Human beings need warmth and light because the world outside is enormous, dark, wet, and cold. In response, someone built a house — not perfectly efficient, but full of care. The stairs and rooms reveal a builder working in eager doubt, using more timber than necessary, trusting his own half-fearful sense of what was good. He put his mind, his labor, and even his heart into the bricks and hearthstones. That personal sacrifice is what keeps the house feeling warm, safe, bright, and honest long after the building is finished. Now the house waits for a new occupant to bring another heart and fire to it. The mood is tender and quietly celebratory: building is seen as an act of love, a flawed but deeply human answer to the vast darkness outside.
Home for Love — Summary
Because the earth is vast and dark And wet and cold; Because man's heart wants warmth and light Lest it grow old;
Therefore the house was built--wall, roof And brick and beam, By a lost hand following the lost Delight of a dream,
And room and stair show how that hand Groped in eager doubt, With needless weight of teasing timber Matching his thought--
Such fond superfluousness of strength In wall and wood As his half-wise, half-fearful eye Deemed only good.
His brain he built into the house, Laboured his bones; He burnt his heart into the brick And red hearth-stones.
It is his blood that makes the house Still warm, safe, bright, Honest as aim and eye and hand, As clean, as light.
Because the earth is vast and dark The house was built-- Now with another heart and fire To be fulfilled.