This is Episode 80 of Poems for the Speed of Life.

Today's poem is "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad" by Robert Browning.

Robert Browning was an English poet of the 19th century, seen as a giant of Victorian literature. (His body is interred at Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey in London.)

Many of Browning’s poems are long (some are book-length) and are often seen as difficult — he was as much a philosopher and psychologist who expressed his philosophical theories and psychological observations in poetic form. But this poem, probably now his best known, is short and easily accessible. 

Critics have pointed out the political tension behind this poem — Browning was writing about the natural and pastoral beauty of England at a time when the British Empire’s colonization efforts were in full flow. That’s a valid observation, but revisionist history is fraught with problems. Who knows how we might have behaved in a past we can scarcely imagine?

Instead I think about this poem in the context not of the political but of the individual. Browning had left England to live in Italy for many years (he died in Venice).

In the poem we witness one man’s powerful yearning for home. We also see how, when distance comes between us and where we believe we belong, we always somehow manage to romanticize the things we think we love, even if our decisions have taken us away from them.

There may be something for us to consider here as we look at our own lives, at who or what we love or where we might feel we belong, and ask whether our decisions are bringing us closer or moving us further away.

⁠⁠⁠You can read the poem here⁠⁠⁠⁠.

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