“OH, TO be in England Now that April’s there. . .”

I have been haunted by the opening of Browning’s “Home-Thoughts, From Abroad” as I come to the end of my sojourn in the United States and yearn again for home. Yearning towards England from Italy, Browning longed for the music of the chaffinch, and the thrush, to prove that he “could recapture The first fine careless rapture”. I long for that, too, but have also been glad to hear, on this side of the pond, the blue jay and the cardinal, and am content to “pick me a bouquet of dogwood flowers” in lieu of buttercups and daisies.

One of the strange and poignant things about being in the US, when you’re longing for home, is the teasing coincidence of place names. Yesterday, on the way to the last stop in my tour, I came down through the beautiful Cumberland mountains, towards the fine city of Bristol, but it was the Cumberland Gap, famed in Appalachian song, and Bristol, “the birthplace of country music”, and they were both in Tennessee. The Lake District and the West Country will have to wait for another occasion.

“So near and yet so far,” I might say; but, when I tune my ear to the “mountain music”, the “old-time string bands” that are playing everywhere here, I can hear as much of the Scottish ceilidh as I can of the high nasal whine of the country singer; and, when the fiddles play the slower, heartbreaking ballads, I can hear the Scottish airs and laments that my mother sang to me as a child — and, before I know it, “the green rolling hills of west Virginia” have become “ye banks and braes o’ bonny Doon”.

And then, ironically enough, my mind moves from the lines that an English poet wrote in Italy, in the spring of 1845, to the lines that an American songwriter jotted down in Widness Railway Station, on his way to a gig in Humberside in the spring of 1964; for I, too, like Paul Simon, in his song “Homeward Bound”, have been

On a tour of one-night stands
My suitcase and guitar in hand
And every stop is neatly planned
For a poet and a one-man band.

Tonight, I will be singing and reading my songs and sonnets; tomorrow, lecturing on poetry; and then I will indeed be homeward bound, reflecting again, as I cross the Atlantic, on all the similarities and differences, the links and severances, between us and our American cousins.

I have been glad of their hospitality, encouraged by their faith, delighted by their music and their “can-do” spirit. I have been dismayed by their politics, appalled by their divisions, alarmed by their gun culture — in my hotel lobby, a magazine equivalent to Homes and Gardens is called Garden and Gun — and, somewhere in that complex mix of feelings, I am simply grateful: grateful for the chance to travel again, after all the lockdowns; grateful for the conversations; grateful that, for all the differences in our understandings of faith, there is, in the end, only the one Christ in whom all things cohere; that, come Good Friday, the arms wide open on the cross will embrace us all, and, on Easter Day, we will be gathered and lifted in the same resurrection.