Re: Since It's So Friggin' Hot

"Jeff Davis" <jd_home@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:21501$42ee545d$80a32844$15912@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> let's talk Robert Frost.
>
> His poem "Directive" is a strange one and a good example of his habit of
> wearing a mask. "Directive" is a Grail parody. The poet has hidden a cup
> from a set of a child's toys by a stream in a town that Progress has
> emptied. (Progress isn't named, but the town is disappearing from view
> even as the poem progresses:
>
> 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.
>
> There's an earlier reference to the town's 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.
>
> Time -- with a capital T -- is important to Frost.)
>
> As we watch the house, the town, the culture disappear before our eyes we
> ought to be cautious of what it is the poet has in mind:
>
>
> The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
> Who only has at heart your getting lost...
>
> And he means lost though he says otherwise:
>
> 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.
>
> That "So can't get saved" is the horror the poem has been preparing for
> the reader. It seems, to our enlightened ears, like a misreading. Many
> won't even bother going back to Mark to see.
>
> [11] And he 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:
> [12] 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.
>
> A passage The Enlightenment must surely prefer to be absent from the
> Gospels: a Jesus who speaks cryptically to hide salvation from them that
> are without.
>
> It's easy to forget, I guess, since they've been encrusted with 2000 years
> of history, how odd the Gospels are. I re-read some of Waiting for Godot
> the other day and in the first act, Vladimir and Estragon talk about the
> mystery of the thief who was saved. How only one mentions that and one
> says that both railed against Jesus. The inerrant crowd has explanations
> for everything, so there are no doubt explanations for that. Just as there
> are, no doubt, explanations for 2 creations. But, the oddest thing for me,
> are the one's who shouldn't get saved and the Jesus who hints at that.
>
> So, while it's so friggin' hot now, it's obvious that things could get
> hotter.
>
> And why is Frost so cheerful about that?

Man, I just had this nightmare that I was back in college after being away
for 23 years, and the class was this Poetry Appreciation class. And then I
suddenly realized I was in my underwear.


.

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