Coming Home

Hello everyone! Sorry it has been so long since my last update. I've been pretty busy moving back home and completely overhauling my room. But the room-redo is nearly complete, and I have an awesome literary-inspired hideout now, complete with my beloved Fitzgerald poster and a lovely little poetry corner.

In honor of coming home, I've decided to share a poem by one of my favorite poets, Philip Larkin, with you. Larkin's poems are deceptively simple and stated, and his endings almost always knock me out. This poem does a nice job of capturing my mixed emotions about coming home. I am disappointed to be a college graduate moving back in with my parents, but I also feel relieved to be somewhere where I feel safe and loved before heading on my own to the other side of the country for grad school (next year, fingers crossed). But coming home is always a tricky process. One has to confront one's precious memories with how things seem now, a little more ragged and smaller than you remember. Larkin's poem perfectly captures this feeling. And pay attention to the perfect and unintrusive rhyme pattern; Larkin might be the master of rhyme in 20th century poetry. Enjoy!

Home is So Sad, by Philip Larkin

Home is so sad. It stays at it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things outght to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.


Happy Reading Everyone, and expect some good updates to come, including an entry on Louise Erdrich and some more lists!