Poetry about Home and Thoughts for Home

A close friend of mine is getting married.
She and her artist fiance are in search of a poem, a poem about home. They are planning to translate poetic language into decorative art to furnish their new house.

She honored me with this task to search for a poem on their behalf.
I love poetry, but it is not an easy work. I found my knowledge about home and about poetry of home lacking. The first suggestion that I gave her is William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow",


so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.


It is a poem more than simple. It is not directly related to the idea of home, but I am so enchanted by the verb "depend" that I am intrigued to impose my interpretations of home upon the 8 lines. My imagination is invited to understand the 'dependence' here as everyone's attachment to and reliance on home. Home is the red wheel barrow, the ultimate centre for all.

But it didn't deliver the same message to my patrons. I knew that I had stretched the poem a bit too far.

Then I was thinking about John Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning", its later half:

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th'other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th'other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.


The metaphor for relationship between 2 lovers--compass--has long been my favorite language of poetry. A steady centre and a wandering foot generate another image of a pair of graceful Waltz dancers. The fixed foot enacts the role of home. However far the other foot roam, it is bound to go home.
But what makes a wonderer go home? It is the beloved. The beloved is the steady centre of home.

Yet, I feel that home is not just between 2 people; therefore this proposal is postponed.

I went to a concert the other day. With the University Symphony Orchestra Bibi Heal, a soprano, sang Richard Strauss's 'Vier lextzte Lieder'. The lyrics are a set of four poems by Hermann Hesse and Joseph von Eichendorff: Hesse's Fruhling ('Spring'), Beim Schlafengehen ('On Going to Sleep') and September, and von Eichendorff's Im Abendrot ('At Dusk'). The poems discuss love and emotional attachment between an aged couple. The lyrics flesh out Strauss's melody through which the composer expresses a deep affection for his wife in their old age. 'At Dusk' writes,

Here both in needs and gladness
We wandered hand in hand;
Now let us pause at last
Above the silent land.

Dusk comes the vales exploring,
The darkling air grows still,
Alone two skylarks soaring
In song their dreams fulfil.

Draw close and leave them singing,
Soon will be time to sleep,
How lost our way's beginning!
This solitude, how deep.

O rest so long desired!
We sense the night's soft breath
Now we tired, how tired!
Can this perhaps be death?

(tr. Michael Hamburger; taken from the programme of the concert)

The language was as enchanting as the melody. My imagination glided on the smooth flow of music and was led to thinking about an ultimate home, grave, for the aged couple. Death is not scary at all if one is accompanied by love to the last moment of life.

Home is a feeling rather than a physical place. This is all that I can think of now. Irritatingly, my imagination about home is rigid and is rather confined to romantic love. It still awaits a moment when it can cross the limit of experience.



The image is New Home.