Love Were Going Home Now - Analysis

The poem’s claim: love is a migratory creature that still needs a nest

This poem treats love as something both lavishly roaming and unmistakably domestic. The speaker begins with a simple decision—we're going home now—but quickly frames it as a law of feeling: passion can travel the world, yet it cannot live forever in pure flight. The voice is tender and assured, speaking to Love as if it were a companion with a body and needs. The homecoming isn’t defeat; it’s the necessary next phase of desire.

Home arrives first: vines, trellis, and honeysuckle feet

Before we even hear where home is, we feel it physically. The vines clamber over the trellis, turning the house into a living thing that climbs and grips. Then summer itself becomes a visitor that will arrive even before you, stepping into the beloved’s bedroom on honeysuckle feet. That phrase makes the season intimate and sensual—soft, fragrant, almost barefoot—so the return home feels like returning to the body as much as to a place.

The world-tour of kisses: exotic abundance and restless motion

The poem’s middle swells into a travel-chant: Our nomadic kisses wandered through Armenia, Ceylon, and the YangTse. These locations aren’t offered like a map; they’re transformed into taste and creature—Armenia as a dollop of unearthed sweetness, Ceylon as a green dove. The kisses don’t just visit; they re-imagine each place as something edible or winged, as if the lovers’ desire remakes geography into sensation. Even the YangTse becomes a moral model: its old patience calmly dividing the day from the night, suggesting time itself is something love has been skimming over—until now.

The turn at And now: from flight to the wall

The poem pivots sharply with And now, dearest, trading the bright sprawl of the itinerary for the hard clarity of return. Crossing the crackling sea, the lovers become two blind birds aiming for their wall. It’s a surprising image: we expect a nest in a tree, but we get stone, boundary, and impact. The wall implies limits—edge of land, edge of wandering, edge of what bodies can do. Yet it’s also a place of belonging: the birds have a wall the way the lovers have a home, something they can find even without sight.

The contradiction that resolves the poem: rocks as refuge, not prison

The closing lines admit the tension the whole poem has been circling: love cannot always fly without resting. The speaker doesn’t renounce the nomadic kisses; he simply insists that flight requires a landing. That’s why the destination isn’t a soft pastoral cliché but the wall and the rocks of the sea: endurance, roughness, a stable surface that can take repeated returns. The final assertion—Our kisses head back home—makes home not the opposite of desire but its proper habitat, the place where wandering becomes sustainable.

One sharper question the poem leaves behind

If the lovers return like blind birds, is the homecoming chosen freely, or obeyed like instinct? The poem praises rest, but its home is also a wall—a structure you can nest against, or collide with. Neruda lets both meanings stand, so the sweetness of honeysuckle and the hardness of rocks become two sides of the same necessity.