The poem begins with a confession that sounds almost like a complaint. The speaker wants to love things "all by myself, / not looking sidelong to see / if others are loving them, too." She wants to escape borrowed enthusiasm, the habit of checking the room before deciding how to feel. The poem never abandons that wish, yet it ends somewhere the opening hardly predicts: outside a lit kitchen, with a husband and a teacup.
The first stanza trains us to look at nature through things made by hand. The sky is "old blue glass held in by a tracery of trees," as if the woods were a leaded window. Snow becomes "falling cold stars," which keeps the grandeur but lets it stay cold and slightly distant. Even the owl gets a voice. Its "cynical question– / Who's awake?" turns a hoot into a challenge, a night-time sceptic doubting that anyone is paying attention. The dash and the clipped line make the reader stop, the way a sound in the dark makes you stop. The owl's doubt is half answered already, since the speaker is out on snowshoes, awake and watching.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The poem is free verse, close to speech. Line length does the shaping instead. The sky line is long and crowded, as if the eye is travelling across it, while "Who's awake?" is brief and sharp. Sound does quiet work where rhyme might have been: "lace of soft snow clouds" is hushed with its s and l sounds, and "lamplight gleaming" carries the same liquid light. The stanzas are uneven, seven lines and then eight, which suits a walk that wanders and then turns toward something.
The second stanza tells the story, and a small shift in vocabulary carries the real argument. The moon becomes "lamplight," and the clouds become "lace." Natural things keep being described in household terms, as though the speaker's mind is heading home before her feet are. The title says as much. "Coming Toward Home" describes movement, not arrival, and the joy comes on the way. The "uncurtained window" also echoes the earlier "old blue glass." The sky was like a window, and now a window holds a scene as vivid as a sky. Inside that frame is a second frame, "the painting of a summer orchard," so a green season hangs on the wall while winter presses at the glass. Then comes the only living figure: "my husband moving across the kitchen with his teacup." The sequence moves from art to furniture to person, and the person is doing the least dramatic thing imaginable.
This is how the poem answers its opening wish. The speaker watches from outside, unseen, with nobody beside her to measure her response, so her feeling is entirely her own. Yet what she loves is a shared life. Judging by the scene, her husband doesn't know he is being watched, so she loves him as he is when no one is performing for anyone. The poem suggests that wanting to love alone isn't the same as wanting to be alone. It means wanting a feeling that hasn't been handed to you by anyone else's reaction.
The last line, "I thought I would break for joy," is plain, almost entirely one-syllable words, and the hedge of "I thought" keeps it modest. The verb is worth pausing on, though. Breaking belongs to glass and china, and the poem has just given us blue glass, a window and a teacup. Whether or not the echo was intended, joy here feels like something fragile being tested by its own weight.
The poem is significant for what it trusts. It sets up grand, cold, impersonal beauty (stars, moon, owl) and then lets a lit window and a man crossing a kitchen outweigh all of it. It treats ordinary domestic happiness as something worth a whole poem's build-up, without sentimentality, because it arrives as a surprise to the speaker herself.