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.


The image here embodies in a stunningly powerful and compressed form Frost’s idea that “strongly spent is synonymous with kept.”  Even as the former house’s foundation disappears beneath the lilac, the imagination reclaims the living house through the agency of a simile: the simple domestic task of kneading dough and baking bread. In both erasing and reaffirming the life of the house, the image brings to fruition the imaginative quest for “a house that is no more a house.”  And it is a quest, as the heightened language of the poem’s conclusion affirms: a quest, perhaps, for the mystery of dissipative structure, the meaning that inheres in the landscape and in the mind of the walker long after the house is gone.


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