The speaker makes a heartfelt promise to return to a beloved homeland. He lists the things he longs to experience again: watching forest fires burn under a sapphire sky, lingering by streams and bending grasses, and hearing the fiddle and fife at village dances. Every image is full of warmth and sensory detail, as if memory itself can bring relief. The tone is wistful and tender, but the repeated line “I shall return” gives it quiet determination. Only at the end does the poem reveal that these memories stand against “long, long years of pain,” so the imagined return feels both joyful and deeply needed. The mood is one of longing—not bitter, but full of hope and homesickness at once.
I Shall Return — Summary
I shall return again; I shall return To laugh and love and watch with wonder-eyes At golden noon the forest fires burn, Wafting their blue-black smoke to sapphire skies. I shall return to loiter by the streams That bathe the brown blades of the bending grasses, And realize once more my thousand dreams Of waters rushing down the mountain passes. I shall return to hear the fiddle and fife Of village dances, dear delicious tunes That stir the hidden depths of native life, Stray melodies of dim remembered runes. I shall return, I shall return again, To ease my mind of long, long years of pain.