"Home is so Sad"

For the benefit of all to whom I have quoted it over the years, and because I always think of it when I'm about to set off on my travels, I thought I'd reproduce Philip Larkin's poem here as I finish my preparations for another jaunt. Actually, I was always more aware of the pathos of the abandoned house when I was a child - perhaps because we tended to go away in the summer for 8 weeks at a time. At that time in my life, eight weeks felt like forever, and I recall how our house seemed totally strange when we returned at the end of the summer. Even the end-of-term feeling from the end of June seemed preserved and ineffably sad as we prepared to start school again at the very end of August, in the days when the summer holidays were not rudely terminated in the middle of the month. I think Larkin captures all I have ever felt about this phenomenon.

Home is so Sad
by Philip Larkin
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 turn 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.