Get ready for some time travel, Shmoopers. In "Directive," the speaker asks you to travel "back out of all this now too much with us." In other words, we've gotta go back to simpler times, when the apples were ripe and the brooks were babbling. Why? Because he said so, of course (the poem is called "Directive," after all). But also because if we do so—if we travel back through memory and the past—we'll find the waters that heal us. In other words, the pasts holds the secrets to our redemption.
Questions About Memory and The Past
- Why travel back into the past at all? How would our speaker answer this question?
- In what ways can the past heal us, according to this poem?
- Shmoopers, why do you think the speaker remembers this journey so well? What gives?
Chew on This
The speaker isn't asking us to journey back into our past—he wants us to journey into his past, which we just don't really care about. Sorry, bud.
The speaker is asking us to travel back into a kinda sorta universal past—a shared experience that we can all take part in as human beings.