19

THE HEIGHT OF THE ADVENTURE
1945–1947

A good many things I have no heart for anymore, but I still like marked attention that savors of affection.

—FROST TO OTTO MANTHEY-ZORN, APRIL 22, 1947

Frost lingered in Florida throughout the early spring of 1945, savoring the bright weather. He wrote to Sidney Cox describing his “occupations,” which included “watering our grove, building a stone wall (nearly forty linear feet), walking two level miles for groceries, and eating papayas. Let’s see what else. Kathleen and I went down to Key West to see old friends. It is a cramped little island. We had a talk with John Dewey there. He’s eighty-five. We are giving it out that I am practically seventy, and I’ve been yours in friendship exactly half the time. Have you stopped to realize it? Thirty-five is exactly half of seventy. See!”1

In March, A Masque of Reason was published to generous reviews. Mark Shorer hailed it as “a kind of ballet in verse” in the Atlantic Monthly.2 Time praised the “ruminative philosophic wit whose pentameters are salted with gentle satire and unobtrusive learning.”3 Only here and there a discordant note could be heard, as when Conrad Aiken (a poet who wrote uncomfortably in the long shadows of Frost and Eliot, who had both been his contemporaries at Harvard) chided in The New Republic: “Dare one whisper, of a poet to whom one so gratefully owes so much, that a little more affectionate and affective care with his blank verse might have prevented its becoming quite so—and frequently—unrewardingly blank?”4

Frost felt, however, that A Masque of Reason had not been properly understood, especially by Lawrance Thompson, his friend and biographer, who reviewed it in the New York Times Book Review.5 The masque was meant to embody Frost’s stance as an Old Testament Christian, to underline his philosophical dualism of spirit and matter, and to underscore the conflict between justice and mercy (more pronounced in A Masque of Mercy) that was central to his thinking. The satire of the masque was directed not at Christianity, as Thompson suggested, but at a kind of rationalism that characterized modern secular thinking.

Peter J. Stanlis recalls, “Frost had spent the summer of 1943 talking with Rabbi Reichert about the Old Testament, with special concern for the Book of Job, on which Reichert was a recognized authority. After Frost wrote A Masque of Reason, he read it to Reichert, who waxed enthusiastic about it. A very significant event happened after the book’s publication. Larry Thompson reviewed it, showing his total misunderstanding of the essential point of the satire by claiming it was an ironical ‘unholy play’ which satirized Christianity. This provoked a furious response in Frost, and undoubtedly contributed much to the growing alienation between Frost and Thompson.”6

In April, Frost celebrated his seventieth birthday in Amherst with close friends, then returned to Hanover for three weeks to finish off his second year as Ticknor fellow. From there, he returned to Ripton, where he spent the summer working quietly on A Masque of Mercy, his companion piece to A Masque of Reason. The new drama moved closer to allegory than the previous one, parodically so, with Jonah coming back in the character of Jonah (or Jonas) Dove, who discusses the matter of divine justice with a latter-day reincarnation of St. Paul (“the fellow who theologized / Christ almost out of Christianity”) and a vaguely artsy couple who run a proletarian bookstore. He is Keeper (full name: His Brother’s Keeper) and she, Jesse Bel (Jezebel). At the center of the discussion is the Pauline idea that God allows injustice in the world so that mercy can overcome it—a mode of argument familiar to readers of Paradise Lost. The central idea of the masque, embodied in its concluding line, spoken by Keeper, is, “Nothing can make injustice just but mercy.”

The drama begins happily enough, in New York City, with the bookstore owner and his wife and a customer chatting. Suddenly, a fugitive appears at the door. “God’s after me!” he cries. He introduces himself as Jonas Dove, although Frost and the others refer to him as Jonah. Like Job in A Masque of Reason, Jonah is obsessed with the question of divine justice. One hears Frost distinctly in Jonah’s lament about

This modern tendency I find in Him

To take the punishment out of all failure

To be strong, careful, thrifty, diligent,

Anything we once thought we had to be.

Paul’s sense of mercy is ultimately more vital than either Keeper’s socialist vision of justice (he considers Karl Marx the Messiah) or Jonah’s Old Testament version. When Keeper decides to plunge into the cellar of his bookstore to contemplate this insight, the door mysteriously slams shut and he dies of fright (not quite instantly: he lingers for a few remarks, like a dying soprano in an Italian opera). The scenario is cartoonish, even slapstick, and a challenge to readerly patience.

A Masque of Mercy is much less successful than its predecessor. The flippancy of the language, with glancing allusions to contemporary culture (a quip about the New Yorker magazine, for example, is oddly out of place), seems ill suited to the material. In attempting to create concrete universals, as Milton did with the characters of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost, Frost fails to give credible or particular life to them. Keeper is strangely ignorant for the owner of a bookstore (he thinks that Rockwell Kent wrote Moby-Dick), and his wife, too, is unevenly drawn, her rhetoric veering from the profound to the idiotic. Neither Jesse nor Paul reacts to Jonah’s death in a way that any reader would find convincing.

One of the peculiar aspects of this masque is the consistent echoing of “Home Burial.” “She’s had some loss she can’t accept from God,” says Jonah of Jesse Bel, for example, as if to explain her oddness. But Jesse Bel never really emerges in this closet drama as a figure with a consistent point of view. Even the central characters, Paul, Jonah, and Keeper, are puppets on the mental stage of Frost’s interior mind, mouthing sentiments that he apparently felt the need to express at the moment despite their lack of any organic role in the unfolding drama. A Masque of Mercy is less interesting as poetry than as evidence of a shift in Frost’s thinking as he moved into his eighth decade. His mind was turning more and more to mercy, veering away from a rigid sense of justice; indeed, Jonah dies saying, “I think I may have got God wrong entirely.” To which Keeper, wisely, responds: “All of us get each other pretty wrong.”

Frost lingered over this play throughout the summer. It must have seemed peculiarly relevant to him as atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August, raising profound questions of both justice and mercy. In general, as might be expected, Frost rejoiced that the war was coming to an end; but he understood that the nuclear age was looming. “The new explosive can be bad for us,” he wrote to Lesley, “but it can’t get rid of the human race for there would always be left, after the bomb, the people who fired it—enough for seed and probably with the same old incentive to sow it.”7 With eerie detachment, he added, “There’s a lot of fun in such considerations.”

Frost’s third year as Ticknor fellow took a slightly different course. There was a new president at Dartmouth now, John Sloan Dickey, and he wanted Frost to spend more time on campus. Frost decided to live in Hanover for several weeks at a time, in fall and spring. “He was not really teaching an academic course,” Dickey recalled. “Frost was a presence, and important to us, and we hoped for more of him. He was amenable, too. Very quick to agree to whatever I proposed.” Frost offered to grade the students, but Dickey explained that this was unnecessary; he recalled a time when Frost asked everyone to write something for the next class: “He gathered the papers, and then asked the students if anyone felt that what he had written was of permanent value, even to himself. When nobody responded, he said, ‘I’ll be damned if I’ll be a perfunctory reader of perfunctory writing,’ then simply threw the whole batch of student work into the wastebasket, unread. It made quite an impression on them.”8

This sense of theatricality only added to Frost’s popularity. The student body swelled with servicemen returning from the war, and many of them wanted to have the experience of encountering Frost. “Frost was popular with us,” recalls Philip Booth, a Dartmouth student after the war whose own poetry Frost came to admire. “He was keenly interested in all of us, and wanted to hear about our experiences. He was especially interested in those of us who were married. I suspect he was attracted to young married couples—it may have reminded him of his own early days with Elinor.” Frost eagerly sought out Booth and his young wife and would often have dinner with them in their tiny apartment, talking happily until after midnight.9

Frost had difficulty balancing his need for contact with people and his desire for solitude; poems, as he often noted, rooted in the latter. One new poem written in 1945 was “One Step Backward Taken.” It harks back to Frost’s experience of a flood in 1927, when he was traveling by train across Arizona on his way home to Amherst; looking out the window, he saw a bridge washed out with a car balanced on one bank, edging backward carefully each time a slice of earth fell away—an astounding image that Frost puts to good use in the poem:

Not only sands and gravels

Were once more on their travels,

But gulping muddy gallons

Great boulders off their balance

Bumped heads together dully

And started down the gully.

Whole capes caked off in slices.

I felt my standpoint shaken

In the universal crisis.

But with one step backward taken

I saved myself from going.

A world torn loose went by me.

Then the rain stopped and the blowing

And the sun came out to dry me.

The first seven lines comprise a movement of sorts: a vision of the “universal crisis” collapsed into an image of colliding elements of nature. Uncharacteristically, Frost refuses to punctuate the lines normally; the syntax, in effect, mimics the confusion created by the disruption. Like the wary animal in “A Drumlin Woodchuck” who makes its “own strategic retreat,” the poet (emulating the driver in the car on the edge of the precipice) withdraws to save himself as a “world torn loose” went by him.

“Directive,” one of Frost’s most central poems, was also written during this period. Although past the time of life when major poems came regularly, here he recovers temporarily his full powers in a poem that reconsiders his entire poetic project, interrogates it thoroughly—much as Yeats had done in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (1939), one of his best late poems. “Directive” is both epitaph and poetic credo. As the latter, it offers a “directive” to his imagination, a map of his inner landscape. As in Milton’s “Lycidas,” the poet confronts one of his major themes: how to survive an overwhelming experience, one that threatens to destroy the imagination itself.10 Both Milton and Frost take the reader through a harrowing reconstruction of emotional destitution, confronting the dark aspect of sentimentality, which is death to the poet. While Milton looks forward to “fresh woods and pastures new,” Frost is able to say (to himself as much as to his reader): “Here are your waters and your watering place. / Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”

At the outset in “Directive,” the poet confronts a nearly obliterated landscape, discovering a “house that is no more a house / Upon a farm that is no more a farm” within a “town that is no more a town.” Like Virgil beside Dante in the Inferno, Frost accompanies us “Back out of all this now too much for us.” He returns to a time “made simple by the loss / Of detail.” The details, perhaps, would hurt too much if we had to experience them again freshly. We don’t know, and don’t even want to know, the names of the lost.

The reader should be warned that Frost is a guide “Who only has at heart your getting lost.” This is the Christian (or, more specifically, Pauline) paradox: that only the lost can be saved. One must plunge into loss and despair before arriving at a condition of salvation. This line also echoes Thoreau, who writes in Walden, “Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”

The traveler in the poem is taken on a “serial ordeal,” coming upon a deserted village with its “forty cellar holes.” This is, as Katherine Kearns has noted, “a deconstructed land that evades the pitfalls of both town and farm even as it repudiates the possibility of an uncorrupted wild space.”11 “Directive” seems to occupy some of the emotional terrain of Eliot’s The Waste Land—that is, the modern world is seen as a broken place, a ruined landscape where all traditional symbols are drained of content. Indeed, Frost seems to allude directly to Eliot by putting a broken chalice in the poem as the guide claims to have hidden “a broken drinking goblet like the Grail” in the instep arch of an old cedar near the brook that runs by the property.

Perversely, the chalice is “Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it, / So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.” Frost refers here to Mark 4:11–12, where Jesus says, “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.” The uninitiated, those spiritually unprepared for the experience, cannot participate in the revelations offered here. Those who have not received their education by metaphor—their training in parables, so to speak—will be left out.

Not all critics have been impressed by Frost’s cleverness here. The poem “hints at ironies that cannot be consequential except to those who have enclosed themselves within the circuit of Frost’s own work, and for them the ironies ought to be of a claustrophobic self-reference that is at odds with the pretentiously large rhetorical sweeps and presumptuous ironies in which the poem indulges itself,” complains Richard Poirier. But even Poirier cannot deny that parts of this poem represent instances of Frost’s “descriptive and visionary genius,” especially the “wildly brilliant” opening.12

The narrative builds to the point where a brook is found: “Too lofty and original to rage.” It is near its source, so icy cold. Frost seems to invite the reader who has followed him into this wild to go back to whatever source has been important for him or her. “Go back to a favorite poet, or a place you almost forgot,” Frost once said to an audience before a reading of this poem. So the poet directs the reader to reconnect to some important emotional source (as in the Latin roots of the word religion: re-ligio, meaning “to link back”).

In the end, the poet encounters a torn landscape but still refuses to give in to despair. He urges himself (as much as the reader whom he serves as guide):

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.

He adds, memorably: “The height of the adventure is the height / Of country where two village cultures faded / Into each other.”

Encountering such a charged scene, Frost nevertheless refuses to succumb to nostalgia, although (as with many great poems) that threat is always present. The exact setting for “Directive” doesn’t really matter, but Frost would certainly have had in the back of his mind the farm at Derry and the brook nearby, Hyla Brook, where his children played. There is also an abandoned farm much like the one in “Directive” not far behind the Homer Noble farm. But abandoned farms, even whole villages, are commonplace in northern New England. “As a hiker,” recalls Reginald L. Cook, “Frost came across them regularly. It would be a mistake to try to locate this farm anywhere in particular. It is typical, even universal, in its complexion and details.”13

One geological point of interest in the poem is the appearance of some dramatic ledges. In a memoir by the sculptor Walker Hancock (who did a bust of Frost), one finds this interesting recollection: “Frost had explored some of the woods of Cape Ann with us. One day I showed him ‘the Ledges.’ These are a wide stretch of granite on my property that had been laid bare long ago by quarrymen who never thereafter carried out their intention to excavate at that location. They are now strangly beautiful—quite remote, surrounded by pines and bordered with little pools. Still visible are marks of the boulders that were pushed across them in the ice age. Frost was especially interested in them, and a short time later these lines appeared in his poem entitled ‘Directive’ (first published during the winter of 1946):

The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,

The chisel work of an enormous Glacier

That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.”14

“Directive” stands somewhat by itself in Frost’s work, not quite resembling anything that came before, but lodged firmly in the tradition of what M. H. Abrams has called the Greater Romantic Lyric.15 In Abrams’s outine of the genre, typified by Wordsworth in “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” the poet (as solitary speaker) returns to a place that has been meaningful at some past time. He sinks into deep meditation, having been forced by the circumstances to contemplate lost time, and having had his sense of spirituality quickened by the encounter with nature. The poem moves toward a resolution that rises to levels of ecstasy or determination—a totalizing moment or epiphany of sorts. The reader has the experience of having been taken on a journey that is both physical and spiritual, one colored and given texture by a particular landscape. In attempting such a thing, and succeeding so magnificently at an age when most writers have long since abandoned, or been abandoned by, the muse, Frost was once again proving himself worthy of his reputation.

*   *   *

In late September 1946, Frost lectured at Kenyon College in Ohio. Among those in the audience was the critic Lionel Trilling, who recorded the event in his journals:

At Kenyon: Frost’s strange speech—apparently of a kind that he often gives—he makes himself the buffoon—goes into a trance of aged childishness—he is the child who is rebelling against all the serious people who are trying to organize him—take away his will and individuality. It was, however, full of brilliantly shrewd things—impossible to remember them except referring to the pointless discussion of skepticism the evening before, he said: “Skepticism”—is that anything more than we used to mean when we said, “Well, what have we here?”—But also the horror of the old man—fine looking old man—having to dance and clown to escape (also for his supper)—American, American in that deadly intimacy, that throwing away of dignity—“Drop that dignity! Hands up” we say—in order to come into anything like contact and to make anything like a point.16

This account is harrowing to read. Trilling cringed at the manner Frost had evolved over many years: the joshing, avuncular, ingratiating manner that won over large audiences but, at least in Trilling’s mind, demeaned the great poet and his work.

After the Kenyon visit, Frost stopped by to see Victor and Louise Reichert in Cincinnati. Louise Reichert recalls that “Frost could be a temperamental houseguest, although he was often considerate and kind, too.” The rabbi was busy preparing a sermon for the eve of Sukkoth, the Feast of Tabernacles, “when Frost made it clear he wanted to give the sermon that day.” He had a strong didactic streak, and the notion of giving an actual sermon was attractive to him. Reichert eagerly made a place in the ceremony for his friend. He had always believed “that Frost had strong connections to Judaism, more so than most Christians.”17 Reichert pointed to the recent masques, which were centered on the Old Testament stories of Job and Jonah. (It should be noted that Frost’s God is almost always the fierce Jehovah of the Book of Job and not the more gentle Elohim who visited Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.)

Reichert recorded Frost’s sermon, and later surprised him (unpleasantly) with a printed version of what he had said. Frost began by saying that he had once valued courage above all other virtues, but he currently favored wisdom over courage. “Now religion always seems to me to come round to something beyond wisdom,” he added. “It’s a straining toward wisdom that will do well enough in the day’s work, you know, living along, fighting battles, going to wars, beating each other, striving with each other, in war or in peace—sufficient wisdom.” Frost had taken his cue from the Union Prayer Book, which had been read only minutes earlier by the rabbi: “Look with favor, O Lord, upon us, and may our service ever be acceptable unto Thee.” Circling back to this prayer, Frost dwelled on the idea that only God’s grace or mercy makes any gift one can give Him acceptable.

Frost had been working on A Masque of Mercy throughout the fall, even as he traveled, and his sermonizing in Cincinnati sparked a number of ideas; in particular, the notion of what gifts are acceptable to God became a focus for the concluding speeches of Paul and Keeper. Rather quickly, Frost was able to bring the masque to an end, and in November he sent it to Holt for publication in early winter. At the same time, Frost gathered the poems he had written over the past few years into a volume called Steeple Bush, also planned for publication by Holt in 1947.

In many ways, Frost’s life had improved after a troubling decade of personal disasters. His living arrangements, which closely involved the Morrisons, were more than satisfactory, and he liked having a range of bases: Ripton, Cambridge, Miami. The Dartmouth appointment had worked out well, and President Dickey intended to renew the Ticknor fellowship as often as Frost would let him. “It was only in our interest to keep him,” Dickey said. But family pressures continued to make the poet’s life uneasy.

Most of the family pressures now came from Irma, who had separated from John Cone in 1944. Irma’s troubled mental state had made her a difficult wife, and in 1946 Cone decided to divorce her. By now, her paranoia had grown to the point where the doctors who saw her predicted she would soon find living on her own difficult if not impossible. Having recently experienced the suicide of Carol, Frost dreaded a similar turn in Irma’s life. Her younger son, Harold, was only six, and Frost considered the relations between mother and son unhealthy. Irma, having essentially been abandoned by her husband, clung to the boy.

She had been living in Hanover, New Hampshire, with Cone but now wanted to leave that town, which was full of bad memories. She turned to her father for help, as she had in the past; as ever, he was willing and able to assist her, but the anxieties were difficult for him to bear. Furthermore, he did not exactly relish her proximity, which was bound to create awkward situations. Nevertheless, Frost and Kay went searching for a house for Irma and Harold near Cambridge.

They located one in nearby Acton, just far enough away from Cambridge so that Irma would not be on her father’s doorstep every day. It was a small, two-bedroom cape that Frost could rent inexpensively. By early winter, Irma and her son were settled there, and Frost was able to escape to Florida.

A good deal of time at Pencil Pines was spent making plans for his next birthday, on March 26. The prospect of an upcoming honorary doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley appealed to him, not only because he always enjoyed being honored; it had been over sixty years since Frost left San Francisco with his sister and mother, and he looked forward to revisiting old haunts. The one awkwardness of the trip was that two of Frost’s biggest collectors, Earle J. Bernheimer and Louis Mertins, lived in California, and both would be falling over themselves to play host to their favorite poet. Frost expected complications.

In fact, the visit to California was a complete success. Mertins and Bernheimer organized a gala dinner at the Hotel Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, with a hundred guests present, many of them old friends from Bread Loaf, including Wallace Stegner and Edith Mirrielies. The waiters carried in a vast birthday cake with “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” written in white frosting against a chocolate backdrop.

The night after this party, Mertins drove Frost to Beverly Hills, where Bernheimer lived in a splendid house. Another birthday celebration was held there, with dozens of well-known writers, businessmen, actors, and local worthies in attendence. It was a bit overwhelming for Frost, who grew increasingly exhausted by having to meet and exchange pleasant words with so many strangers. He now began to regret a promise to return to Redlands a few days later, where Mertins had arranged for him to lecture at the local university. But he did so, and lectured to a crammed auditorium for over an hour and a half.

One marvels at Frost’s stamina. He was seventy-two, but age seems not to have dampened his appetite for travel or public exposure. He stopped briefly in Ann Arbor on the way home, then spent only a week in Cambridge before returning to Hanover for his spring work as Ticknor fellow. This was followed quickly by a visit to Amherst, where he stayed in the home of the new president, Charles W. Cole, who had been his student at Amherst some years before.

He had always liked Cole immensely, and was relieved that Stanley King was gone. (Unfairly, he always imagined that King had plotted to get rid of him at Amherst.) Once again, he dropped heavy hints to Cole that he was still not averse to the idea of returning someday to the Amherst faculty. Cole, wisely, remained neutral on the subject, although he made it clear that Amherst had always considered Frost a significant member of its extended family.

Back in Cambridge in early May, Frost was startled one afternoon by an unexpected visit from T. S. Eliot, who appeared in the doorway of his house on Brewster Street wearing a mackintosh and carrying a folded umbrella. It had been over a decade since Frost had last seen him, and Eliot had aged significantly, his face chiseled by time, his shoulders slumping. He had come to the States to visit a brother who was ill; to defray expenses, he had accepted an offer to lecture at Harvard. Eliot fondly recalled having met Frost in 1928 at the home of Harold Monro in London; they had also, of course, seen each other briefly at the St. Botolph Club in Boston in 1932 during the time of Eliot’s Norton lectures. It amazed Frost that Eliot—surely the most influential and highly regarded cultural figure of the day—would stop by, unannounced, with flattering words. Sitting over a pot of tea, the two exchanged compliments, talking about works-in-progress, musing on their early days in Britain. They also discussed the sad fate of Ezra Pound, who had been arrested after making treasonous wartime broadcasts on Italian radio. Eliot, who seemed modest and friendly, showed no signs of hostility toward Frost, even though he must have known that Frost had often bad-mouthed him in public over the past two decades. Frost, for his part, was thoroughly won over.

*   *   *

Steeple Bush was published in late May, and the reviews appeared throughout the summer. Like most writers, Frost dreaded the reviews; even the good ones made him anxious and unhappy. “They always get it wrong,” he once told an interviewer. Intuitively, he understood that critics would be looking for signs of diminishment. Indeed, the signs were there; only a few of the poems in this collection were equal to his best work. The title refers to a plant (also called hardhack) that grew profusely around the farm in Ripton. The volume was dedicated to Frost’s six grandchildren: Prescott, John (Jacky), Elinor, Lesley Lee, Robin, and Harold.

The shrewdest review was written by Randall Jarrell, the most gifted poet-critic of his generation of American poets.18 Jarrell began with a lengthy, admiring account of “Directive,” concluding, “There are weak places in the poem, but these are nothing beside so much longing, tenderness, and passive sadness, Frost’s understanding that each life is tragic because it wears away into the death that it at last half welcomes—that even its salvation, far back at the cold root of things, is make-believe, drunk from a child’s broken and stolen goblet hidden among the ruins of the lost cultures. Much of the strangeness of the poem is far under the surface, or else so much on the surface, in the subtlest of details (how many readers will connect the ‘serial ordeal’ of the eye pairs with the poem’s Grail-parody?), that one slides under it unnoticing. There are no notes in the back about this Grail.” The last quip, of course, refers to the footnotes appended to Eliot’s Grail poem, The Waste Land. Jarrell also noted that “there is nothing else in Steeple Bush like ‘Directive.’” The one other poem of some importance, in his view, was “The Ingenuities of Debt,” which he praised for its “dry mercilessness.”

Jarrell’s opinion was shared by many readers, although Frost had by now built up such a layer of goodwill among critics that he was generally praised. As Gladys Campbell observed in Poetry, “The time is long past for casual contemporary evaluation [of Frost].… Through textbooks and anthologies some of his poems are so well-known to schoolboys that they are amazed to find that Frost is a living poet. He belongs with Tennyson, Wordsworth, Longfellow—all those who are to be read before examinations.”19

While Steeple Bush is not quite equal to its major predecessors, it has its own peculiar radiance and affect. The first section is “Steeple Bush,” and contains seven poems, including “Directive,” which overpowers the volume as a whole. It would be hard for a poem of this distinction not to overpower its neighbors in a slim volume. The other groupings are “Five Nocturnes,” “A Spire and a Belfry,” “Out and Away,” and “Editorials.” Overall, the poems play to each other beautifully, amplifying a theme sounded early, in “Something for Hope,” where the poet puts the steeple bush before the reader, a “lovely blooming” that has very little to say for itself apart from this beauty. It cannot be eaten, it crowds out other plants, and even the most resolute gardener will have difficulty getting rid of it. Frost suggests that the cycles of nature will naturally shift the local flora in

A cycle we’ll say of a hundred years.

Thus foresight does it and laissez faire,

A virtue in which we all may share

Unless a government interferes.

With the accumulated wisdom of seven decades, Frost urges “Patience and looking away ahead, / And leaving some things to take their course.”

The second section seems lighter in tone, but there is gravity here as well. Frost writes about terror (of the dark, of death), about putting false hope in the comfort of distant lights; “The Night Light” is a compressed and memorable lyric (it was actually written in September 1928—while Frost was visiting England):20

She always had to burn a light

Beside her attic bed at night.

It gave bad dreams and broken sleep,

But helped the Lord her soul to keep.

Good gloom on her was thrown away.

It is on me by night or day,

Who have, as I suppose, ahead

The darkest of it still to dread.

A cluster of poems follows that contains one rarely noted but quite remarkable poem, “The Fear of God,” which might be taken as Frost’s look backward on his own career:

If you should rise from Nowhere up to Somewhere,

From being No one up to being Someone,

Be sure to keep repeating to yourself

You owe it to an arbitrary god

Whose mercy to you rather than to others

Won’t bear too critical examination.

The poem goes on to urge the reader: “Stay unassuming.” He regards “the uniform of who you are” as “the curtain of the inmost soul.”

The poems here repeatedly insist on humility, and the poet responds to the bleakness of the universe with a rueful shake of the head. This mode of wisdom-giving continues in “Out and Away,” the third grouping, which opens with another strong poem, “The Middleness of the Road.” The ease of phrasing and the light, running quality of the lines are stunning. The poet begins with an image of finitude that, mysteriously, beckons toward but cannot approach infinity:

The road at the top of the rise

Seems to come to an end

And take off into the skies.

Quickly, the poem becomes a meditation on “near and far,” on the present life in the body, and the spiritual realm embodied in the “universal blue” of the sky. The human mind (represented here as Fancy) cannot take satisfaction in the comforts of what lies near, nor can it leap into transcendence. That is, it cannot consort comfortably with “absolute flight and rest.” Before a reading of this poem, Frost once said that “you can only go so far, which is what being human means. We’re human. We’re not immortal. At least not yet.”21

The final section, gathered under the title “Editorials,” is full of the usual resentment against government planners “With the intention blazoned on their banners / Of getting one more chance to change our manners” (“The Planners”). He believes that “States strong enough to do good are few” (“No Holy Wars for Them”). Even doomsayers are chided in “The Broken Drought.” These poems, which would have fit nicely in A Further Range, represent an extension of the tonalities of that collection.

“The Ingenuities of Debt,” that piece of “dry mercilessness” praised by Randall Jarrell, fits in perfectly with the poems in this section, but it was actually written on the Derry farm some five decades earlier. Typically, it lingered in Frost’s folder of unfinished poems for many years. The poem was unfinished largely because it turns on his inventing an ancient inscription from a long-destroyed city in the Middle East, and Frost had trouble getting a good enough line to fit here. It obviously took forty years to find it: “TAKE CARE TO SELL YOUR HORSE BEFORE HE DIES / THE ART OF LIFE IS PASSING LOSSES ON.” Once again, the mere presence of a poem written so long before its publication argues against applying any traditional notion of poetic development to Frost. As a poet, he was born whole: fingernails, hair, teeth, everything in place. He didn’t “grow” but changed, evolving by extension and amplification.

In his collected edition of 1949, Frost appended three poems to Steeple Bush, one of them being “Choose Something Like a Star,” which first appeared in a selection of his work made by Louis Untermeyer in 1943. This extraordinary poem—another peak of this period—is written in a measured, four-beat cadence; the opening recalls Keats’s famous “Bright Star,” which Frost alludes to directly in line 18. By inviting comparison with a famous predecessor, Frost takes a certain risk, but the poem can withstand such scrutiny. The poet addresses the star, which he once told an audience at Bread Loaf was meant to represent “something far away, like a star or an ancient poet.”22 Frost once again adopts the mask of wisdom, suggesting to readers that they (as he presumably has) look beyond whatever is around them to something more permanent, even exalted. The poem ends on a note also heard in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”:

So when at times the mob is swayed

To carry praise or blame too far,

We may choose something like a star

To stay our minds on and be staid.

The wordplay on “stay” and “staid” is suggestive—one fastens on to a distant object of veneration, risks becoming “staid” (boring, old-fashioned) in order to be “stayed” (rooted, attached). “We may take something like a star, or a poem, or God, to stay our minds on, and be staid,” Frost commented.23 One of the poets he would himself read for this purpose, as he noted, was Catullus—the ancient lyricist of love.

*   *   *

Frost spent a quiet summer in Ripton, waiting for the reviews of Steeple Bush. “He was like most poets,” Richard Eberhart says, “fretting over the response of critics. The more well known he became, the worse it seemed if someone didn’t like him.” As it were, most of the reviews were celebratory—even those that found some falling off in this collection. The harshest response came in Time, where the anonymous reviewer said, “Frost is the dean of living U.S. poets by virtue of both age and achievement. At 72, the four-time Pulitzer Prize–winner has lost little of his craftsmanship and none of his crackling vigor. But what was once only granitic Yankee individualism in his work has hardened into bitter and often uninspired Tory social commentary. The 43 poems of Steeple Bush do nothing to enlarge his greatness and not one of them could begin to displace the best of his Collected Poems.”24 Given that the book contains “Directive,” one has to wonder about this reviewer.

Frost reacted badly to the response in Time, as any sensitive poet would; but there was enough respect, even adulation, available in other publications to make up for this slight. Writing in the Saturday Review, for example, Leonard Bacon extolled “the bewildering beauty” of the book, finding “sharp imagery” and “savage satire” in the poems. “There is no falling off,” he declared.25 In the Atlantic Monthly, Donald A. Stauffer suggested that Frost’s poems were “not so much simple as elemental.” Stauffer was among the earliest critics to recognize the darker aspect of his vision: “Frost is uncompromisingly aware of an agonizing universe, and creates apocalyptic twentieth-century visions no less grim than Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, and Auden.”26 This line of criticism would be amplified in the next decade by Randall Jarrell and Lionel Trilling—both of whom focused on the tragic sides of Frost almost too intensely.

Frost was, by now, well beyond the harm of reviewers, having ripened into an American institution. More remarkably, he was still writing poems of lasting value at an age when most lyric poets are long past the point of meaningful productivity. In this, he stands beside his great contemporaries Yeats and Stevens, who also managed to find a voice and stance in their later years that allowed them to continue writing poems equal to or better than their earlier work.