"Home Thoughts, from Abroad" is a poem by Robert Browning. It was written in 1845 while Browning was on a visit to northern Italy, and was first published in his Dramatic Romances and Lyrics.[1] It is considered an exemplary work of Romantic literature for its evocation of a sense of longing and sentimental references to natural beauty.
Text
The poem is written as a first person in which the speaker expresses feelings of homesickness through sentimental references to the Englishcountryside.[2] The poem's opening lines are renowned for their evocation of patriotic nostalgia:[3]
The poem is in two stanzas. The first stanza has an irregular metre consisting of alternating trimeter, tetrameter and pentameter lines and a final trimeter line, with an ABABCCDD rhyming scheme. The second stanza is longer consists almost entirely of pentameter lines except for one tetrameter line, and the rhyme is an AABCBCDDEEFF scheme.[4]