Homecoming
Homecoming - meaning Summary
Aging, Memory, Lost Desire
Lowell's 'Homecoming' reflects on aging and the distance between past and present. The speaker notes old companions' retirement and remembers a youthful love whose early intensity gave way to repetitive decline. He mourns lost fertility, fading beauty, and an increasing estrangement from a town that favors the young. Memory recurs as a searching, glazed-eyed longing, leaving the speaker solitary and alienated, closed off even from a dog.
Read Complete AnalysesWhat was is . . . since 1930; the boys in my old gang are senior partners. They start up bald like baby birds to embrace retirement. At the altar of surrender, I met you in the hour of credulity. How your misfortune came out clearly to us at twenty. At the gingerbread casino, how innocent the nights we made it on our Vesuvio martinis with no vermouth but vodka to sweeten the dry gin-- the lash across my face that night we adored . . . soon every night and all, when your sweet, amorous repetition changed. Fertility is not to the forward, or beauty to the precipitous-- things gone wrong clothe summer with gold leaf. Sometimes I catch my mind circling for you with glazed eye-- my lost love hunting your lost face. Summer to summer, the poplars sere in the glare-- it's a town for the young, they break themselves against the surf. No dog knows my smell.
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