The title does the first piece of work. Read as one word, "homesick" names the ache of someone far from home. But the slash splits it into "home" and "sick," and suddenly the word can mean sick of home, or sick at home. The poem lives in the gap between those readings. Its speaker is not away at all. They have arrived, and the trouble is the arrival.
The first couplet sets this up with a sideways confession: "the wren might suspect / I am finished with elsewhere." The speaker does not admit the feeling directly. They imagine a small, unshowy bird guessing it, and even that guess is hedged by "might." "Finished with elsewhere" is a strange, striking phrase, because it treats elsewhere as something that can be used up, like a meal or a book. It could mean the speaker is tired of travelling, or has given up dreaming of somewhere better. Either way, the obvious consequence, contentment at home, does not follow.
The second couplet delivers the surprise: "and home I find / somewhat sour." The word order is inverted, with "home" pushed forward, and the line break matters. "And home I find" stops for a moment and sounds like a discovery, as if the speaker has found their way back. Then "somewhat sour" curdles it. The understatement is telling. Home is not bitter or hateful, only a little off, like milk a day past its best. A hissing thread of s-sounds runs through the poem (suspect, finished, elsewhere, somewhat, sour, silent), and it gives the whole thing a faintly sour, sibilant mutter.
The third couplet offers a reason, though a loose one: "being there so often / at the end of the road." The cause is familiarity. Notice "being there," which is oddly detached for a home. It does not say "living" or "staying," as though the speaker were a visitor to their own life. "The end of the road" works twice. It may be the literal position of a house (a place where a wren might plausibly nest), and it is also the idiom for finality, the point past which nothing more is on offer. The long o of "home," "so" and "road" lingers in the ear, a slow, resigned vowel.
The last couplet is the most open: "too late to get / her silent way." Who is "her"? The poem never says. She could be the wren, imagined as female and gone quiet. She could be a person, or the place itself. "Get her silent way" can mean to win her way, to persuade, or to reach and understand her manner of being. I read the bird as the likeliest candidate, since she is the poem's only other presence, and her silence stands against the speaker's restless inner chatter. But the ambiguity is deliberate in its effect. "Too late" closes the poem on a loss we cannot quite name. There is a small echo as well: "way" is a near-synonym of "road," so the poem ends back on the image of a path, now one that leads nowhere new.
The form supports all this. There are eight short lines in four couplets, with no rhyme and no punctuation. Almost everything is lowercase, so the capital "I" stands out, a lone, exposed figure among quiet words. Each couplet is a complete thought broken across a line, which gives the poem the feel of a mind drifting from one reluctant realisation to the next. With no full stops, nothing is ever finally declared, which suits a speaker who can only say that home is "somewhat" sour.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. It turns the familiar idea of homesickness inside out and admits something people seldom say aloud: coming home does not always cure the longing, and the wish for elsewhere can wear out and leave nothing in its place. It manages this without drama, through a hedge, a bird and a pun in the title.