Homesickness rarely announces itself with grand gestures. More often it shows up as a craving for something tiny. Browning's speaker, stuck somewhere that is not England, longs for no monument or city, only for a tree coming into leaf. The poem's quiet argument is that absence makes ordinary things glow.
The opening sigh, "Oh, to be in England / Now that April's there," places the speaker elsewhere, and the title confirms it. The word "there" does the work. Then comes "unaware." Spring, in this version, doesn't arrive with fanfare. Whoever wakes in England simply notices it one morning. Browning's eye goes first to the scruffy, low parts of the scene, "the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf" around the elm's trunk, which are "in tiny leaf." The plain, small words suit the subject. The stanza closes on "In England--now!" Both words are ones the speaker cannot have, a place and a moment. "England" is even used as a rhyme with itself in lines one and three, as if the speaker can't stop saying it.
The form feels improvised, like a speaker talking himself into a happier place. Line lengths lurch from the short, five-syllable opening to long lines that tumble forward in a rush of observed things. The first stanza settles into rhymed couplets (leaf/sheaf, bough/now). The second is looser, mixing couplets with interlocking rhymes, and it leans on soft, lilting double rhymes like "follows/swallows" and "clover/over." The poem's grammar also slips. It begins with a wish ("Oh, to be") but by "Hark! where my blossomed pear tree in the hedge / Leans to the field" the speaker is listening and looking as if he were standing there. The possessive "my" suggests the memory has become so vivid that he has, for a moment, walked back into it.
The thrush is the poem's best joke. This "wise" bird "sings each song twice over, / Lest you should think he never could recapture / The first fine careless rapture!" The rhyme of "recapture" with "rapture" repeats a sound just as the bird repeats a song, and the poem itself says "England" twice and "twice over" in the same breath. There is a paradox here. A "careless" rapture has to be recaptured deliberately. One way to read this is as a comment on memory, or on poetry itself, which tries to bring back a spontaneous feeling by careful craft.
The ending turns with a touch of comedy. The fields may "look rough with hoary dew," but "all will be gay when noontide wakes anew / The buttercups." The verb "wakes" echoes the earlier "whoever wakes in England," so the human and the natural worlds rise together. Buttercups are called "the little children's dower." A dower is a dowry, a gift of wealth, and Browning gives that grand word to a weed-like roadside flower that costs nothing. Then comes the sneer: they are "far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!" The word "this" points at whatever is in front of him. Judging by the imagery, he is somewhere warmer, where showier plants grow. His verdict is part grumpy, part playful. He knows he is being a little unfair to his surroundings, and that self-aware sulkiness keeps the poem from turning syrupy.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it shows how nostalgia really works. The England he remembers contains only blossom, birdsong and bright mornings, and no mud, no cold, no grey weeks between April and May. The poem seems to understand this. Its speaker is a distinct, warm, slightly biased voice, not a neutral observer, and that makes the longing believable. At the same time, the poem's attention to detail, from the chaffinch on its orchard bough to the dewdrops at the bent spray's edge, teaches a lesson that has nothing to do with travel: the things you take for granted may be the very things you will one day ache for.