I Learned at Least What Home Could Be
poem 944
I Learned at Least What Home Could Be - meaning Summary
Domestic Discovery and Paradox
The poem describes a speaker’s discovery of an idealized home through shared domestic rituals and simple daily pleasures. Scenes—mornings in the garden, afternoons together, evening return—build a sense of intimate companionship that shapes moral and spiritual life. Yet the speaker ends with a paradox: this realized “home” both seems true and remains not fully attainable, felt as a transient, haunting sight like a setting sun that promises a brighter dawn.
Read Complete AnalysesI learned at least what Home could be How ignorant I had been Of pretty ways of Covenant How awkward at the Hymn Round our new Fireside but for this This pattern of the Way Whose Memory drowns me, like the Dip Of a Celestial Sea What Mornings in our Garden guessed What Bees for us to hum With only Birds to interrupt The Ripple of our Theme And Task for Both When Play be done Your Problem of the Brain And mine some foolisher effect A Ruffle or a Tune The Afternoons Together spent And Twilight in the Lanes Some ministry to poorer lives Seen poorest thro’ our gains And then Return and Night and Home And then away to You to pass A new diviner care Till Sunrise take us back to Scene Transmuted Vivider This seems a Home And Home is not But what that Place could be Afflicts me as a Setting Sun Where Dawn knows how to be
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