Summary:
Robert Frost's "Directive" and T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" are both poems about quests the writer must take in life. Eliot wants someone to accompany him on his journey and Frost is taking a journey into the past.
A quest is a journey, an adventure, seeking or looking for something that you feel there is a need to find. Robert Frost's "Directive" and T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" are poems of quest. Both men have chosen different quests for their poems. Quest that they feel the reader needs to seek out and become aware of. As there is a quest, there is also something that they want the reader to not be aware of. Thus going away from the quest, toward a new direction.
Both authors were going through different stages in their lives and were having different problems when they wrote these poems. Frost, a very depressed figure dealt with a lot of tragedy in his lifetime. It seemed as if all that were around him family wise, died leaving him lonely and depressed. This explains the gloominess in his poems and also hints towards why he sets out the quest in "Directive." He wrote a lot dealing with nature. His poems were realistic and not of love and romantic setting. "Directive" is said to be Frost's most major poem. It is out of his 1947 publishing, Steeple Bush (Pritchard, Oxford University Press). Eliot, the opposite of Frost was a religious man. He wasn't depressed. His poems were more about love with a romantic feel unlike Frost's. Which too helps to depict his quest.
His style didn't change till the 1920's when he took up his jazz like form and he became greatly influenced by the postwar and the death of his close friend, Jean Verdenal, who died in the battle of Dardenelles. Eliot dedicated "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to Verdenal (Garraty & Carnes, Oxford University Press).
The quest Frost sets out for us in "Directive" is to help one to connect with their lost childhood. He gives direction and instruction on how he feels the reader is to do so. He wants the reader to get lost, in order to really find himself or herself. He tries to put the reader on a course.
In the first nine lines he beings to set the path.
"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
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," (Ferguson, 1138)
He explains how the reader is to go back in time, to a time that is have most likely forgotten, a place that used to exist but over time has been erased. There is a path to guide you there but it's only intention is to actually get you lost. From these lines we can see whom Frost is trying to direct. His audience is that of an older generation, and the path he wants them to find
is back to their childhood, their days of innocence before their days of adulthood. So that they don't forget how simple life used to be. Before they gained knowledge of how complicated life can be as adults. This knowledge helps us to forget how simple things really are.
By trying to find your way back to childhood, you are already gaining back a childhood experience and that is of the use of imagination. From childhood we start using our imagination. This is the only way they can possibly have a connection with their past. He goes on to explain how much time has passed. How the woods they used to travel through once excited the reader but since they have grown older the excitement is no longer there. As they are traveling to help gain back this he tells them:
Make yourself up a cheery song of how
Someone's road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with buggy load of grain. (Ferguson, 1139)
Children always make up songs about many different things that occur in their days. Frost wants the reader to go back to doing this, but his choice of song is weird. He wants them to sing about a person who either is traveling this same road or used to and is no longer of existence.
Frost feels that if the reader has read up to line 37 (Ferguson, 1139) and is lost enough in their journey back in time, just as in the days of childhood, in a tree house or fort that a child would usually build, he wants them to
.".. pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home." (Ferguson, 1139)
By doing this they have gone back to the way they would have secluded themselves from the world as a child.
Frost reminds the reader in lines 41-44 that as a grown adult they need to look back to see that as a child it didn't take much to make them happy and make believe was once good enough. Frost realizes that now the reader has more of an adult knowledge and has an idea of limitations and flaws, that as children they were not aware of and doing all of this is a great task. He only wants them to return to a place of perfection so that they don't forget about the past or try to avoid the fact that it occurred because they might see it as childish.
T.S. Eliot on the other hand has set a quest out for the man of his time, a man like himself a "Man of Early Modernism." The quest was, to conquer the fears that he had as a "Man of Early Modernism" (Mitchell, Southern Illinois UP). Men of his time were very self-conscious, shy, scared to approach women, unable to get passed themselves and very sensitive. These men suffered from Solipsism, where one thinks that they are the center of the world. The theory that the self is the only thing that has reality or can be known then and verified. Prufrock showed how ignorant they on approaching the matter. They had women and love missing from their lives and to conquer this quest, they needed to get over themselves in order to break their shyness.
Although the "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is of such a quest the character seems to show himself moving away from the this quest that he is on. This gives the reader an example of how hard it really was for the men of this. By the structure of the poem, Eliot seems to need someone to accompany him on this journey so he begins by saying:
"Let us go then you and I, " (Ferguson, 1230)
As you go on this journey with him at first in lines 1-14(Ferguson, 1230) you can see that he has a negative perspective of actually going out in search of women.
To justify his reason for not going out in search he says the following:
" And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing it's back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;...
And time for all the works and days² of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me
And time for a hundred visions and revisions..." (Ferguson, 1231)
This stanza shows he feels that he has all the time in the world to go out in search and to date, so he actually find a lady to settle down with and raise a family. But he is wrong. With that attitude he will never get anywhere.
Lines 37-48 (Ferguson, 1231) he describes himself. From the description he does not seem to be a young man, he still feels that there is time. These lines too also show he is scared to approach a lady he questions himself "Do I dare?." Here he shows up his solipsistic ways by thinking he is the center of the universe he feels asking such a question will "Disturb the universe..."
He claims to have known/ been with women before. He knows their eyes that have watched him, their arms on tables from dinners he's attended with them, and their fingers that soothed him while he slept. Does this tell us that he has been with women but still has the fear of approaching and steadily being with one?
"It is impossible to say just what I mean"(Ferguson, 1232)
He is oh so confused he knows that that is what he wants but is to blind to realize it. Although he wants to know if all the women he has been with were worth it all. He confesses to not being a man of action in lines 111-119 that he is not a man of action and the actions he does take are irrational. He also realizes he is getting older and doesn't expect women to want to be with him. Eliot's quest is towards going out and conquering his fears but he contradicts his quest as he goes away from it by not actually going out in search of what he wants.
The form of "Directive" is blank verse it is one continuous paragraph without a rhyme scheme. It takes place in the past in an old town it seems as well as the forest. Frost wrote this poem in what seems to be a pessimistic tone. Eliot's tone is more questioning and insecure. Eliot too put "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in blank verse. It is a dramatic monologue because he is directly speaking to a specified listener "you." The differences between these poems are the situations and location. Eliot may be in the house contemplating on leaving to go out on his search, while Frost is taking a journey into the past. Both poems quests, give their readers different solutions to get over something, one's self. Frost's way is that you need to get over the fact you have grown up and remember your childhood in order to remember how simple life really is. As a child you take everything easy but as an adult you complicate every. While Eliot's is of men who need to get over themselves in order to get on with the love part of their lives. So they can achieve what they want in life and are having problems getting with their self-centered attitudes.
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