Anyone who has packed a bag in a mood of grand self-importance will recognise the speaker of "On Setting Out." He is leaving home, but he is not leaving quietly. In five tidy stanzas he bids farewell to parents, pets and furniture with the breezy confidence of someone who has already decided he is destined for greatness. The central idea is a double one: the poem celebrates the thrilling self-belief of the person who sets out, and at the same time lets us see how much of that bravado is childish. The speaker will conquer the world, and then, "briefly, unwillingly," come back so that his family can be proud of him.
The fairy-tale machinery is the first thing to notice. Letters will arrive "brought by a talking stork"; the "Queen of Fairyland" smooths his hair; the mountain is made of diamond and the pillars of the day are golden. This is the furniture of a children's book, and that is surely the point. The speaker's imagination is stocked from nursery stories, so his idea of adventure is a storybook one, in which the sea is obliging and the universe holds still to be conquered. The poem never says he is immature. It lets his images do the telling.
The most revealing line may be the one about the photograph. The speaker sees his family "frozen into a photograph," to be laughed at later "with a contemptuous fondness." The phrase holds the whole poem in miniature. Contempt and fondness sit side by side, and the oxymoronic pairing shows a young person who loves his home yet needs to feel superior to it in order to leave. Notice, too, that he imagines himself already looking back at the photograph, so he has not even gone and is already narrating his own nostalgia. Likewise, the family become "dolls," small enough to be put away, while the speaker is "so fiercely burning like a star." The scale of the comparison is absurd, and the absurdity is the portrait.
Even the sea is recruited into his vanity. It is a "petulant ocean" that "meekly lulls" and will "like a taxi hurry me anywhere." The taxi is a lovely collision of registers, dropping a cheerful piece of modern errand-running into a poem of stars and diamond mountains. It makes the grand voyage sound like a convenience, which is exactly how the speaker, with no experience of real weather, imagines it.
Formally, the poem is calm and controlled, and that calm works against the speaker's frenzy. It is written in regular quatrains rhymed ABAB, in lines that run close to iambic pentameter, with the unhurried steadiness of a ballad or a nursery rhyme. Some of the rhymes are slightly off ("embark"/"stork," "comfy laps"/"icy steps"), which gives the verse a faintly playful, tilted feeling. The repeated "farewell" works like a drumbeat, moving the speaker from "Home" to "cat and dog" to "nurse and nurture," each goodbye smaller and more domestic than the last. "Nurse and nurture" is a nicely chosen pair: he rejects the very care that made him confident enough to leave.
The final stanza turns the poem's confidence into something slightly comic. Having held "the world like a giant key," with "no further sky nor sea to burn," he will return only "to gratify your natural pride in me." The generosity is entirely self-serving, since the homecoming is a favour paid out to his family. Yet "unwillingly" lets a little truth slip: some part of him knows that home still has a pull he would rather not admit.
What makes the poem worth reading is its tone. It neither mocks the speaker nor simply indulges him. It lets his glittering, ridiculous ambition stand beside its tender undercurrent, and leaves us smiling at someone we have all, at some point, been.