BUT NO GAME CAN continue forever. Frost’s fascination with delay allows him to understand the romantic sensibility, to sympathize with its fear of closure, even if its preoccupations aren’t his own. And this understanding lets him create his own version of romantic yearning. This being Frost, of course, that yearning has very little in it of the “sigh” from “The Road Not Taken,” or the overt regret that animates it. But it has a road, and the consequences of that road. Here is the beginning of “Directive,” from 1946, which is usually considered to be Frost’s last great 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 . . .

The poem proceeds through a series of possible self-deceptions that recall the potential self-deceptions of “The Road Not Taken”:

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 . . .

These in turn give way to a scene of homecoming that hovers somewhere between parody and pathos:

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.

And the poem famously concludes with a cross between a baptism and the Grail quest:

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.