Home After Three Months Away

Lowell’s poem qualifies as a lyric and a narrative. It’s the latter because it tells the story of a man returning home and trying to adapt to his regular life. It’s also a lyric because it’s short and centers on the personal perceptions and feelings of Lowell, the poem’s speaker. Lowell’s situation and his mental health experiences inform the poem. These are his experiences, so he is the voice of the poem and, thus, the speaker. Even if a reader comes to the poem without much information about Lowell’s biography, the work provides a clue that Lowell is the speaker when someone asks, “Is Richard now himself again?” (Line 11).

At the same time, it’s important to remember that Lowell, the speaker in this poem, isn’t the same as Lowell, the person outside the poem. The speaker is a literary device, so Lowell creates a poetic persona based on his life, but it’s not interchangeable with his life. “Home After Three Months Away” is a poem; it’s a creation of Lowell’s poetic sensibilities. When Lowell mentions “the Mother” in Line 3 or his daughter in Stanza 2, he’s not providing an objective, dispassionate account of Elizabeth Hardwick or Harriet.