The Long Voyage (#poetry)

The Long Voyage

Not that the pines were darker there,

nor mid-May dogwood brighter there,

nor swifts more swift in summer air;

  it was my own country,

 

having its thuderclap of spring,

its long midsummer ripening,

its corn hoar-stiff at harvesting,

  almost like any country,

 

yet being mine; its face, its speech,

its hills bent low within my reach,

its river birch and upland beech

  were mine, of my own country.

 

Now the dark waters at the bow

fold back, like earth against the plow;

foam brightens like the dogwood now

  at home, in my own country.

 

-Malcolm Cowley

 

One last bit of Malcolm Cowley and then maybe I'm done for now. Cowley's own country where he grew up was rural western Pennsylvania; his first book of poems was titled Blue Juniata for the left bank tributary of the Susquehanna.

 

This poem together with three others by Cowley first appeared in Poetry magazine of October 1938, along with others by Kenneth Fearing, Stephen Spender, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. In 1938, Cowley was living on the east coast, in Connecticut.