Found It

Till we bought this place in September, for seven years Patrushka and I traveled - homeless, rootless. No home to go home to. It was circumstances. Not our choice, really - there were things we had to do. East Coast, West Coast, the UK - even South Africa for a couple of months.

I like staying on the move. I could live in hotels and just keep going. But I want to go home too. I mean really - Home. That place where I used to live a long long time ago.

All those years a line from an old poem kept trying to be reborn in my head. What was it? How did it go? The snatch I semi-remembered went something like this: "I've been gone so long I don't know where my home is anymore."

But that's not a poem. The actual poem wouldn't form in my mind. I just knew it expressed a deep homesick feeling like mine.

I was leafing through my 1964 journals the other night to help remember details for the Langley Porter post. And I found it - the poem, that is. I had copied it out neatly in my book one afternoon at Langley Porter.

"He knows he hath a home, but scarce knows where;
He says it is so far
That he hath quite forgot how to go there."

A quick Google search reveals the passage to be by Henry Vaughan, from his poem Man. Here it is in its entirety, from The Oxford Book of English Verse. Look down towards the bottom of the page.

Ain't that pretty? It was worth the wait.