I HAVE not trod those burning sands,
I have not plumbed those frozen seas;
My palace was not made with hands,
My sails are furled from every breeze.
I sit behind a curtained pane
And gaze into a village street;
Homeward, at eve, return again
My indolent, untraveled feet.
But in the books you bring to me,
I find strange places that I knew:
Cathay or Ind or Muscovy,
The Isles of Spice or Khatmandhu.
I close my eyes and call it back —
The tedium of the caravan,
The jackals howling on our track,
The wile and sloth of savage man.
My homesickness was born with me
Whom the ancestral walls enclose;
But it is nice as memory,
And chooses only what it knows.
And when the page divines aright,
I do not shrink or find it far;
But answer, as an exile might,
’That is my home, and there my star!’