Most poems about homecoming begin with the homecoming itself. Daniel Whitehead Hicky's "Wanderer's Return" does something cleverer: it spends two-thirds of its length on everything the speaker is *not* going back to. Only in the final stanza do we learn what has replaced all that beauty, and the surprise is that it is a person, not a place.
The poem is built on a long negation. The first eight lines are a catalogue of famous glories: the Aegean "running cold with silver" beneath the moon, a Grecian wind striking wildflowers "like a bell," almond trees lifting pink clouds toward "envious Italian skies," the Nile "shaken by ibis and their cries." These are the postcard destinations of the classical and ancient world, and Hicky renders them with real sensuous generosity. The sea is silver, the wind has "warm blue fingers," the clouds are pink. A poet who wanted to dismiss travel as overrated would not write like this. The point is that the speaker has seen the best the world offers, and that is exactly what gives the renunciation its weight. Giving up something mediocre costs nothing; giving up the Aegean costs a great deal.
The imagery also carries a quiet pattern of sound and touch. The wind has fingers and rings flowers like a bell; the Nile is "shaken" by cries. Even the scenery is restless, striking, lifting, waking, shaking. Everything abroad is in motion, which suits a wanderer's life. Against this, the final stanza brings stillness: "my flags are furled." The phrase is a neat piece of nautical shorthand. A ship furls its sails or flags when it has reached port, so the speaker's travelling life is folded away like cloth.
The turn arrives with "I have come home," and then the poem's central metaphor takes over. Home is not a house or a country but "your heart's bright harbor." The unnamed "you" is the beloved, and the speaker becomes "a captive" in that harbor, whose "shining waters bind my world." The word "captive" is the most interesting choice in the poem. Captivity is normally something to escape, yet here it is freely accepted, even celebrated. The adjective "bright," used earlier for the moon's spell and now for the harbor, quietly links the two: the beloved's heart outshines the moonlit Aegean. The harbor's waters also "bind" the speaker's world, so love is not merely one pleasure among many but the boundary and the whole of what remains.
Formally, the poem is tidy and traditional. It is written in rhymed quatrains, with the second and fourth lines of each stanza chiming (spell/bell, skies/cries, furled/world), and the lines move in a smooth, mostly iambic pulse that suits a reflective, almost song-like voice. The rhymes are worth noticing. "Furled" and "world" close the poem together, so that the act of ending the journey and the shape of the speaker's new universe sound alike. The anaphora of "Not... Not... Nor... Not" gives the opening a slow, deliberate rhythm, like someone counting treasures before laying them down, and the sentence does not resolve until the third stanza finally supplies its verb and its reversal.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint and its logic. It does not announce that love is better than travel; it lets the reader feel the sacrifice first, then shows the speaker settling into a different kind of abundance. The ending is a little paradoxical, since the freest figure imaginable, the wanderer, finds freedom in being held. Readers may wonder whether this is romantic or a touch confining, and the poem leaves room for both responses. Its achievement is to make a very old idea, that home is a person, feel fresh by first making the whole world look beautiful and then letting it go.