Few poems say so plainly what they want. "Longing" announces its subject in its title and then repeats it, word for word, at the head of each stanza: "Today my soul is longing." The speaker is homesick, though not necessarily for a house or a person. What she misses is a place made of trees, first its smell and then its voice. The poem tells us nothing about where she is now or why she cannot be among the pines, and that silence is part of its effect. The absence is felt but never explained, so the longing seems to belong to anyone who has ever missed a landscape.
The two stanzas are built as a deliberate pair. The first is about smell: "the odor of the pines," "the aromatic smells / Springing up from hidden wells." The second is about hearing: "the voices of the pines," "the whisperings that tell / How some lovely thing befell." The structure is almost identical, with the same opening line, the same closing image of "the needles on the ground," and the same movement from a general wish to a particular, slightly mysterious detail. Poems of longing often circle rather than advance, and this one does exactly that, returning to its starting point as a mind does when it keeps worrying at a memory.
The first stanza's imagery is physical and generous. The scent does not simply drift; it springs "from hidden wells," as though the forest keeps reservoirs of fragrance underground. Then the air is "laden rankly / For a mile or so around." "Rankly" is a surprising word. Today it suggests something unpleasant, but here it conveys sheer abundance, a smell so thick it is almost a weight. The comfortable, offhand "a mile or so" gives the line a spoken, unfussy quality, as if the speaker were describing a real walk she knows well rather than constructing a grand poetic effect.
The second stanza moves from the senses to story. The pines "whisper," and what they whisper is "how some lovely thing befell, / Long ago." The poem never says what the lovely thing was, and this restraint is its most interesting move. The forest becomes a keeper of unrecorded events, and the speaker longs not only for the place but for a past she can only half hear. The trees stand "round" in "arches," their branches "interlacing," and the picture is of a natural cathedral, enclosed and quiet, where whispering feels appropriate. The soul that is "longing" in the refrain finds a fitting setting: a space that is both sheltering and sacred.
The sound of the poem supports all this. The lines are short, mostly four-beat with a falling, trochaic lilt ("Today my soul is longing"), which gives a gentle, swaying motion, rather like branches in light wind. The rhymes are simple and satisfying: "pines" echoes "wells" only indirectly, but "tell" and "befell" chime, and "around" and "ground" close each stanza with a soft thud, the sound of settling. The repeated "ground" is the final note of both stanzas, leaving us at the forest floor, where the needles lie. Notice also how often the poem leans on long, open vowels and soft consonants: "longing," "pines," "whisperings," "interlacing." Even without a pine tree in sight, the language hushes.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it achieves with so little. It does not argue or explain; it offers two senses, a refrain, and one tantalizing hint of a story. Its emotional force comes from understatement and repetition, from the way "Today" sets the longing in an ordinary moment rather than a dramatic one. Nostalgia here is quiet and sensory, rooted in particular things such as scent, sound, and fallen needles, rather than in grand statements about loss. For students, it is a good example of how a simple form can carry real feeling: the poem's plainness is not a limitation but its method.