Six short lines, and a whole philosophy of escape gets deflated by a worn-out piece of clothing. The speaker climbs to "a high place" and stays there until "a hole in my coat" makes him "come home." That is the entire plot. The central idea is that the wish to withdraw from ordinary life, whether for peace, solitude, or something spiritual, always runs into the needs of the body and the claims of the everyday. Even a retreat has to end, and not necessarily for a noble reason.
The title does a lot of work. "Retreat" can mean a chosen period of quiet, as in a meditation retreat, but it can also mean giving ground, falling back, losing. The poem holds both meanings at once. The speaker's withdrawal reads as a search for stillness, yet the way it ends, forced home by a tear in the fabric, looks more like surrender. "High place" has a faintly sacred ring, as if the speaker were seeking something above ordinary life, but the poem never says where it is or what he found there. We get the altitude and nothing else, which suits a poem so wary of big claims.
The language is almost entirely plain. Nearly every word is a single syllable, and "almost" is the only exception. That plainness gives the voice a dry, understated humor. Notice "took to," a casual phrase, like taking to one's bed, that makes the climb sound more like instinct than plan. And notice "forced," a passive and slightly comic word. The speaker does not decide to leave; he is overruled by his own clothing. The grand gesture is undercut by the humblest detail available.
The form quietly supports this. The poem is one sentence stretched over five lines, followed by a three-word sentence. The line breaks keep interrupting the thought: "a high / place" splits an adjective from its noun, and "forced by / a hole" leaves us hanging on a preposition, so the reader has to wait for the cause, just as the speaker waits on the hilltop. There is no regular meter, but there is more patterning than first appears. "High" and "by" rhyme at the ends of lines one and three, and "coat" rhymes with "wrote" at the ends of lines four and six. The pairs frame the poem, and the second one is the more telling, because it links the coat to the act of writing. A long "o" sound also runs through the final lines, in "hole," "coat," "home," and "wrote," so that the sound itself seems to be drawing the speaker downhill and back toward the house. Judging by the sound alone, "hole" may also faintly echo "whole," a word for the completeness the speaker was perhaps hoping to find and the coat no longer has.
Then comes the last line: "I almost wrote." It is the strangest and most open moment in the poem. Wrote what? A letter, a poem, an account of the high place? The verb has no object, and the gap is the point. The speaker returns home with something unsaid, or at least unrecorded. There is a nice irony here too, since the poem we are reading is itself a piece of writing. The poem can be read as the thing he "almost" did, a few lines that admit the experience couldn't quite be put into words. That is an inference, but the poem's tight, hesitant phrasing invites it.
What makes "Retreat" worth reading is how much it leaves out and how little it pretends. It refuses to turn solitude into a triumph or a lesson. Instead it offers a small, honest comedy of human limits: we want to rise above things, and then we get cold. Yet the poem does not mock the impulse. The brief stay on the height still happened, and the near-writing at the end suggests it mattered enough to leave a trace, even if only an unfinished one. In six lines it shows that a retreat is not a clean break from life but a pause that life eventually interrupts, and it leaves the reader to decide whether that interruption is a failure or a relief.