Few poems titled "An Invitation" are quite so unsure about who is being invited, and where. G. Frank Goodpasture's fourteen lines look at first like a simple summons to a familiar patch of forest, but the longer one reads, the stranger and more tender the situation becomes. The speaker addresses a "you" who knows these "wooded acres," who loves the smell of the first trilliums and "could always tell / The hour the wood-hare feeds." Yet the speaker is the one waiting, and the "you" must be coaxed back. The phrase "the sure, sweet faith that we shall meet again" hints that this reunion is not an ordinary one. The poem never says why the two are apart, and judging by the text alone, it is wise not to pretend we know. What it gives us instead is a feeling: patient, confident longing, offered in the language of a walk in the woods.
That quiet confidence is the poem's central idea. The speaker doesn't plead; they reassure. "I may not lose" the faith of reunion, they say, and the word "may" works almost like a vow, a refusal to let doubt in. The invitation, in other words, is really an act of trust. The speaker waits "beneath this spruce," fixed in place, while the beloved is imagined drifting back on "truant feet" that "come lightly down the glade." "Truant" is a lovely, slightly teasing word, the sort you use for a child who has skipped school. It forgives the absence before the absent one has even arrived.
The form supports this gentleness. The poem is a sonnet, fourteen lines in iambic rhythm, though the lines stretch and contract: some run to five beats, others, like "As thrushes fly, yet deem this wood our home," settle into a longer, more leisurely pace. The indentation of lines two and three in each quatrain gives the page a rocking, wave-like shape, as if the verse itself were swaying. The rhymes are intricate. The first four lines rhyme "choose / smell / tell / lose," a pattern that loops back on itself, and the following stanza ("again / find / wind / when") half-rhymes and slips, so that the sense of closure keeps being postponed. The poem's last word, "home," only has its partner, "roam," one line earlier, as though the wandering and the homecoming were already in the same breath.
Imagery does most of the emotional work. Goodpasture chooses small, specific things: trilliums, ferns, spruce, feathery moss, a wood-hare, thrushes. None is grand, and that is the point. These are details only a person who has truly looked at a place would notice, and the speaker offers them as proof of shared memory. The senses are layered, too. We get smell ("the smell / Of spring's first trilliums"), taste or touch in the "spiced" wind, and sight in the "frail bud." The moss lies "on velvet couch," turning the forest floor into a drawing room, a place built for resting. Nature here is not wild but hospitable, arranged for reunion.
Then the final quatrain lifts the poem skyward. The couple will roam "into the shade / Of empyrean pattern-tracings," a dense, almost dreamlike phrase. "Empyrean" means belonging to the highest heaven, and the "pattern-tracings" suggest the delicate lacework of branches and sky overhead, or perhaps something larger, an order behind nature. Earlier the speaker boasts that "you will never find / More symmetry in ferns," so pattern and order have been building quietly throughout. The ferns' symmetry becomes the heavens' design, and the earthly wood stretches into something more spiritual without ever losing its roots.
The poem closes on a paradox worth lingering over: they will travel "as thrushes fly, yet deem this wood our home." Freedom and belonging are held together. To roam and to be at home are not opposites here. That balance, a love that lets the other wander but trusts in return, is what gives this small sonnet its warmth, and what makes its invitation feel genuinely irresistible.