Robert Frost, romantic - poet

To Frost, however, the journey is not made casually or easily. Indeed, to get beyond confusion, the initiate must go through it. (According to Eliade, the ritual begins with a "separation" from the quotidian world and a "retrogression . . . into chaos.") In "Directive," Frost invites the reader-as-initiate to embark on an arduous journey that results in the loss of the kind of consciousness Wordsworth called meddling and murderous. That is, the "detail" of profane life, which is "too much" (and, in some respects, too little), is not simply ignored, suppressed, or forgotten, but "burned, dissolved, and broken off" in an experience that purges and purifies not only the consciousness but also the data of consciousness. Oddly enough, this end is achieved not by making the "too much" less, but by making it more - by revealing to the initiate the glacial and imperious forces of nature (11.10-19), the graveyard of all houses and metaphors (11.20-22), and the fact of ongoing and implacable change (11.23-28).

The means to the end of soul saving is thus outwalking the farthest city light and becoming acquainted with the night - that is, losing all sense of ordinary time and space. In this context, being "lost enough to find yourself" is not a platitude but another way of figuring absolute disorientation in the midst of what Frost elsewhere calls "utter chaos" and in this poem implicitly names "confusion." For the reader-as-initiate, Frost's ambiguous tone (playful and serious) and mixture of truth (in 11.10-28) and "make-believe" serve a similar purpose. He, too, is groundless, ontologically uncertain, lost. But his descent into chaos prepares him for an ascent to "the height / Of country," which is reached by a "ladder road" - the dwelling place of the gods. Following Frost's "directive," the reader leaves his present dwelling, his house, which has ceased to hold "the sacred," and, like the couple in "The Generations of Men," seeks to build a new house on an old foundation. Under these circumstances - and only then - can he "make [himself] at home" (1.39), "at home in the metaphor" (Prose 39).

At the world center, represented in all of Frost's poetry by cellar holes (to Eliade, "initiatory graves"), brooks ("primordial waters"), trees and ladders ("cosmic pillars"), and moons (standing for the "reconciliation of contraries"), the initiate undergoes a spiritual change and acquires spiritual knowledge. And his entire journey is a reenactment of the creation of the cosmos out of chaos, the founding of the universe. The initiate's final encounter with the saddest of time's treacheries - in "Directive," the shattered debris of the children's world of make-believe - adds pity to terror and leads to his attainment (through sympathy) of childlike innocence, the final purification. In this way, says Eliade, "the work of time" is "undone," and in the ensuing "existential crisis," which is always "religious," the sacred is recovered and reintegrated.

To be sure, these revelations appear to occur randomly and fortuitously, as if they were unearned and unwarranted. In "How Hard It Is," Frost says that the causes of such moments are indeterminable: "We know not what we owe this moment to." However, all of Frost's visionary poems follow the pattern of Wordsworth's spots-of-time experiences. That is, illumination follows disappointment ("The Dust of Snow, "Two Look at Two," "The Tuft of Flowers"), a mood of despondency in response to fall or winter ("Looking for a Sunset Bird," "Going for Water," "I Will Sing You One-O"), confusion or despair induced by a vision of universal chaos ("I Could Give All to Time," "Happiness Makes Up in Height," "Iris by Night"), or a sense of futility ("One More Brevity," "All Revelation," "Take Something Like a Star"). In "Skeptic," the moment of insight follows a series of negations ("I don't believe . . ."). In "How Hard It Is" and "Time Out," it succeeds a cessation of struggle or competition. Thus, in every case, the routine of everyday life is suspended, ordinary consciousness is abandoned, and the candidate for revelation descends into darkness - baffled, hopeless, and lost, but only for a moment.