The homesick love of country now felt by millions of servicemen and women overseas has rarely been better expressed than in this poem by a veteran of World War I. Malcolm Cowley, a member of the "lost generation" of U.S. writers who expatriated themselves in Europe after that war, came home to become one of the nation's most influential literary critics. He wrote this poem, which first appeared in Poetry and has since been reprinted in Mr. Cowley's own The Dry Season and in several anthologies, while returning from Spain in 1937.

THE LONG VOYAGE

Not that the pines were darker, there,

nor midmay dogwood brighter there,

nor swifts more swift in summer air;

it was my own country,

having its thunderclap 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.

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