The title promises a poem about someone who has left home, and the first line seems to deliver: "her home is / the mad country to which / I commit myself". But the migrant turns out to be the speaker, not her. She stays put, and he is the one who crosses over. Her home has become a foreign territory, and the poem is about the choice to move there.
The poem never says who "her" is, and it is better for that. She could be a lover, a wife, a mother. The "lines in her face" suggest someone who has lived a long time, and "mad" might mean illness of the mind or simply a person whose inner world runs by different rules. Judging by the text alone, both readings are open. What is certain is the speaker's attitude: he does not try to bring her back to his country. He goes to hers.
The word that does the most work is "commit". It first sounds like a promise, as in committing yourself to a person or a cause. Placed beside "mad country", though, it also recalls being committed to an institution. The speaker pledges himself and, in the same breath, almost confines himself. Love here is both a vow and a loss of freedom, and the poem lets the two meanings sit together without comment. "Mad" does similar double duty. It can mean insane, furious or wildly alive, and the poem doesn't choose.
The structure is two tercets with no rhyme and no punctuation. Even the capital letters are gone, apart from the lone "I". That detail matters: the speaker's self is the one thing that stands upright on the page, and it is about to be handed over. The line breaks add to this. "The mad country to which" ends on a dangling preposition, so we hang in mid-air, as if mid-journey, until "I commit myself" lands the sentence on its verb. The lines are short and uneven, which gives the poem a quiet, halting rhythm, like someone choosing words carefully in a delicate moment.
Rhyme is absent, but sound still binds the poem. The hard *c* of "country" and "commit" links the place to the promise. In the second stanza a chain of long *i* sounds runs through "time", "like" and "lines", and it echoes the "I" and "myself" of the first stanza. The speaker and the passing of time share a vowel, as if they were already bound together.
The second stanza changes direction. "What a picture" sounds like a spontaneous exclamation, the speaker stepping back to look at her. The picture is "drawn by time", so time is an artist, and the face is its drawing. Then comes the comparison "like the lines in her face", which is cleverly circular: the picture is made of lines, and the lines are the face. The word "lines" also quietly widens into other meanings. Lines are what a map is made of, so the "mad country" suddenly has borders and a landscape, and her face becomes its chart. Lines are also what a poem is made of, and this poem is itself a drawing of her in lines. A reader can take or leave these echoes, but they fit the migration metaphor closely.
There is also a tonal shift. The first stanza is solemn and abstract, all home, country and commitment. The second is tender and visual. The wrinkles are not treated as damage. "What a picture" sounds admiring, even awed, so the speaker seems to find her age and her strangeness beautiful rather than frightening. That keeps the poem from sliding into sentimentality or pity.
The poem is significant for how much it carries in so few words. It turns a familiar situation, loving someone whose world has grown unfamiliar, into a journey with a destination, a border crossing and a map. It refuses to explain, correct or rescue her. It offers only the act of going there and looking, which may be the point: in this poem, love is a willingness to be a stranger in someone else's country.