Most poems about coming home are poems about arriving. Daniel Whitehead Hicky's "The Return" is more interesting because the real event happens before the speaker gets there. He stands on a hilltop, sees the farm below, starts to hurry, and then the place comes out to meet him. The apple trees "came running half the way" and lift him in an embrace. What begins as a quiet, nostalgic homecoming turns, in its last four lines, into something close to a fairy tale, and a scene about memory becomes a scene about forgiveness.
The opening sets the emotional terms plainly. "It was a fitting time to come back home" has the tone of a settled, almost formal decision, as though the speaker has waited for the right moment. But the next lines admit what the waiting cost: "Too long my feet had wandered, and the years / Like weeds had grown between us, shoulder-high." The simile is a good one. Weeds are what happen to a place, or a relationship, when nobody tends it, and they grow without anyone intending harm. The distance between speaker and home is not a dramatic break but a slow neglect. The poem never tells us why he left or what he was doing; the poem suggests only a long absence and a quiet sense of guilt about it.
The imagery then does the work of memory. Through tears he sees "my long lost childhood in the apple boughs," a line that fuses place and time so that the trees are not simply trees but childhood made visible. Beneath them is "a willow I had planted beside the house," the one concrete detail of the speaker's own hand in the landscape. It matters that he planted it: it has kept growing without him, "greening" under the sky, which is a small proof that the home he abandoned went on living. The farm is described as "Waiting in sunlight for me," and that word "waiting" quietly personifies the whole scene, preparing us for the moment when the trees actually move.
The sound of the poem supports this gentle mood. The lines are mostly iambic pentameter, the long, easy line of English reflective verse, and the rhyme is loose rather than strict. "Years" and "tears" chime, "sky" and "I" echo each other, "again" and "plain" pair up, but the pattern drifts and sometimes lapses, as speech does when emotion rises. There are no sharp breaks between sentences and lines; one thought spills into the next ("A long, long way through time, was back again / With all my heart had lost"). The repeated "long, long" slows the line to the pace of a tired traveler. Then comes the exclamation "O nothing now!", where the poem's restraint briefly cracks and relief breaks through.
The turn arrives with "suddenly, I declare." That mild, slightly old-fashioned phrase is a small piece of comedy and surprise: the speaker is as startled by what happens as the reader. Everything speeds up. He "quickened my steps," and the trees run toward him, so the long delay of the opening is answered by a rush of movement. Here the key word is "shamefully." He meets the trees "face to face" and feels shame, which tells us that his guilt over the years away is real, not just a mood. The response he gets is not reproach but welcome: "blossoming boughs," a "sun-drenched day," and finally the "forgiving embrace." The adjective is placed at the very end of the poem, so that forgiveness is the last thing we are left with.
What makes the poem worth reading is this reversal. We expect the returning traveler to be the active one, reclaiming the past. Instead the speaker is received, even carried ("swung me up"), like a child lifted by a parent. The landscape forgives him without being asked, and in doing so the poem suggests that home is not just a place we return to but a presence that can take us back. It is a simple, warm idea, and the poem earns it by letting the impossible image of running trees feel, in the moment, completely natural.