mildly, utterly undermines his entire project). Frost, never one to miss a chance to get a dig at any dogma, interprets Jesus’s words just he spoke them, asserting that there are wrong people and right people and that he doesn’t want the wrong people (if the metaphor holds) reading his poetry (or getting any benefit from it). This is a fair thing for Frost to say, even if it’s at Christ the Lord’s expense.
Just when we feel like Frost is revealing some tenant of his innermost beliefs, emotions and feelings, he deflects with humor, he scurries into his burrow. He puts us off the scent. And all this is very typical of Frost.
...All we who prefer to live
Have a little whistle we give,
And flash, at the least alarm
We dive down under the farm.
We allow some time for guile
And don’t come out for a while
Either to eat or drink.
We take occasion to think.
And if after the hunt goes past
And the double-barreled blast
(Like war and pestilence
And the loss of common sense),
If I can with confidence say
That still for another day,
Or even another year,
I will be there for you, my dear,
It will be because, though small
As measured against the All,
I have been so instinctively thorough
About my crevice and burrow.
~ From the Drumlin Woodchuck
Frost ends this passage of Directive with the impish admission that he “stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse”. This could be a sly wink at the fact that he stole the idea of the Grail from the playhouse of other literary sources (if it wasn’t already obvious). But this is why Frost, at his best, is a genius. Most poets would probably have written the entirety of Directive with the utmost Miltonic seriousness, but in Frost we find a variety of moods. We find a conversationalist whose sly and humorous asides deflate any attempt to get too close. (Frost was famously cagey.) Frost may be willing to share some of his pain with you, and might need to, but get too close and he will put you off (when asked, he stated that he would never publicly read Home Burial). The ideas aren’t his, he seems to say, but those he stole. Don’t interrogate him. But do you believe the dodge? In short, Directive is a parable whose seriousness the wise reader will recognize and which the less capable won’t—perhaps unable to see past Frost’s disarming exterior. The poem enacts Jesus’s edited, misquoted or flatly unfortunate words.
Here are | your wa |ters and |your wa |tering place.
Drink and | be whole | again| beyond | confusion.
Listen to Frost’s reading below and you will hear Frost’s tone markedly change with the reading of these last two lines. Now he means what he says. If the waters are the creative source of poetry, of the life he loved most living, then the watering place is every poem. Drink from these, he says, and be whole beyond confusion. The simplicity (and perhaps clarity) of childhood is in the children’s goblet with which, perhaps, make-believe becomes the truth and is the truth—the act of poem-making being the act of make-believe, the no-house that is a house. For me, the poem can be read as a profoundly spiritual statement (and not wholly uncharacteristic of Frost). Though the playhouses and houses are gone (his and our past with all its possibilities and disappointments is irretrievable—a house that is not a house) the lofty and original water that flowed through that house—the children, men and women—is not. This is our source, what we are, and what we all must drink from, despite our sorrows and self-inflicted tragedies. This in no way makes our suffering less, but Frost seems to be offering those that have it in them to read and understand poetry, something true and meaningful through poetry. He wants you to know. You can hear it in his voice. This creative source from which we all come, even in the evident midst of our suffering and ruin (Frost will not muddy the waters—like the streams in the valley—by calling the source God) cannot be anything other than whole and beyond confusion.
Frost Reads Directive
Of interest:
So I’m back to reading Dickinson and reading Sewall’s biography. Maybe because it’s autumn? Or maybe it’s because Dickinson’s poems are all like riddles? I love sorting out what a poem means, so long as it’s not deliberately obscure or obfuscates. Dickinson is great that way. I don’t get the sense that she thought of her poetry as obscure. Rather, the difficulties of her poetry are like that of one who is writing to a confidant with a shared background and assumed knowledge. Truth is, many of her poems found their way into her letters. Even if we aren’t sure of what she’s talking about, there’s no evidence—that I’m aware of—that her correspondents didn’t know. It’s possible that she wrote many of her poems assuming a shared knowledge. And that brings me to the poem below (and by indirection) because what led me to this poem was another Dickinson poem (which I’ll talk about in another post) called Promise This When You Be Dying. The poem begins with these two stanzas:
Promise This — When You be Dying —
Some shall summon Me —
Mine belong Your latest Sighing —
Mine — to Belt Your Eye —
Not with Coins — though they be Minted
From an Emperor’s Hand —
Be my lips — the only Buckle
Your low Eyes — demand —
Once more, Dickinson is describing a viewing of the recently deceased. She describes “belting” the deceased’s eye and of her lips (a kiss?) being “the only Buckle”. To which I say: Wait, what? That sent me on a search through Victorian funeral rituals, belts and buckles, because Victorian burials were—an event—full of ritual, production and display. Was there a funerary ritual surrounding belts and buckles? And that sent me to this poem:
He put the Belt around my life
I heard the Buckle snap—
And turned away, imperial,
My Lifetime folding up—
Deliberate, as a Duke would do
A Kingdom's Title Deed—
Henceforth, a Dedicated sort—
A Member of the Cloud.
Yet not too far to come at call—
And do the little Toils
That make the Circuit of the Rest—
And deal occasional smiles
To lives that stoop to notice mine—
And kindly ask it in—
Whose invitation, know you not
For Whom I must decline?
[FR-330]
And this poem sent me to my favorite Dickinson website, the prowling bee, where Susan Kornfeld, not unreasonably, interprets Dickinson’s belt and buckle as a corset, writing:
“The poem begins in an almost shocking image: God putting a belt around a woman and then snapping it tight. This is an overt act of domination. We put a collar on a dog and snap it to a leash. But unlike many dog owners who bend down to pat the dog and give it an “atta boy” encouragement, God then turns away, ‘imperial.'”
And that brought about another—Wait, what?—moment. So, does that mean that when Dickinson is describing the viewing of the corpse, she wants to put a corset round the corpse’s eye?—then cinch it up with a kiss?
I’m here to suggest another, and I think much more likely, explanation.
But first, there are problems with interpreting the belt and buckle as a corset, let alone a subjugating corset. The biggest problem is Burnadette Banner. Burnadette Banner (who I love) is to period Victorian clothing what I’d like to be to poetry. And one of her pet peeves is the notion that corsets were an uncomfortably oppressive article of clothing so tightly laced that they caused Disney heroines—see Pirates of the Caribbean—to faint off the sides of cliffs. She will tell you that that’s utter nonsense. In fact, corsets were bespoke articles of clothing that were exceedingly comfortable and were not meant, in any way, to unnaturally constrict a woman’s figure. In fact, the corset was meant to support and give structure to her clothes, not her body. Banner argues that our current perception of corsets is a modern myth. For this reason, I think it very unlikely that Dickinson would have used the corset as a metonym or analogy for oppression or subjugation. The evidence argues that this is an anachronistic interpretation. The second problem is that, as far as I know, corsets were not buckled; they were laced. If you see a buckle on a corset, then it’s a modern corset that, typically, is exceedingly uncomfortable (as demonstrated by Banner).
So what was Dickinson referring to by belt and buckle? I’m glad you asked.
Buckle Jewelry. As it happens, buckle jewelry was a thing in Victorian times, and wildly popular. As the International Antique Jewelers Association goes on to explain:
“The buckle rings were made of precious metal that was sometimes embellished with chasing, engraving or other treatments. Sometimes they had a few gemstones adorning the ring. Buckle rings reached the pinnacle of popularity during the mid 1800s, which could have something to do with the other meaning of buckle rings: Mourning jewelry. The link between the buckle and the belt signified strength and connection during the mourning period, which in Victorian England lasted at least one year.”
Voila! Mourning jewelry. There’s your belt and there’s your buckle. They also apparently made buckle bracelets and buckle earrings. They were, in a sense, glorified friendship bracelets. And if you’ve read enough Dickinson, then you know that what at first glance might seem like an erotic love poem to a dear friend, very often turns out to be a corpse or death personified. When in doubt, assume she’s in the graveyard.
Now, knowing that, a bit like having the right key to the lock (which is very often all you need to understand a Dickinson poem), let’s reread “He put a belt”:
He put the Belt around my life
I heard the Buckle snap—
And turned away, imperial,
My Lifetime folding up—
Deliberate, as a Duke would do
A Kingdom's Title Deed—
Henceforth, a Dedicated sort—
A Member of the Cloud.
Kornfeld interprets this as God, but since Dickinson, to my knowledge, never personified God, only Death, I’m more apt to say that Dickinson is once more personifying Death (especially given Buckle Jewelry’s association—if the IAJA site is to be accepted—with mourning). I also like this because it lends to the poem Dickinson’s typical pixie-ish sense of humor. In fact, I find the poem to be full of laughter. Buckle Jewelry was also given between lovers. So, if you think about it, Death, with a sort of imperious and self-satisfied ego, has “gifted” little Emily Dickinson with, maybe, a lover’s belt and buckle “friendship” ring which, given the giver, also, and ironically, serves as mourning jewelry—folding up her lifetime just like that (thanks a lot, right?). So, to spell it out, the humor is that getting a lover’s friendship bracelet from Death will be a short affair.
What is Emily to do? Death, assuming Emily’s gratitude, ‘turns away’ once he’s buckled his jewelry round her neck, or finger or wrist—as a self-satisfied Duke would do (she is his new Kingdom and the jewelry is effectively his Title to that Kingdom). I tentatively read the last three lines this way: Death fastens his jewelry to her “as a Duke would do A Kingdom’s Title Deed” making Emily “a Dedicated sort”—and here she thought she was going to live forever!—who will become yet another “Member of the Cloud”. (ED is not “dedicated”, in the sense of being committed to an action, but is dedicated, by Death’s “Title”, in a legal sense.) One could interpret “Member of the Cloud” as a reference to Death, but I read ED as describing the friendship/mourning jewelry as the Title Deed that claims her as another “Member” in Death’s Kingdom (the Cloud).
So. That’s just great. Emily continues:
Yet not too far to come at call—
And do the little Toils
That make the Circuit of the Rest—
And deal occasional smiles
To lives that stoop to notice mine—
And kindly ask it in—
Whose invitation, know you not
For Whom I must decline?
Susan Kornfeld, at the prowling bee, interprets this passage as Emily’s description of her own behavior, which is possible, but I’m inclined to read it as a continuation of the first stanza and her description of Death’s obliviously egotistical behavior. Death has turned away, says Emily, but “not too far to come at call”. How nice of him. How decent of him. And while doing so, like an entitled lothario, Death sees to his little “Toils” and makes a “Circuit of the Rest”. Read, More dead Victorians. Death graciously smiles at those, “To lives” Emily writes, who stoop to notice his new—what would you call it?—possession?—to which he’s buckled his ring, bracelet, necklace or what have you. The others, knowing no better, kindly ask “it” in. The idiots. Know you not? Emily asks. When Emily is also invited, she politely declines, disgusted with the whole affair, understanding that this new-found “royal interest”, this so-called friendship bracelet (let’s say) is not something to be celebrated. It’s quite possible to read this as Emily’s very pointed critique of the Victorian Era’s “death cult” (as it is sometimes called). You would almost think these people are looking forward to the next death, says Emily, the way they all but invite “the Duke” into their houses with their excessive rituals and displays of grief. They treat him—”it“—like royalty.
And that’s my reading of that. A good poem for Halloween.
And if Death offers you any candy, come Friday, I suggest you politely decline.
May gossamer meadows be your pillow
And sing to you the weeping willow.
Lay down your head and close your eyes
And I will sing you lullabies.
Sleep take you where the angels billow.
Your dreams be light as thistledown
And woven stars bedeck your gown.
Lay down your head and close your eyes
And I will sing you lullabies;
A wreath of kisses be your crown.
Thistledown
by me, Patrick Gillespie, October 26 2025
Another of Duni’s songs, a lullaby for her adopted daughter, Odaii, from the fourth book of my Fantasy Epic, WistThistle, called The Tree of Life. I loosely based the song on the famous lullaby by Thomas Dekker, Golden Slumbers—famous because it was made into a song on the Beatles Abbey Road. Thomas Dekker, if you don’t know, was a contemporary playwright of Shakespeare’s. He wrote the Shoemaker’s Holiday, which remains one of the finest non-Shakespearean plays of the Elizabethan Era. Dekker was a gifted poet and dramatist, whose drama and poetry suggest a gentle, good-humored and observant personality. His imagery is notable for drawing on nature, and in that respect is closer to Shakespeare than any of Shakespeare’s peers, but debt plagued him and landed him in debtor’s prison for seven years. While capable of writing compelling drama, his surviving plays also bear marks of haste, lax character development and, in the words of later scholars, “moral slovenliness” (implying that he was too tolerant of his character’s faults from a dramatic standpoint).
A correspondent asked me to discuss the following three stanzas from TS Eliot’s “Little Gidding” (from Part 2 of the fourth part of the Four Quartets). First think I should say, is that the best online criticism of TS Eliot’s poetry, in every sense, is by Nasrullah Mambrol at Literary Theory and Criticism. This is the best and most readable site of its kind and, as far as I’m concerned, Mambrol offers the best (most useful and informative) analyses of Eliot’s poems that I’ve found.
Scholarly sources write that The Four Quartets is Eliot’s masterpiece, but for me the poem reads like TS Eliot garrulously imitating TS Eliot. The Four Quartets reminds me of a comment made by Alfred Einstein (Albert’s brother) regarding Mozart’s 26th piano concerto:
…It is very Mozartean, while at the same time it does not express the whole or even the half of Mozart. It is, in fact, so ‘Mozartesque’ that one might say that in it Mozart imitated himself—no difficult task for him. It is both brilliant and amiable, especially in the slow movement; it is very simple, even primitive, in its relation between the solo and the tutti, and so completely easy to understand that even the nineteenth century always grasped it without difficulty….
Likewise, I might write that The Four Quartets is undeniably Eliotesque. It is brilliant (even amiable in a way that The Waste Land is not) but it is, in fact, so Eliotesque that one might say: ‘In it, Eliot imitated himself’ (having already written the quintessential “Eliot poem” with the The Waste Land).
The other reason I personally don’t care for the poem—as much— is that I’m not a Christian. The Christian allusions add a layer that goes right over my head, but they’re not missed by the likes of The Modern Age: A Conservative Review, (which will once again inform us that this is Eliot’s greatest poem):
…Eliot set to work writing what would become his greatest poem, Four Quartets. The ambition of that four-part sequence was to provide the fullest account of the truly Christian life the modern world had yet seen. Having diagnosed the inadequacy of devotional poetry on several occasions, Eliot’s poetic sequence would avoid them. Rather than expressing a feeling, the poem provides us the dramatic moments as well as the full intellectual architecture of faith necessary for us to feel.
Elsewhere, one will read that The Four Quartets‘s universality transcends its Christian grounding; but one wonders if it’s mainly or wholly Christians writing that. For a reader like me (for whom the Christian allusions are meaningless) these parts of the poem just don’t land. And then there’s the poem’s obscurity. Debating whether a poem should be comprehensible without footnotes and index is mostly an academic exercise at this point. It’s mostly accepted that some poems are incomprehensible without cabooses full of critical exegesis behind them (which effectively become a part of the poem).
Or not.
Nasrullah Mambrol, in a section of his analysis (of The Four Quartets) called Approaches to Reading The Poetry (which in itself should be a tip off), will dedicate one thousand seven hundred and thirty two very fine words explaining why it’s not necessary for readers to understand the poem (the length of which rather begs the question); but I wasn’t persuaded. Mambrol goes on to close the section by asserting that the “Four Quartets must be read again and again in order for the poem finally to become an experience of truth and of beauty…” But that did not and never worked for me. Before the invention of the internet, I had —no idea— what Eliot was nattering on about, and reading the poem twenty times over didn’t change that one whit. It wasn’t until I read something like Mambrol’s brilliant analyses that I began to “experience” its “truth and beauty”. Until then, The Four Quartets was full of ‘high astounding terms’ but otherwise meaningless. One wonders whether Eliot, ultimately, would have been satisfied with being read but not comprehended.
But now that I’ve horrified TS Eliot cognoscenti, I can say that what I love about the poem, Eliot’s inimitably and beautiful poetry. And that brings me to the following three stanzas (as requested by my correspondent):
Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house-
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.
There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth.
Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.
My first observation is that Eliot has momentarily detoured into Hymn Meter (or more strictly, Ballad Meter), the favored meter of Emily Dickinson. I’m sure there’s an analytic reading of this poem that will find it ‘significant’ that Eliot, at this moment, writes “Hymn Meter”, but I leave that speculation to those with a foot in Christianity. The meter is a (very loose) 6,8 meter (referring to the number of syllables in the lines), or a Compound Meter ending with with a 6,6 couplet; but, again, the many variant feet make it a ballad hymn. (Bold = Accented)
Ash on | an old | man's sleeve
Is all | the ash | the burnt ros | es leave.
Dust in | the air | suspended
Marks the | place where | a stor | y ended.
Dust | in breathed | was a house-
The walls, | the wain | scot and | the mouse,
The death | of hope | and despair,
This is | the death | of air.
The meter is varied by trochees, anapests and feminine endings and the monosyllabic first foot, but enough of the metrical pattern (by modern standards) is left undisturbed so that the reader/listener recognizes the meter (subliminally or otherwise).
There | are flood | and drouth
Over | the eyes | and in | the mouth,
Dead wa |ter and | dead sand
Conten |ding for | the up |per hand.
The parched | evisc |erate soil
Gapes at | the va |nity | of toil,
Laughs |without mirth.
This is |the death | of earth.
Eliot keeps the same pattern apart from the seventh line. I don’t know how to read that as other than a disyllabic line, but it’s close enough to trimeter that that overall pattern is recognized. There is also a pyrrhic foot.
Water | and fire | succeed
The town, | the past |ure and |the weed.
Water | and fire | deride
The sac |rifice | that we | denied.
Water | and fire | shall rot
The marred | founda |tions we | forgot,
Of sanct |uar |y and choir.
This is | the death | of wa |ter and fire.
Once again, Eliot largely hews to the 6,8 pattern. The final line breaks the pattern, being tetrameter, but since Eliot was less interested in form than content (like Emily Dickinson), he was content to break the pattern already broken in the previous stanza.
Here is Nasrullah Mambrol’s brilliant analysis of this passage, from here:
The ash that falls “on an old man’s sleeve” as the second section begins is clearly the soot and dust in the air from London’s nightly fires in the present moment as the city endures the constant German air attacks. Where there was a house and the lives lived in it, there now is nothing. “This,” the speaker tells us, like a bell tolling the final hour, “is the death of air.” The litany of doom and terror continues as in each succeeding stanza the speaker makes the reader painfully mindful of the tragedies unfolding all around him. Existence collapses into its absence, which is death. There are the dead at sea washed up on sandy shores and the dead in the mud of the water-filled craters the bombs have left in their wake. “This is the death of earth.” There are the bombed-out churches, their ruins still smoldering, the foundation drenched and flooded with water, gone both “sanctuary and choir. / This is the death of water and fire.”
The world and all its glory having been thus reduced to its elemental baseness, which is dead, inert matter, the speaker suddenly finds himself on a foot patrol searching for smoldering fires through the ruined and deserted city streets after the bombing has ended but still during “the uncertain hours before the morning.”
Structurally, the stanzas are mostly composed of semantically distinct rhyming couplets. Each couplet is essentially added to the next like a brick, one atop the other (not meant to be a disparaging).
Ash on | an old | man’s sleeve
Is all | the ash | the burnt ros | es leave.
Followed by the wholly separate:
Dust in | the air | suspended
Marks the | place where | a stor | y ended.
Anyway, the second and third stanzas break this pattern when the semantic sense runs through the couplets (in the last four lines of each). The effect, after the diffuse free verse, is of sudden focus. The meter and rhyme focus the reader’s attention, drawing attention to the horror’s being described by the narrator. There’s also an element of irony in using the flowing, lilting feeling of the hymn/ballad meter (some might associate it with nursery rhymes) to describe the observed horrors. One could argue that this is the narrator’s way of processing what he sees—a desperate, if failed, retreat into innocence. These stanzas will be followed by blank verse (in my copy —The Poems of TS Eliot Vol. 1: Collected and Uncollected Poems—formatted like tercets and possibly meant to echo Dante). This could be interpreted as the narrator trying to pull it together, but the blank verse also feels strained and artificial—possibly signalling a failing(?) attempt to comprehend the violence (to structure it) through the distancing formality of a bygone age—the verse of Shakespeare and Milton. The blank verse is followed by Part 3, and a return to (strongly iambic) free verse, in which Eliot will write, perhaps tellingly:
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
It’s possible that “antique drum” is a reference to the meter of blank verse.
I have read that TS Eliot wanted to write something in verse that would be equivalent to Beethoven’s achievement in his late quartets—hence the name given to the poem — The Four Quartets. What’s interesting though, is that I find Little Gidding to be more like Beethoven’s Hammerklavier, Piano Sonata 29, Opus 106. If you’re curious to know what I mean, go to this video (and go to 35 minute mark in case the link doesn’t land you there). After the slow movement, there’s a fascinating preamble, where Beethoven seems to recapitulate the history of music. First come octaves, then toccata-like scale passages of 32nd notes, then at 36:34, we go from the Renaissance/Early Baroque to Bach, with a contrapuntal and imitative passage between the right and left hand, then to another toccata-like flourish that ends in an explosion of emphatic Beethoven. All this is followed by a massive fugue—one might almost call it a free-verse fugue. There’s a comparison to be made between this passage and what TS Eliot did. TS Eliot goes from the simplistic ballad hymn, to blank verse, and then to free verse, as though recapitulating the history of poetic forms (and by extension the history that led to this moment of war), but then again this might be reading much too much into the formal aspects of the poem.
But anyway, that’s all I have to say on that.
by me, October 26th 2025
Going completely out of my comfort zone today (being an almost Emily Dickinson level introvert) I attended one of the many No King protests. To be clear, I am anti-fascist, stand for Democracy, for the Rule of Law, for the Constitution and the 1rst Amendment. In other words, I am opposed to the Republican Regime and their titular leaders in executive, legislative and judicial branches (who consider American citizens involved in the demonstrations to be ‘America haters’—and by America they mean Republicans—and anyone who opposes fascism—and by fascism they mean Republican policies—to be terrorists).
The generation of my grandparents (by whom I was raised) all fought against the Nazis.
They told me their stories.
And I’ve often wondered what they would think of a party that is, at this very moment, struggling —struggling— to respond to other Republicans who wrote things like “I love Hitler” and who proudly display American flags with Nazi swastikas on them. Among these “young” Republicans who were not [said Elise Stefanik blatantly lying] “even candidates for elected office”, was elected Vermont state Sen. Samuel Douglass (R). A mere 27 years of age and just out of diapers. He just resigned.
But, as I was saying, I was asking myself what my grandparents would have thought.
Is it any coincidence, then, that during recycling this morning, a newspaper dated from May 12th, 1943, showed up. Among the many articles about America’s fight against the Nazis, was this cartoon. Americans trying to escape a Nazi prison (analogies anyone?).
I have no idea what a Jungle Masher is but, apparently, it merits you a go-straight-to-hell-Nazi slap.
Do you believe in coincidence?
While the Republican Party struggles —struggles— to respond to swastikas and “I love Hitler” [and the vice-President defends them] I’m certain in thinking my WWII fighting grandparents, aunts and uncles would not have struggled—at all. I mean, just look at her. And I’d like to think my demonstrating today, along with many of you, was a slap in the face to the Jungle Mashers running our country.
The Stranger’s Case
I also thought I’d once again post what our greatest poet had to say as regards intolerance and cruelty toward immigrants—today being a good day to do so.
Say now the king
(As he is clement, if th’ offender mourn)
Should so much come to short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whether would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,—
Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case;
And this your mountanish inhumanity.
This passage was Shakespeare’s contribution to a collaborative play called Sir Thomas More. The play was neither performed nor published in his lifetime and is possibly the only extent example of Shakespeare’s handwriting.
The image comes from this post. Then, just as now, there was anti-immigrant sentiment. You can read about Shakespeare and Elizabethan era immigration sentiment here.
So, because I can’t help myself, I have two version of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. I find them for 50¢ at book sales and can’t resist a backup copy to my backup copy. For some reason I was interested in Thomas Carew, and so I looked him up in the older anthology. Here was the brief bio.
“Bright, talented, and idle, Thomas Carew (pronounced Carey) carefully avoided serious work of all sorts; everything he did, and writing poetry particularly, seemed to be the diversion of his empty hours. Yet he was the first poet (and remains, with Marvell, one of the two poets) to unite the intellectual toughness of metaphysical verse with the polish and elegant lightness cultivated by the followers of Jonson.
As the son of a distinguished lawyer, Carew was himself destined for the law, but the Middle Temple dismissed him for idleness. He tried the diplomatic corps, but was sent home in disgrace for “levity”. He became a hanger-on around the court, and ultimately (his most solemn employment) a gentleman of the bedchamber; his diversions were pretty girls, bowling, and versifying—apparently in that order. Yet when his poems were collected, after his death, they turned out to include some of the wittiest and most elegant verses in the century.
Everything that the Puritans despised in “wit” was epitomized in Carew. He had no high spiritual seriousness at all; he was not, in the solemn sense, “sincere.” Many of his poems were obvious bits of light persiflage, “mere” amusements. He was not only clever, he was by 17th century standards (and even more by those of the 19th century) obscene. Yet somehow this libidinous trifler managed to say more true things in his Elegy on the Death of Doctor Donne than criticism would be able to enunciate in the next three hundred years. And in A Rapture he expressed, naturally and joyously, a side of life that Puritanism would, to the best of its ability, swathe in black crape and hypocrisy for an equivalent length of time.
Now that, by God, is an obituary worth dying for.
I’ve never wanted to read a poet’s works so much in my life. It’s clear that the editor who wrote this little introductory bio had an axe to grind, especially as regards religious prudery. But, at the same time, he also seems nonplussed that an idle ne’er-do-well like Carew—a carouser, womanizer of pretty girls (are there any other kind?), “libidinous trifler” and mere gentleman of the bedchamber—was also a surpassingly fine poet and keen judge of the times. How? How?—the tirelessly toiling Salieris of the world ask, can it be that God’s idle triflers, the ones with “no high spiritual seriousness”, the undeserving hangers on who are sent home in disgrace for “levity” (think Mozart, who was literally kicked in the ass on his way out the door by the arch-bishop of Salzburg) are the ones on whom God bestows such an excess of genius that they can write their poetry as a diversion during their “empty hours”.
In the editor’s appraisal, there’s the hint of that resentment that sends many ambitious but less recognized artists into fits of apoplexy—and that resentment is called “talent”. There really is such a thing as talent and no amount of practice and devotion is going to turn you into a Mozart or a Micheal Jordan (that study has been debunked). Carew may have been dissolute and a chaser of pretty girls, but he also had a tremendous and unearned talent. Meanwhile, the graveyard of poetry is littered with the works of men who diligently wrote their entire lives, who never once chased a skirt, whose high moral, ethical and spiritual seriousness went unquestioned, but whose unimpeachable hours didn’t translate into a shred of talent.
But, apparently, this lively and gossipy bio just wouldn’t do for the new editors of the Norton Anthology, because when they wrote the new bio, they decided to be far more informative as regards Carew’s output, while studiously removed anything that might hint at Carew’s personality. In short, they made their bio as academically informative and flavorless as they possibly could.
Thomas Carew is perhaps the Cavalier poet with the greatest range and complexity. He gained his BA at Merton College, Oxford, studied law (his father’s profession), held several minor positions in the diplomatic and court bureaucracy, fought for his King in the ill-fated expedition against the Scots (the First Bishop’s War, 1639), and died of syphilis. A brilliant, dissolute young man, he was a favorite with Charles I and Henrietta Maria.
His poems (1640), published posthumously, are witty and often outrageous, but their emphasis on natural sensuality, and the need for union between king and subjects encodes a serious critique of the Neoplatonic artifice of the Caroline court. Carew’s spectacular court masque, Coelum Britannicum, performed at the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall on February 18, 1633, was based on a philosophical dialogue by Giordano Bruno. It combines a dramatization of serious social and political problems in the antimasque with wildly hyperbolic praise of the monarchs in the main masque. As a love poet Carew sometimes plays off Donnean situations and poems; elsewhere, as in “Ask no more where Jove bestowes,” he imitates Jonson’s most purely lyric vein. But his characteristic note is one of frank sexuality and emotional realism. “The Rapture,” probably the most erotic poem of the era, describes the sexual act under the sustained metaphor of a voyage. He also wrote country-house poems that, unlike Jonson’s “To Penhurst,” describe Saxham and Wrest as places of refuge from the mounting dangers outside their gates. Carew’s poems of literary criticism provide astute commentary on contemporary authors. “To Ben Jonson” evaluates Jonson with Jonsonian precision and judiciousness in weighing out praise and blame. His famous “Elegy” on Donne praises Donne’s innovation, avoidance of classical tags, “giant fancy,” and especially his tough masculinity of style, a feature Carew imitates in this poem’s energetic runover couplets, quick changes of rhythms and images, and vigorous “strong lines.”
Admittedly, more informative as regards Carew’s output, but also less interesting or informative as regards Carew himself. There’s a sense of humor to the older bio that has been expunged from the revised Norton. But I don’t know. I suppose there will be readers who prefer the revised Norton, but not me. I don’t read enough modern criticism to say definitively, but I do get the feeling that “scholarly” writing isn’t as free-wheeling as it used to be. Interestingly, when the latest Oxford Shakespeare was released with a separate Authorship Companion, the latter Companion was much commented on and not because of the content, but because of the way it was written. Reasoning that the dry, struffed-shirt academese was off-putting to younger students, the editors decided to introduce generational colloquialisms and anecdotes into the their writing. Just imagine the horror of your grandparents showing up at a frat house in a mini-skirt, Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt and lei. This seems to have been the impression the essayists made on horrified students. Shakespeare scholars who had spent a lifetime perfecting academese were now going to shed that industrial-grade affectation with a smattering of hip colloquialisms?
Anyway, while my country descends into full-blown fascism, these are the little tempests that amuse me.
While I’ve been single-mindedly writing my fantasy epic, the blog continues to be visited. In the heyday of blogs, I used to net close to 2000 visitors a day. Now I average around 500. I remain fascinated by what visitors enjoy. As regards what you’ve been listening to for the past seven days:
Tara Caribou’s poem The Endless Road remains very popular. So do Michael Thomas’s poems The Cherries are all Gone and The Passing of the Year, with The Cherries being consistently more often replayed. Also, these are the poems that one first sees when arriving at the blog, so there’s that. I’m a little surprised that The Player King’s Speech is so popular! The poem is a bit contrived and antiquated, but readers seem to like it. Who am I to object? As On a Sunny Afternoon remains one of my most popular and sought out poems, in general. Knob & Tube, though a ways down, remains popular. My Heart’s Song, written in the meter of Old English, also remains (to me) surprisingly popular.
As regards what you’re reading:
My analysis of Monday’s Child is the single most read post on my blog. I would never have predicted that. If I extend the stats to all time, then it’s been read by almost a quarter of a million readers. I’m floored, but maybe I can make sense of it. People love nothing more than fortune telling. My hunch is that many readers treat this little nursery rhyme with the same enthusiasm as a dealt hand of Tarot cards. And why not? The next ten or twenty posts were written based on what readers were searching for. And that strategy succeeded. Students are the primary readers of these posts. I’m pleased to see that I Had a Little Nut Tree remains very popular. Hands down my favorite nursery rhyme.
Anyway, that’s all I have to say on that.
My next post/analysis/close reading, something like that, will be on Robert Frost’s Directive, unless someone has a request. Just want to show my poor neglected blog a little love.
Once again, sorry I haven’t written more for the blog.
I’ve been single-mindedly writing my fantasy series. I completed the third novel in early May and am close to completing the fourth novel, probably this coming month—by the end of October or earlier. My belovèd character Duni is back, and singing her songs again. Thought I’d share her most recent song, as I usually do.
Another summer comes and goes,
And soon enough the icicles
Will hang from Old Man Winter’s nose.
Where birds bestrewed their canticles
The winds will whistle ghostly airs;
They'll scour the rows left by the plow
And rout the leaves from thoroughfares;
They'll bury them in ditch and slough,
For Old Man Winter’s coming soon.
A flinty midnight lines his cloak
And for his crown an antlered moon;
For scepter the uprooted oak.
He sends the waxen sun away
And tells the gaunt and yellow-eyed
To feast on summer's fatted prey.
Be wary those who go outside;
And know the guest who knocks before
You open up your entry door.
The song was inspired by going out to my writing cabin in the evening. Change is afoot. Leaves are falling. We’ve had our first frost. The owl is hooting and the coywolves are carrying on, jabbering and howling.
As an aside, I try to avoid glaring anachronisms in my vocabulary. The world I’m writing about is nominally medieval, but in a world, an Erþe, other than our own. In short, I try to create the illusion of a medieval “idiom” by avoiding modern expressions or phrasing (writing in the spirit of Tolkien and LeGuin) which brings me to my poem. I wondered if “thoroughfare” was too modern a word. I looked it up in my Oxford English Dictionary. I’m so near-sighted I don’t need the magnifying glass to read it. As it turns out, thoroughfare was first used by Chaucer! “The world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo, And we been pilgrymes passynge to and fro.“
The Endless Road is a poem by Tara Caribou, proprietor of Raw Earth Ink who published my novels Tiny House, Big Mountain and North of Autumn. After reading Michael Thomas’s poems, I thought I’d like to read hers.
Her poem begins:
black tar ribbon flows
moves like water
racking up distance
my eyes yawn
mind darting
thinking thinking thinking
missing one, with hope
You can find the rest of the poem at her blog.
PoemShape