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 –
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.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
What to make of a guide who only has at heart our getting lost? Later he will challenge us to know whether we are “lost enough to find ourselves by now”– one of the moments that transform this walk into a quest for a wholeness beyond confusion. In so many of Frost’s poems, the guide is some wild creature, often one with wings, who directs the walker’s eye to some detail he might otherwise have missed, some moment of Emersonian seeing (the butterfly in “The Tuft of Flowers,” for example, or the small bird in “The Wood Pile.” But here the guide is the speaker of the poem himself, and his manner is at once mischievous and demanding– part trickster, part threshold guardian. The poem is full of verbs in the imperative mood, entangling us, from the shifting negations of the opening lines, in the work of making believe that will lead us, in the end, to wholeness.
