A quiet meditation on homesickness and the strange pain of receiving word from a place you have left behind. The speaker recalls standing with someone on a prairie, letters from home lying unopened, while the mere phrase “Letters from Home” brings back vivid memories: lighted windows, dusk, birdsong, green hills, and the sweetness of youth. But the second half turns bitter. After years of distance, failure, and exile, the speaker has made a kind of peace with being far away. Then the letters arrive, too late, and they reopen a wound that had nearly healed. They remind the speaker that home can never again be what it was. The mood is wistful and heavy with regret, caught between cherished memory and the ache of knowing that the past is unreachable.
Letters from Home — Summary
Letters from Home, you said. Unopened they lay on the shack-sill As you stared with me at the prairie And the foothills bathed with light. Letters from Home, you whispered, And the homeland casements shone Through the homeland dusk again, And the sound of the birds came back, And the soft green sorrowing hills, And the sigh of remembered names, The wine of remembered youth,-- Oh, these came back, Back with those idle words Of "Letters from Home"!
Over such desolate leagues, Over such sundering seas, Out of the lost dead years, After the days of waiting, After the ache had died, After the brine of failure, After the outland peace Of the trail that never turns back, Now that the night-wind whispers How Home shall never again be home, And now that the arms of the Far-away Have drawn us close to its breast, Out of the dead that is proved not dead, To waken the sorrow that should have died, To tighten the throat that never shall sing, To sadden the trails that we still must ride, Too late they come to us here-- Our Letters from Home!