Oh....I think I have broken my record using smilies. And that as a lover of poetry. Apologies.

oblivion wrote: I'm assuming you have to be a fan or at least admirer of Lincoln to say this as I do not find the poem aesthetically pleasing, much less beautiful, as Daniels does. I feel, though, that emotions would be running rampant while reading the poem when it was written, not only because of WWI but because Lincoln was still very much alive in the memories of many of the readers. I do not think that this poem has passed the test of time.

It's hagiography that Lindsay has written, and this doesn't give it the legs to traverse eras. It seemed incongruous that he enlists Lincoln in the socialist cause of worker emancipation, but I suppose to Lindsay this was the next logical step after emancipation of slaves.

328. "Directive," by Robert Frost. This poem has an unusual status for me, in that its first line ("Back out of all this now too much for us") and last line ("Drink and be whole again beyond confusion") are among my favorites in poetry. In between those lines, I'm not sure how much I like this poem and how I put its meaning together. It's odd, Frost can be directly moralistic in his poems, yet in the poem he titles "Directive," the moral is to me mysterious. I half wish he had not given us the reference either to St. Mark or the grail toward the end. You know how that kind of thing can send interpretations into the stratosphere. One analysis I read a while ago said that he's writing about the Church! Anyway, I'm thinking you will have ideas about this poem.

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.

328. "The Gift Outright," by Robert Frost. He read this at JFK's inauguration (having meant to read a different one specially written for the occasion).


The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia.
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak.
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

I think that in directive he is being very direct. I think he is using the experience of finding a 200 plus year old ruin to show us how we can look into the past to find a spiritual renewal. The fact that he only sparingly references religion highlights that it isn't necessarily a religious experience, but a renewal of energy. These ruins are all over the northern thirteen colonies, you can find cellar holes and villages on random walks through the woods, with the first clue being the lilacs, which were planted not indigenous. It is almost holy seeing the way that time has both ruined and preserved life from the 16th and 17th century.

DWill wrote:
228. "Directive," by Robert Frost. This poem has an unusual status for me, in that its first line ("Back out of all this now too much for us") and last line ("Drink and be whole again beyond confusion") are among my favorites in poetry. In between those lines, I'm not sure how much I like this poem and how I put its meaning together. It's odd, Frost can be directly moralistic in his poems, yet in the poem he titles "Directive," the moral is to me mysterious. I half wish he had not given us the reference either to St. Mark or the grail toward the end. You know how that kind of thing can send interpretations into the stratosphere. One analysis I read a while ago said that he's writing about the Church! Anyway, I'm thinking you will have ideas about this poem.

I also put the openning lines of this poem in the bag with my most favoirte lines of poetry. I've thought about this poem before. It seems to me there is alot in this poem. It is hard for me to think this is about Church, though. The images of this poem (There is a house that is no more a house and all the other lines that indicate decay/the ravages of time) bring to my mind the fact that as soon as we are born we begin toward death; as all creatures and human made objects are always moving march death and decay.

The first 8 lines are a single sentence, the longest in the poem, that start the poem off in a strong "direction." The opening line reminds me so strongly of Wordsworth's "The world is too much with us, late and soon," that I think it must be a conscious echo. Whereas Wordsworth continues on to locate human salvation in nature, and even if need be, in natural myths, Frost takes a different route, right through the human heart. The remedy that our guide offers for the overwhelming complexity of "now" is imaginative identification with the past, going back to a time "made simple by the loss/Of detail." How true it is that we see the past in this way, as simpler than our own time, and much easier to summarize because we drop many of the details. But it is a time made simple in our eyes because forms fade for us like the forms of graveyard sculpture. It was probably not in itself simple at all, but Frost suggests that the past, simply because we are not so entangled in it, offers perhaps a unique opportunity for knowledge. That it is a knowledge that goes beyond what we usually think of as historical knowledge becomes clear even before the end. With not only the references to salvation, but with the guide now having become something like a priest beckoning the time-traveler to drink, it is inescapable that Frost has something like religious knowledge in mind. Whatever it is, it's a knowledge that can make us whole again, I suppose as we were before we went off with this Virgil-like guide, only now we are somehow clear about human life, as we were not when in a state of present-induced confusion.

Maybe? I admit it's vague. And I'm not sure if the poem really supports such a lofty aim. Frost is reaching metaphysically here as I believe he never did elsewhere except in his verse plays. The one note that seems truly false to me is "Weep for the little things that could make them glad," referring to the children. It wouldn't be this overtly sentimental feeling that would be called up in us. It would be a meditative reverence, somber but not tearful.

Regardless, here's a third one from Frost.
327. "Provide, Provide"

The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag,
Was once the beauty Abishag,

The picture pride of Hollywood.
Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood.

Die early and avoid the fate.
Or if predestined to die late,
Make up your mind to die in state.

Make the whole stock exchange your own!
If need be occupy a throne,
Where nobody can call you crone.

Some have relied on what they knew;
Others on simply being true.
What worked for them might work for you.

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard,
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

DWill wrote:
Maybe? I admit it's vague. And I'm not sure if the poem really supports such a lofty aim.

Believe it or not I fell asleep thinking about Directive, wishing I'd said more in my post. The thought I had not completed: that life is short and this fact becomes clearer as we look back into the past. I think DWill hit much closer to home than I did, but my impression do fit with the idea DWill expressed that as we look back some of the detail drop out, leaving us with the impression that the past was simpler. I will go one step further out on my limb. Maybe it is the knowledge that the past was not really simpler, it just appears so in retrospect that brings clarity -- reorders priority. And I do now get the idea of church. I guess I was thinking of a "church", the building (silly me) and not the church service.

As for "Provide, provide!", I'm not quite sure what to make of it, other than to laugh. I assume this is a tongue in cheek statement; commentary on the values of Americans????

That's the impression I get as well, Saffron....not to be taken completely seriously. Dwill??

326. "Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longham," By Ernest Dowson. The title translates as "The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long."

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate;
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
325. "Lapia Lazuli," by William Butler Yeats

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow.
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out.
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.

All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That's Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop-scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,'
Camel-back; horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilisations put to the sword.
Then they and their wisdom went to rack:
No handiwork of Callimachus,
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;
His long lamp-chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again,
And those that build them again are gay.

Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in lapis lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird,
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument.

Every discoloration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent,
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

Anyone like W. B. Yeats, the later stuff? This is the work that vaulted him into the "greats." I like a lot of it very much, but in general, if I hear somebody say he or she doesn't like Yeats, I can understand why even though I don't feel the same about him. He can come across as an egomaniac who dramatizes his own life and places himself within history. Takes himself very seriously, gets away with it sometimes but not always. Not a real sympathetic fellow, either, or one who has a nuanced view of women.

It's a simple idea he's presenting in "Lapis Lazuli"--that yes, life is full of tragedy and bad stuff, but there is a way to rise above all this tragic clutter and see life as one grand stream of transitoriness, wherein lies its very grandeur. He liked this notion of "tragic joy," equating it with wisdom and attributing it to the "Chinamen" depicted in the carving.