Note–The poems below are used only as illustrations and used by virtue of the Creative Commons theory; the copyrights belong to the authors or their executors.

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I’m thinking about the nostalgic overtones of the “changed” homescape here, or the notion of solastalgia as coined by Glenn Albrecht (see earlier post). At first I planned to use a poem with overt environmental themes (as of the home that has been denuded, altered, destroyed–many good poems exist on that theme). Then I thought to look more obliquely at the idea of solastalgia as an emotional state, for home is deeply freighted with psyche.

One form of “solastalgia” is represented here, I think, in Philip Larkin’s “Home Is So Sad”:

Home Is So Sad

Home is so sad. It stays as 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 turns again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought 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.

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Another aspect of solastalgia, in this section of Gary Snyder’s “Four Poems for Robin,” relates to the homeplace in the form of a relationship, one bound up with the excitement of youth, college, the orchard with its tall dry grasses and love’s “grave, awed intensity.” Yase village is located near Kyoto; the speaker of the poem identifies where (and when: December) he resides while reflecting on an autumn day in his past.

December at Yase

You said, that October,
In the tall dry grass by the orchard
When you chose to be free,
“Again someday, maybe ten years.”

After college I saw you
One time. You were strange.
And I was obsessed with a plan.

Now ten years and more have
Gone by: I’ve always known

where you were–

I might have gone to you
Hoping to win your love back.
You still are single.

I didn’t.
I thought I must make it alone. I
Have done that.

Only in dream, like this dawn,
Does the grave, awed intensity
Of our young love
Return to my mind, to my flesh.

We had what the others
All crave and seek for;
We left it behind at nineteen.

I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.
And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my