Julia Boynton Green’s “The Return” begins not with a scene but with a remembered voice: “Look, dearest, this shall be my flower!” she said, pressing a spray of starry jasmine toward the speaker. The line fuses love, command, and scent. “Remember!” she adds, and that imperative becomes the poem’s engine, because within a single year the beloved is dead. The speaker, caught on a winter night of raw grief, refuses to let the grave have the final word. The central idea is not simply that grief remembers; it is that remembered physical sensation—smell—can become a way for the dead to answer.
The poem is tightly shaped as an Italianate sonnet. Its first eight lines move from the buoyant past to the wailing present, enclosed by rhymes that bind sound to meaning. The words “said,” “red,” “dead,” and “fed” chime through the octave, so the beloved’s speech, her beauty, her death, and the speaker’s desperate feeding on memory are drawn into one locked chamber. The rhyme “lay” and “pray” marks the speaker’s condition: snow lies on the ground, but he is “too unresigned to pray.” The volta arrives with a shout rather than a philosophical turn: “Love,” I cried, / “Come back to me—come back!” At this point the poem stops recollecting and begins summoning.
The imagery is built around jasmine. It is “starry,” which makes the small white flower celestial, as though the beloved had handed over a piece of the night sky. Yet the opening is not all sweetness: “buoyant loveliness” is immediately undercut by the blunt statement “In one brief twelvemonth she was dead.” The natural world mirrors grief: wind “wailed,” December’s first snow lay on the ground, and the speaker is “too torn with racking grief to sleep.” The word “racking” suggests torture or tearing; mourning is not passive. He feeds his “misery on remembrance,” as if the past is both nourishment and wound. When he commands the beloved to return, he defies both “heaven” and “tomb,” refusing to accept that she belongs to either realm. The repetition “my own, my own!” is possessive, almost desperate, signaling that the speaker will not be comforted by pious abstractions.
What answers him is not a figure, a voice, or a touch. “A sudden scent of jasmine filled the room.” That single sensory event transforms the “gloom” into something “glorified.” The earlier command—“Remember!”—has become a kind of spell: the scent persists after the body, and when the speaker recalls it at full intensity, it invades the present room. The final line is deliberately understated after so much exclamation, and that restraint makes the presence feel real. The poem’s significance lies in this ambiguity: the jasmine may be memory, hallucination, or a genuine supernatural sign, but the experience of being “not alone” is given as fact. By choosing smell rather than sight, Green uses the sense most intimately connected to memory and emotion. The flower first handed over as a token of love returns as an atmosphere, filling the dark room and dissolving the boundary between then and now.