128 PA RT T W O
by then, couldn’t gauge such questions of the soul or of woman’s grace, or
know how this man’s need was anything but capricious and slight. We could,
though, hear “pole” link to “soul,” “summer breeze” lead to “ease,” “summer
air” make us “aware,” sounding out the world around us for news of the hu-
man condition.
World War II did not alter Frost ’s stance. In nature he ’d long been imagining
historical or private accident and terror: “fire and ice,” the Pacific’s “shattered
water,” a spider’s “design of darkness” on a moth, and something crashing “as
a great buck” into the lake across from you. You’d thought the universe was
there to reflect human love, but this counterforce came
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush—and that was all.Nothing could swerve Frost from fronting the world ’s worst with pentameter
and rhyme. For his 1939 Collected Poems he wrote a preface, “The Figure a Poem
Makes,” saying that a poem “ends in a clarification of life—not necessarily a
great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary
stay against confusion.”
Shortly after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
August 1945, Frost sought a stay against confusion and then some. “Back out of
all this now too much for us,” his breathtaking “Directive” starts—ten staccato
syllables pacing us back toward Derry and the brook where their children played
and Elinor wanted her ashes: “a farm that is no more a farm” and a “children’s
house of make-believe.”
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.Nearby, your guide has hidden “A broken drinking goblet like the Grail.” The
poem ends,
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.Bracing, symbolic, and religious, yes, but the goblet ’s broken, and only like a
holy grail, for “the key word in the whole poem is source,” Frost said, “—what-
ever source it is.”
He might or might not have blanched to hear that “Directive” is akin to T. S.
Eliot ’s wartime Four Quartets, where a hidden source,