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.

Back 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,
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.

1. All iambic feet are unmarked. ↩︎
2. Green is feminine ending. ↩︎
3. Red is a spondaic foot. ↩︎
4. Amber is a trochaic foot. ↩︎
5. Grey is pyrrhic foot. ↩︎

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.

• Frost made up the mountain and everything about it, and it’s just coincidence that there’s an actual Panther Mountain (that he may not even have been aware of).
• Frost, for a time, lived just a smidgen north of Bennington, Vermont, which was not far from the Shandaken Panther Mountain (maybe 3 to 4 hour travel time in those days). Frost was an avid hiker (especially in the spring when searching for flowers) and may have climbed Panther Mountain. He might have been inspired to create a sort of composite vision from this hike and others. In other words, he might have placed an abandoned town he knew of elsewhere (there’s one within walking distance of my own house) on the slopes of Panther Mountain for poetic effect.
• There was/is an actual place Frost had in mind, but he chose the name “Panther Mountain” possibly for narrative, dramatic, or metrical reasons.

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 ruled |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).

• Mount Willard of NH. Any number of mountains or ridges in New Hampshire and Vermont could have inspired the imagery of “great monolithic knees”. And there are any number of places in Vermont and New Hampshire where original old “post roads” might have worn ruts into exposed ledge, but the notion of an old post road riding over “monolithic knees”, like those of Mount Willard’s, is tall-tale-telling for dramatic effect.

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.

• If the poet is suggesting the glacier’s iciness can still be felt, this places the abandoned town on the north slope of the mountain, which makes sense. The north slopes of the White Mountains are much shallower than the southern slopes—caused by the ice aged glaciers calving (sheering away the southern slopes of the mountains).

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:

• It was no dream of the gift of idle hours, / Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf: / Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak” ~Mowing
• 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— ~Ghost House
• The birds have less to say for themselves / In the wood-world’s torn despair / Than now these numberless years the elves, / Although they are no less there… ~A Line-Storm Song
• Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him, / But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather / He said it for himself. ~Mending Wall
• But once within the wood, we paused / Like gnomes that hid us from the moon, / Ready to run to hiding new / With laughter when she found us soon. ~Going for Water
• But the bones didn’t try / The door; they halted helpless on the landing, / Waiting for things to happen in their favour.’ / The faintest restless rustling ran all through them. ~ The Witch of Coös

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 your| 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 with |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 essay, Frost and the Meditative Lyric, Blanford Parker seems to accept the critic Frank Lentricchia’s assertion that there are two distinct villages. But I’m not sure how that’s supposed work on top of a mountain? Parker writes that Lentricchia “was the first critic of the poem to see the significance (at least in part) of the geological and natural images of the poem, and to measure the emptiness of the traveler’s quest at the moment when both villages are lost.” But Frost doesn’t write that there are two villages. He writes that there are two “village cultures”.

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.

• “cramping the wheel on a water-bar” The meaning of this line is a touch obscure (since we no longer travel in horse and buggy) but a waterbar “or interceptor dyke [according to Wikipedia] is a road or trail construction feature that is used to prevent erosion on sloping roads.” Frost implies that the farmer is driving his horse uphill, where it would make sense that his buggy wheel would “cramp” against a waterbar. They must also be close by a spring. If I interpret the poem correctly, the horse is made to struggle uphill, made worse by having to pull the buggy over a waterbar. Being close by the spring, the mare wishes for a drink (some kind of reprieve) but the farmer won’t let the sighing mare have it, and proudly compares his treatment of the mare to how he treats his wife (who is figuratively pulling the farmer and his buggy uphill). Frost may be indirectly, if regretfully, comparing his own literary ambition to the farmer’s uphill ambition, and comparing the farmer’s demands upon his wife to his own treatment of Elinor (and the resultant cost). The similarity of the drinking glass by the spring, in both poems, is striking. One can’t help think that this imagery was inspired by a true-life observation, and that it powerfully stuck with Frost, appearing in two of his poems in subtly similar ways.

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.

• Discussing this passage in his book, Belief and Uncertainty in the Poetry of Robert Frost, Robert Pack, as others do, makes the mistake (in my opinion) of reading a guide into the poem, writing that “Questions abound about who the wrong ones might be when one realizes that Frost’s poem as elusive parable might also be read as a Saint Markian parable that is designed to exclude, and so the motivation of the guide then becomes even more deeply suspect. And the reader’s suspicion about the validity of the guide is encouraged still further as the guide in the line ‘I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse’ seems to be confessing to his own illegitimacy as the thieving owner of the goblet/Grail.” I do think Pack makes a valid point as regards the earlier passage and Frost’s later comment as regards keeping the goblet away from the “wrong ones”, but because of his misreading he conflates the guide (the road that has at heart the reader getting lost) with the poem’s narrator (every poem has a narrator, but doesn’t make them a guide).

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:

• You’re Probably Misreading Robert Frost’s Most Famous Poem
• The Atlantic: The Fact of Feeling