Away From Home Are Some And I - Analysis

A city full of homes, and still an emigrant

The poem’s quiet argument is that home is not a place you can simply swap; it is a bodily and mental habit, and even in a Metropolis of Homes you can remain fundamentally outside. Dickinson begins with a mild, almost conversational solidarity: Away from Home are some and I. The speaker is not uniquely stranded; exile is shared. Yet she names herself bluntly An Emigrant to be, as if leaving is not only a condition but a role she must now inhabit.

The phrase Metropolis of Homes carries the poem’s central irony: she stands in a place crowded with domestic spaces, yet that abundance doesn’t solve the problem. The closing shrug Is easy, possibly matters. Possibly makes the “ease” sound like something she’s repeating because it’s expected, not because it’s true. The tone is tentative, as if she is testing out optimism and already hearing it fail.

The foreign sky as the real border

The poem turns on a surprising object: not foreign streets or foreign language, but The Habit of a Foreign Sky. The sky is what you live under without thinking; calling it a habit suggests home is built from repetition so deep it feels like nature. The second stanza drops the earlier uncertainty and states the cost plainly: We difficult acquire. What was “easy, possibly” becomes hard, not because the new place lacks houses, but because the new atmosphere resists becoming automatic. Home, here, is as intimate as the light above your head.

Children backing away: the body remembers

The simile of children sharpens this into a scene you can almost see: As Children, who remain in Face even as their Feet retire. They keep their faces turned toward what they’re leaving, backing away step by step. That detail turns emigration into a physical contradiction: moving forward while looking back. It also suggests that distance increases longing—The more their Feet retire—as if the act of leaving intensifies the need to keep contact through gaze. The tension is painful but controlled: the poem refuses melodrama, yet admits a deep reflex of attachment.

What if the self cannot live under a new sky?

If the sky is a habit, then emigration isn’t just relocation; it is a demand to rewrite the background of the self. The poem’s final image implies you can leave without ever fully turning around. And if you never turn, the new place may fill with houses—whole “metropolises”—but not with home.