Back Out of All This

On Robert Frost’s poem “Directive”

By Gabriel Hartley • 24 November 2020

[NOTICE: This is a draft of a work in progress. Please do not quote or copy without my permission. Thanks! — Gabriel Hartley]

hartleyg@ohio.edu

Related Posts—Draft Chapters

• Back Out of All This
• The Mountain Held the Town as in a Shadow
• Of Stars and Stones
• The Woods are Lovely, Dark and Deep
• A Journey of Objective Chance in “The Wood-Pile”
• Or Just Some Human Sleep
• Birches: Going and Coming Back
• The Poet Afield: Robert Frost’s “Waiting—Afield at Dusk” and “Mowing”

The poem “Directive” opens with the following direction:

Back out of all this now too much for us, (1)

The first hurdle for me as a reader is to figure out how exactly to read the opening words of the poem. My instinct is to take the first two words as a phrase, “Back out”—to take them as a directive, in other words. I would also assume initially that the addressee of the poem’s address is a figure with whom the reader is meant to identify, a journeyer within the poem itself. So in that case, the poem begins with the advice, or even command, for the journeying reader to back out of something or other—to back out of “all this now too much for us.” Yet, I as a reader do not yet know whether to piece the words together into this particular statement or command. I do not yet know, for instance, if I am supposed to pay attention to something that is “too much for us,” this something too much for us, this something that is now (but perhaps not before or later) too much for us. Whatever it is that the speaker is urging me to conjure up in my mind, I am now on my guard about it, wary, careful, wondering about my own tendencies to misdirection, the ways in which my assurance is misguided. One paraphrase, accurate or not, would be “Retreat from all this stuff that now, for some unknown reason, is overbearing.”

But the second line immediately makes me question my assumptions concerning the first line’s phrasing. The word “back” also opens up the second line, but it does not resolve into the same phrase “back out” but “back in”:

Back in a time made simple by the loss (2)

“Back in a time” suggests that we are dealing with time schemes now rather than directives, and that the words “Back out” are not to be taken as a phrase meaning “retreat” but now as a simple temporal location, out versus in, back when things were becoming too much for us, “back in a time,” “back then,” “back when”—just as the second line suggests. So should we read the first line with the following emendation, “Back when out of all this now too much for us”?

There is no reason other than the laws of repetition and consistency, however, for us to assume that the same word in the two different lines should have the same meaning. Or, rather, there is no reason other than our desire for simplicity that the word cannot suggest both meanings, both phrasal gestures of continuity, simultaneously. “Retreat from all this troubling experience that back then might have felt simpler but now feels too much for us.” Perhaps.

Another possibility not yet suggested by the phrasing is to read the opening line as saying “In back of . . . ,” now pointing to that which lies behind that which now feels too much for us in our collective exhaustion. “Way back in what now seems like a simpler time there was something which lay in back of this experience that we now need to back away from.” And if so, then this possibility brings us back to the beginning, back to the word “back” in all its potential, a position that we would need to back up by going back into the depths of the poem that is urging us to get back to some desire for simplicity, some priority of innocent beginnings and, perhaps, some ulteriority of innocent conclusions. But if this is the case, the poem is directing us to move in all directions at once, a directive to back out of all this now too much for us that is paradoxically also directing us everywhere and perhaps, as a result, in no direction at all—getting us lost in the froth of the complexity lying in back of the search for simplicity. Which leads to the question: What is the source of this ambiguity? Me or the speaker? In other words, can I trust my own instincts as a reader? And can I trust the accuracy and the motives of the speaker, the director of this directive?

So let’s get back to the beginning of the poem. Or rather let’s get in back of what we took to be the beginning of the poem (the first line) to a prior beginning—the title. If we begin by assuming that the “directive” in the title is a noun, then we have a poem concerning some kind of official or authoritative instruction, some kind of direction or command that we do things or take things in a certain way, with the speaker of the poem serving as our guide. And this assumption predisposes me to read the opening words as the command to “back out of” whatever all this now too much for us is supposed to mean or be. The now, the present, is that which we are exhorted to back out of. “Backing out of” is not exactly the same, of course, as “backing away from.” While we might back out of a driveway or parking space, we also back out of certain agreements that we no longer wish to remain committed to. We might not even be sure that we wish to remain committed to our initial reading of a few words opening a poem. Maybe the same words will play into a different desire in the very next line and relieve us of our first interpretational commitments:

Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather (2-4)

The demands of the complexities (the pains, the griefs) of the present might give way to the simplicities of worn away memories of a time that time and weather “made simple by the loss / of detail,” transforming the past loss brought on by death—now marked by this worn graveyard marble sculpture—into the presumed comforting present simplicity of nostalgia. In a similar but universally unconscious way, the cemeteries of settler colonial society (and perhaps all societies) are often planted literally on top of ancient ceremonial sites of previous civilizations whose existence has been so worn away that they are now almost completely invisible. Something there is that leads us to plant our own cemeteries and other sacred markers on top of the markers of those who came before us. These spots seem bound for sacred marking and memorializing. The complexities of the past are transformed into simplicity in order to allow the complexities of the present to fold into the simpler directives of nostalgia. Transforming the past perhaps at once transforms the present and opens it up to its own forgetfulness.

In our commitments to that nostalgia, we approach the difficulties and tragedies of the world with a simple detachment at odds with the initial sufferings we might previously have attached to the past in the various layers of the past. In other words, if we heed the poem’s directive and back out of the complex present as we back into the fantasy of a simpler past, we are then, perhaps, better equipped to read the lines that follow with some mysterious measure of emotional distance:

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. (5-7)

In this meditative cadence of poetic utterance (an echo of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets), this recollection in tranquility, we find ourselves in a larger graveyard of sorts that marks the loss not only of life but of home, of livelihood, and of community as well.

Yet it seems that we cannot get there by ourselves; we need the speaker of the poem to serve as our guide, as the director issuing these directives that will direct us who knows where:

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—
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretence of keeping covered. (8-12)

One interesting thing about the speaker’s offer to guide us along this road to the people and houses and farms and towns that have partially disappeared from view is that until this point—when the speaker points out “the road there”—we have not even been aware that we might have been seeking a road there or anywhere. As in other Frost poems, the speaker slips into a whimsical tone (presenting himself as a guide who only has at heart our getting lost), and yet this whimsy remains double-edged: Are we to take this claim seriously? Does the speaker really wish to get us lost? And if so, is this necessarily a bad thing, as we customarily assume it would be? What exactly might our getting lost involve?

For one thing, at this point, in our focus on guides getting us lost, we have already lost our way in relation to the road the speaker has just offered to guide us down. Now we hear that this road may “seem as if it should have been a quarry”—but what does this mean? The stone lying as the base of this road now somehow seems as if it should be cut and transported, perhaps as the foundation stones of the houses now lost to us or the gravestones slowly dissolving in the weather. The monolithic stone base of our existence is carved up into the bases of our lives and our deaths. We unexpectedly find ourselves guided on a tour of various stones—a litho tour—ending with the biggest stones of all, the ledges of the nearby mountain:

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.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain. (13-19)

Is there really a storybook about this place or are these lithic striations themselves a kind of storybook calling on us to read and decipher these etchings? The traces of time, whether the worn wagon ruts or the glaciated marks in the landscape as a whole, give us a sense of the ghosts of the past that still “haunt this side of Panther Mountain.” The very stone beneath our feet and before our eyes, whether of graveyards or roads or ledges, speaks to us across the ages, unexpectedly opening up the geomantic Akashic record of past goals and intentions from the Ice Age to the present, from Panther Mountain in the Catskills in their “southeast-northeast” angular path from the North Pole to the Atlantic Ocean. Stone speaks to us in its lithologia like a story book, translating the voices of those now gone before us into their hauntological presencing.

Nor is stone the only haunting presence:

Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins. (20-22)

Interestingly, the speaker never identifies what these forty beings might be, seemingly one per firkin (beer barrel) per cellar hole of the forty now missing buildings. Whatever they are—whether human ghosts or some kind of nature spirits, but we need pay no mind to them—they are joined in this mysterious and perhaps mischievous attention to us (the speaker and the journeyer) by the woods in all their inexperienced excitement:

As for the woods’ excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees. (23-28)

The speaker, in some Pan-like superconsciousness that seems to take in the intentions of all beings in this setting, chastises the trees of the woods for their apparent hubris at having overshadowed the apple trees poked at by the local woodpeckers. These upstart trees have grown too cocky. All signs of rural domesticity seem to be overtaken by now by the slow wild abandon of the ever-encroaching forest.

But if this sense of lost humanity grows too melancholy for the journeying reader, not consoled by the story-book legend told by the scarred stony ledges or the curious peering eyes of the hidden cellar spirits, perhaps a journeying song will provide some homely comforting fantasy:

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. (29-32)

Imagine that this road had some human purpose that makes a space for us in the onward flow of history. We are not alone on this road if we can lead ourselves to believe that these traveling ghosts on the road home might still be here with us somewhere, in the flesh, just enough up beyond or back behind us to be out of sight, and that we are simply following in their path. We are participants in their adventure.

The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost. (33-35)

Did our whimsical guide also guide these prior villagers into their own states of being lost? What happens when two village cultures fade into each other that leads them then to be lost? Notice that the verb here is not “merged” but “faded.” And the word “country,” is this a reference to nation or expanded location or non urban location (as in country versus town)? In any case, a process of historical development leads to a wearing away of local specificity, individual fading away into the general until the individual is lost, subsumed, and eventually invisible. This is a process of ghosting, the production of future haunting, the opening up of a landscape of hauntology. And yet . . .

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
You see is no bigger than a harness gall. (36-40)

We might find ourselves asking once again who is this speaker? Is this speaker trustworthy? What road is he leading us down that has now magically been transformed into a roll-up ladder that we can close behind us and deny access to those who come after we do? While these questions might feel a little ominous at the moment in a world of cellar holes full of hidden eyes taking us in, we should nevertheless remember that Jesus once said, “He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 10:39), and that this particular Biblical statement might carry weight here. We are called on to make our home in this space of lost houses amid the ghost yard of faded cellar holes. The scope of things becomes microscoped down to the worn patches on a horse’s trunk, in the midst of which we are to establish our new home in the elite esoteric company of just the speaker and ourselves (which begs the question, How many are we?).

And what do find here?

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. (41-44)

Suffer the little children to ghost unto me, those long-gone spirits now evidenced solely by what they left behind from their play at being grown. Such nostalgia compels us to weep, for we were all children once with little things to make us glad, and those children who we were are now in some ways lost. And perhaps their parents, our parents, are even more lost in their earnest play, having folded into the collapsing dough of time before their children have (in the usual round of things where parents die first):

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. (45-48)

In a linguistic gesture not common to his poetry, Frost lets his speaker engage the serpentine twistings of familial words and their roots: “Your destination and your destiny” (49):

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.) (49-54)

If we can get inside these words and walk around in the rooms their letters form, we find alternative architectures that show us the kinship between such things as “destination” and “destiny,” how this road we have rolled up behind us has led not just to our destination, our goal, our path in life and beyond, but to that destination that shapes the core and the meaning of our being—our destiny that brings us to the mountain brook that appears and reappears in Frost’s poems, the spring ushering forth from the hoof touch of Pegasus, from which springs “the water of the house . . . yet so near its source” that these waters do not yet flow into their own destructive potential. Water brings life and water brings death; some water brings life beyond death.

This water we are here to drink:

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.) (55-60) 

We have entered the esoteric source in back of the journey we have traveled so far and so long. The speaker anticipated our arrival, one among the select few who are not “the wrong ones.” In Mark 4:11-12 we read:

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.

This Grail goblet stolen from the playhouse of childhood was hidden just for us, just for this moment, protected by the spell woven by the words designed to work on at least two levels at once, the common and the occult, the space between story and parable that encompasses the gnosis that is salvation in the hands of the poet-magus offering us this cup of communion:

Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion. (61-62)

Water: clarity, memory, grounding. When we drink of such waters, we come full circle, “whole again beyond confusion” as we once were back of all this once too much for us.

Virginia Quarterly Review 22.1 (Winter 1946)
Steeple Bush 1947