Everything about the place in "Vacation" is lovely, and the speaker is miserable anyway. That small contradiction drives the whole poem. Elizabeth von Schonberg gives us someone surrounded by mountains, pines, a summer moon and kind friends, who cannot enjoy any of it because the one person she wants is missing. Then, in the last line, the poem swerves into something much lighter than its sighing opening promised.
The structure is a series of questions, and the questions are the heart of the poem. "Why do I see in every star, your eyes?" "Why do I keep remembering your arms?" The speaker sounds baffled, almost put out, as if her feelings were failing to follow the holiday brochure. But of course she knows the answer. The "why" is rhetorical, a way of saying that love is stubborn and no landscape can talk her out of it. The poem is built on the gap between what the setting offers and what the heart demands.
The imagery moves from the sky down to the speaker's body. First come the stars, which she reads as eyes, so that the whole night sky becomes a portrait of one face. Then the pines and mountains, where the word "strength" quietly triggers the memory of "arms." Then the moon "drenched" in "bliss," a generous, almost overflowing word, which makes the loneliness underneath sharper. Notice that nature is never described coldly. The beauty is real, and that is exactly what makes her absent beloved so inescapable. She sees stars and thinks of eyes, sees strength and thinks of arms. Her mind keeps converting scenery into him.
The fourth couplet is the emotional low point. She wakes to "your kiss" and finds "but trees and sky," a dream dissolving into emptiness. The dash after "sky" works like a held breath, and the phrase "of you, no sign" is flat and blunt. Even the response of the world is pitiful: "A lone bird's cry was all that answered mine!" The bird is lonely too, and its cry echoes hers. The exclamation mark stops short of melodrama, because the line is a little self-mocking, the sort of rueful joke a person makes about her own misery.
Formally, the poem is a string of rhyming couplets (lies/eyes, charms/arms, bliss/kiss, sign/mine, gay/today, heaven/seven), and the rhymes do real work. Some are tender ("charms" and "arms"), but the final pair is deliberately comic. The lines run in a steady, bouncy rhythm, close to the tread of light verse, and that lilt keeps the poem from sinking into self-pity. It feels spoken aloud, like a letter composed with a half-smile.
The turn comes in the fifth couplet. The speaker lists the pleasures she is supposed to feel: the friends are "kind," the place is "very gay," someone has called it "a paradise." These flat, reported compliments sound like polite things said to a hostess. She quotes the word "paradise" and sets her own private version of "heaven" against it. Then comes the punchline: "My train arrives on Thursday, dear, at seven!" After all the poetic language of stars and moons, the poem ends on a timetable. Heaven turns out to be an arrival time, and the unromantic precision of "Thursday" and "seven" is where the romance lies. Her whole paradise is a person on a platform.
The sudden shift also changes how we read what came before. We realise that the poem is addressed directly to the beloved ("dear"), and that the earlier lament was a love letter all along, a way of saying how badly she misses him, with the cheerful news of her return as the reward at the end.
What makes the poem worth reading is its tone. Many love poems about absence stay mournful from start to finish. This one lets the speaker be sad, honest and funny in under a dozen lines, and it suggests that the most convincing proof of love is not grand language but being unable to enjoy paradise without someone to share it with.