The Full Text of “At Home”
1When I was dead, my spirit turned
2To seek the much-frequented house:
3I passed the door, and saw my friends
4Feasting beneath green orange boughs;
5From hand to hand they pushed the wine,
6They sucked the pulp of plum and peach;
7They sang, they jested, and they laughed,
8For each was loved of each.
9I listened to their honest chat:
10Said one: "To-morrow we shall be
11Plod plod along the featureless sands,
12And coasting miles and miles of sea."
13Said one: "Before the turn of tide
14We will achieve the eyrie-seat."
15Said one: "To-morrow shall be like
16To-day, but much more sweet."
17"To-morrow," said they, strong with hope,
18And dwelt upon the pleasant way:
19"To-morrow," cried they one and all,
20While no one spoke of yesterday.
21Their life stood full at blessed noon;
22I, only I, had passed away:
23"To-morrow and to-day," they cried;
24I was of yesterday.
25I shivered comfortless, but cast
26No chill across the table-cloth;
27I all-forgotten shivered, sad
28To stay, and yet to part how loth:
29I passed from the familiar room,
30I who from love had passed away,
31Like the remembrance of a guest
32That tarrieth but a day.
The Full Text of “At Home”
1When I was dead, my spirit turned
2To seek the much-frequented house:
3I passed the door, and saw my friends
4Feasting beneath green orange boughs;
5From hand to hand they pushed the wine,
6They sucked the pulp of plum and peach;
7They sang, they jested, and they laughed,
8For each was loved of each.
9I listened to their honest chat:
10Said one: "To-morrow we shall be
11Plod plod along the featureless sands,
12And coasting miles and miles of sea."
13Said one: "Before the turn of tide
14We will achieve the eyrie-seat."
15Said one: "To-morrow shall be like
16To-day, but much more sweet."
17"To-morrow," said they, strong with hope,
18And dwelt upon the pleasant way:
19"To-morrow," cried they one and all,
20While no one spoke of yesterday.
21Their life stood full at blessed noon;
22I, only I, had passed away:
23"To-morrow and to-day," they cried;
24I was of yesterday.
25I shivered comfortless, but cast
26No chill across the table-cloth;
27I all-forgotten shivered, sad
28To stay, and yet to part how loth:
29I passed from the familiar room,
30I who from love had passed away,
31Like the remembrance of a guest
32That tarrieth but a day.
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“At Home” Introduction
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"At Home" is Christina Rossetti's eerie tale of a ghost who discovers that all their loved ones have forgotten them. The ghostly speaker returns to haunt a "familiar room" where they once rejoiced in the company of the people they loved in life and is hurt to find that nobody seems to care that they're gone. Their friends' minds are on "to-day" and "to-morrow"; they spare not one thought for the "yesterday" when the speaker was still among them. The living, this poem suggests, might be pretty quick to forget the dead—perhaps because they don't much like the thought that they, too, will be among the dead some day. This poem first appeared in Rossetti's important 1862 collection Goblin Market and Other Poems.
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“At Home” Summary
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After I died, my soul went in search of the house where I once spent so much time. I entered and saw my friends feasting together beneath the leafy branches of orange trees. They passed wine around and relished juicy plums and peaches; they sang, joked, and laughed, for they all loved each other.
I listened to their wholesome conversation. One person said, "Tomorrow we'll go for a long walk across the beach and sail for miles and miles." Another said, "Before the tide turns, we'll reach our lofty viewpoint." Another said, "Tomorrow will be just like today, but even better."
They kept saying "tomorrow," given strength by their hopes, and their thoughts lingered on the delightful road ahead of them. "Tomorrow!" they all cried, and no one said one word about yesterday. They were still in the prime of their lives; it was only I who had died. They spoke of the future and the present; I was from the past.
I shivered uneasily, but I didn't leave a cold shadow on the tablecloth. Forgotten, I shivered: staying here made me sad, but I couldn't bring myself to leave. I left the familiar room—I, who had died and left love behind. I was forgotten as soon as a guest who only stays for a day.
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“At Home” Themes
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Mortality, Pleasure, and Denial
In "At Home," the speaker, a wandering spirit, attempts to visit their living loved ones, only to discover that these old friends don't seem to remember that they ever existed. With not a thought for the "yesterday" when the speaker was with them, the friends look only to "to-day" and "to-morrow," imagining a happy future in which every tomorrow will be "much more sweet" than the day before it. The poem hints that the living might often be in denial about death: in turning away from "yesterday" to revel in the earthly pleasures of "to-day" and "to-morrow," the speaker's friends seem to be pushing away the though that they, too, will die one day.
When they make their ghostly visit to their friends, the poem's speaker doesn't find them grieving, but relishing all life's delights: they sit amid lovely "green orange boughs" (the leafy branches of orange trees) and savor the juicy "pulp of plum and peach" while planning a sailing outing for the next day. Over and over, they look to "to-morrow," a day that they imagine will be even better than today—and today is already pretty good!
The friends, the poem hints, aren't merely callous, but in denial. In looking so insistently toward "to-morrow" and refusing to remember "yesterday," the friends refuse to engage with grief or with a hard fact of life: there's truly no guarantee that anyone gets a "to-morrow." The very presence of the ghostly speaker gives the lie to the friends' boundless cheer. Even as the friends declare that "to-morrow shall be like / To-day, but much more sweet," the speaker looks on, "shiver[ing]" and "comfortless," their chilly misery a stark contrast to their friends' jolly warmth. The speaker's haunting presence reminds readers that life and its pleasures are fragile and transient: like an almost-too-ripe plum, life can't be counted on to keep until tomorrow, let alone to be "much more sweet" every day.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Anxiety, Isolation, and Exclusion
This poem's portrait of a lonesome ghost might well be read as the tale of a living person's anxieties about being overlooked, left out, and uncared for. The poem's speaker describes making a posthumous visit to their former friends after their death only to find that nobody seems to care one bit that they're gone. The poem explores the terror that one's life might not really matter, even to the people one feels closest to.
It's no wonder that the dead speaker makes a journey to the "much-frequented house" (the often-visited house) where they know they'll find their friends: this was clearly a beloved place—indeed, a "Home," somewhere the speaker felt they belonged. They know exactly the "familiar room" where they'll find their loved ones, and at first seem pleased to see all their old pals partying together. "Each was loved of each," they know; this was a group that shared a strong affection.
But the very sight of that love and happiness soon stings the speaker, for they realize that their friends aren't the least bit bothered that they're no longer at the table. "No one spoke of yesterday," the speaker observes: that is, nobody so much as glanced back at the days when the speaker was among them. Instead, they make cheerful plans to go sailing and declare that every new day will be better than the last. These people's "love" seems to have "passed away" from the dead speaker awfully quickly. Out of sight, out of mind.
The ghostly speaker has no choice but to watch as the party goes on without them. They're so insubstantial that they can't even cast a "chill across the table-cloth": they have absolutely no effect here. This vision of the speaker as a ghost whose presence or absence makes no difference to the people they love invites a symbolic reading as well as a literal one. In its depiction of a lonely spirit, the poem captures what it's like to feel so unnoticed and unimportant that one might as well be a ghost. The speaker is forced to confront the fact that they simply haven't left a mark on the people they considered their closest friends; the house they once considered "Home" is unchanged by their demise, and no one misses them. Perhaps that's a nightmare that someone who feels insecure in their friends' love might feel all too keenly.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “At Home”
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Lines 1-8
When I was dead, my spirit turned
To seek the much-frequented house:
I passed the door, and saw my friends
Feasting beneath green orange boughs;
From hand to hand they pushed the wine,
They sucked the pulp of plum and peach;
They sang, they jested, and they laughed,
For each was loved of each.“At Home” begins by matter-of-factly introducing its speaker: a ghost. “When I was dead,” the spectral speaker says, “my spirit turned / To seek the much-frequented house.” In other words, like many ghosts, this speaker sought out a place that had meant a lot to them in life, the “Home” of the title. “Much-frequented” (or “often visited”), this house seems like a friendly place, a place that should bring some consolation to this wandering “spirit.”
And at first, it seems like that’s just what’s going to happen. Returning to the house, the speaker finds their friends “feasting beneath green orange boughs.” (Perhaps they’re in a conservatory, a kind of glass-walled indoor garden, as the speaker later describes the action taking place in a “room” rather than outdoors.) This is a lush, vibrant place for a feast; the green leafiness of those orange-tree branches symbolically speaks of abundant life.
The friends’ party feels abundant, too. Listen to the sounds of relish in this description of their feasting:
From hand to hand they pushed the wine,
They sucked the pulp of plum and peach;All those alliterative and consonant /p/ sounds feel like satisfied lip-smacks; the guttural /uh/ assonance feels round as a full belly. Strong verbs highlight the friends’ gusto as they chow down, too. They don’t simply pass the wine to each other, they lustily “push[]” it into each other's hands; they don’t take dainty bites of plums and peaches, but “suck[] the pulp” of these juicy fruits right off the pits.
This relish of summer fruits and wine comes with a relish of companionship. As they eat, the speaker observes, the friends sing, “jest[]” (or joke around), and laugh together, expressing their mutual fondness. “Each was loved of each,” as the speaker puts it, with diacope that highlights how matched and mutual the friends’ affection for each other feels.
All this sounds perfectly lovely. But the reader might have already noticed an uncomfortable note in the poem. For the speaker, after all, must once have sat among these friends, feasting and joking. Now they’re dead, a wandering “spirit”—but their friends don’t seem to be mourning them. There’s no sign of grief around this cheerful table.
Rossetti will frame this poem’s tale of alienation and death in four eight-line stanzas (or octaves). As readers might already have noticed, these octaves mostly use a regular meter (iambic tetrameter—lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “I passed | the door, | and saw | my friends”), but don’t stick to it all the way through. The last line of each stanza stops abruptly after only three iambs (making it iambic trimeter, as in “For each | was loved | of each”). Like the poor speaker’s life, these short final lines feel cut off before their time—and their changed rhythm adds a note of drama to the speaker’s voice.
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Lines 9-16
I listened to their honest chat:
Said one: "To-morrow we shall be
Plod plod along the featureless sands,
And coasting miles and miles of sea."
Said one: "Before the turn of tide
We will achieve the eyrie-seat."
Said one: "To-morrow shall be like
To-day, but much more sweet." -
Lines 17-24
"To-morrow," said they, strong with hope,
And dwelt upon the pleasant way:
"To-morrow," cried they one and all,
While no one spoke of yesterday.
Their life stood full at blessed noon;
I, only I, had passed away:
"To-morrow and to-day," they cried;
I was of yesterday. -
Lines 25-32
I shivered comfortless, but cast
No chill across the table-cloth;
I all-forgotten shivered, sad
To stay, and yet to part how loth:
I passed from the familiar room,
I who from love had passed away,
Like the remembrance of a guest
That tarrieth but a day.
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“At Home” Symbols
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Fruit and Fruit Trees
The plums and peaches the speaker's friends devour under lush "green orange boughs" symbolize life and youth—particularly the physical joys of life and youth. These summery fruits and leaves suggest that the people who are enjoying them are likewise in the summer of their lives; in fact, they seem to believe that they'll get to enjoy the delights of youth forever. They attack the fruit with gusto, "suck[ing] the pulp" right off the pits. But they don't seem to notice the other side of this symbolism: leaves fall, fruits and blossoms shrivel, and winter comes eventually. Though the speaker's former friends seem to believe that every new day will be "much more sweet" than the one before it, they haven't reckoned with their own mortality any more than they've reckoned with grief for the speaker.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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The Ghost
The ghostly speaker might be read symbolically as an image of a living person who feels overlooked and uncared for. As a ghost, the speaker has no effect on their former friends; they can't even throw a "chill across the table-cloth" to make their presence known (or to share their shivery suffering). Unseen, they can see all too clearly that their friends don't appear to miss them one bit: the party only rages on after they're gone, and nobody thinks of the "yesterday" when the speaker was with them. The powerless speaker is forced to confront how vanishingly small a mark their life has made on the people whom they once believed loved them.
This ghost might thus embody a feeling of alienation, loneliness, and disappointment, capturing a living person's fears that they simply don't matter all that much to their loved ones.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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“At Home” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Imagery
The poem's imagery helps to set up a painful juxtaposition between the joyful energy of the speaker's friends and the chilly sadness of the speaker's afterlife. When the speaker (and the reader) first encounters these friends, the people the speaker loved best in life, they're:
Feasting beneath green orange boughs;
From hand to hand they pushed the wine,
They sucked the pulp of plum and peach;The vivid verbs here—"feasting," "pushed," "sucked"—suggest that the friends are approaching their feast with gusto, slurping up every drop of sweet juice from the soft "pulp" of the summer fruits and vigorously shoving the wine bottle across the table to each other. The backdrop of "green orange boughs" likewise suggests sheer aliveness; the orange trees are thick with summery foliage, in the prime of their lives (to match the friends).
The ghostly speaker, meanwhile, can take no part in this exuberance. Forever separate from the scene, all they can do is "shiver[] comfortless"; they "shiver[]" twice in three lines, in fact, as if death is like catching a feverish chill. They can't even share this chilliness: they "cast / No chill across the table-cloth," they observe. Unlike some ghosts, they don't have the power even to produce an ominous cold spot in the middle of the festivities. Their friends share lively warmth, but the speaker's chilliness is their own.
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
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Parallelism
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Repetition
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Alliteration
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Allusion
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"At Home" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Much-frequented
- Green orange boughs
- Jested
- Honest
- Plod
- Achieve
- Eyrie-seat
- Dwelt upon
- Loth
- Tarrieth
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Often visited.
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “At Home”
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Form
"At Home" is written in four long, meditative octaves (or eight-line stanzas). Each of these stanzas ticks along in a hypnotically steady meter for the first seven lines (iambic tetrameter, to be precise—lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "When I | was dead, | my spir- | it turned"). But then they end with a shorter closing line of iambic trimeter (just three iambs, as in "For each | was loved | of each").
The presence of this abrupt final line helps to evoke the ghostly speaker's emotional experience. Making a spectral visit to the "familiar room" where they used to hang out with their dear friends, they find that all those friends are now enjoying life to the full. No one seems sad that the speaker isn't with them; everyone seems to have forgotten about the speaker, in fact. Who wouldn't be brought up short by that realization?
As the same metrical pattern repeats all across the poem, readers get the feeling that this poor speaker is struggling to face something painful. Again and again, their voice cuts off in the closing lines as they come to terms with the fact that they're a thing "of yesterday"—and their erstwhile friends only have eyes for "to-day" and "to-morrow."
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Meter
Each stanza of "At Home" uses a consistent meter—until its final line. The first seven lines of each stanza are written in iambic tetrameter: lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in line 1:
When I | was dead, | my spi- | rit turned
The last line of each stanza, however, does something different. These lines are written in iambic trimeter, with just three iambs, as in line 8:
For each | was loved | of each.
Like the sad speaker's life, these closing lines have been cut short. The abrupt change in the poem's otherwise steady, swinging rhythm helps to capture the speaker's surprise and dismay and finding themselves so completely forgotten: it's as if they're brought up short by the sight of their friends enjoying their thoughts of a bright "to-morrow" without a single thought of the friend they've lost.
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Rhyme Scheme
For the most part, the rhyme scheme of "At Home" runs like this:
ABCBDEFE
This kind of singsong back-and-forth rhyme scheme is a common one, so the rhyme here doesn't draw a whole lot of attention to itself—fitting for a poem whose speaker realizes they haven't left much of a mark on the world. Not so long after they die, they visit their old friends to find that no one seems to think of them anymore. The simple rhymes help their tale of woe to feel melancholy; the poem's music just runs on softly in the background.
However, the rhyme scheme does something a little more intense in the third stanza, which rhymes like this:
ABCBDBEB
Here, the same B rhyme persists all through the stanza. In fact, some rhyme words here are identical: "yesterday" appears in lines 20 and 24 (and there's not so much difference between "way" in line 18 and "away" in line 22, either). This insistent effect heightens the drama: as the speaker faces the hard truth that they're just a vestige of a "yesterday" their friends don't look back to for a second, that word and its rhymes recur and recur.
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“At Home” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is a ghost, a lonesome figure haunting a familiar, "much-frequented" house they knew and loved in life. Longing to see the faces of their old friends, they're dismayed to discover that their friends don't seem to have the same longing for them. Rather than sighing over the "yesterday" when the speaker was still with them, they're relishing the present and looking to the future, excited for a "to-morrow" that will only bring them more love, fun, and shared experience.
The poem's speaker thus ends up feeling excluded, even ostracized. If not even the memory of them remains amongst the living, they're shut out of this beloved group completely. Nonetheless, they're tempted to linger over the table where their friends laugh and make plans; leaving and staying bring them equal pain.
Rossetti was a fervent Christian, but "At Home" doesn't engage with the Christian vision of an afterlife. Rather than rejoicing in Heaven or suffering in Hell, this poem's ghost is just an invisible, helpless wanderer through the land of the living. Perhaps the poem's speaker thus symbolically embodies a living person's anxieties about being left out or ignored as much as it captures a fear of being forgotten in death.
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“At Home” Setting
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The poem is set in a house that the ghostly speaker "frequented" in life: a place they know well and remember fondly. More specifically, the speaker seems to be visiting a conservatory, an indoor garden stocked with leafy potted orange trees. Amid these lush surroundings, the speaker's old friends are passing wine around and reveling in the juicy "pulp of plum and peach." This description of relishing fruit amid fruiting trees presents the house as a place bursting with delicious life: the speaker's friends are delighting in all their senses.
They're also delighting in the present moment and the thought of the future. To this crew of the living, there's no "yesterday": they spend all their time looking toward a "to-morrow" that will "be like / To-day, but much more sweet," relishing an experience of life that just gets better and better.
All this relish hurts the poor ghostly speaker, who can't join them in any way. A ghost can't do much with a plum or a peach, of course—but besides being denied the physical happiness of the scene, they're denied a place at the table even in memory. Though they remember this garden and its inhabitants with love, their friends don't give them a single thought. The paradisiacal scene thus becomes a torture chamber for the poor speaker, who can take absolutely no part in what they see.
There are also hints, however, that the speaker's friends might be in the faintest bit of denial. Their delusional belief that every tomorrow will be "much more sweet" than today (and their unfounded certainty that they'll definitely have a tomorrow) suggests that they're actively putting mortality and suffering out of their minds; their palace of earthly delights shuts thoughts of what's to come after earthly delights out altogether.
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Literary and Historical Context of “At Home”
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Literary Context
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was one of the most important poets of the Victorian era. A popular writer of strange and fantastical poems, Rossetti contributed to a growing 19th-century vogue for fairy tales and old romances. "At Home" was first collected in her most famous book, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862).
This poem's speaker joins a line of Rossetti characters who ponder death and memory. Their anxious horror of being forgotten forms a counterweight to the very different attitudes Rossetti expresses in poems like "Remember" (in which a speaker graciously tells their beloved not to remember them after death if it pains them too much) and "When I am dead, my dearest" (in which the speaker suggests it makes no difference to them whether they're remembered or not).
Many of Rossetti's contemporaries saw her as a successor to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the wildly popular and famous poet of Sonnets from the Portuguese. Like Browning, Rossetti wrote boldly about her inner life (and had a fondness for Italy—Browning because she moved there, Rossetti because she was of Italian descent). But Rossetti's poetry often followed a wilder and weirder path than Browning's, exploring visions both dreamy and nightmarish. Perhaps Rossetti's contemporaries mostly associated her with Browning because the two were those rarest of Victorian birds: celebrated, successful, widely-read poets who also happened to be women.
Rossetti was also associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an artistic movement dedicated to recapturing the beauty of a (much-mythologized and romanticized) Middle Ages; her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a founding member of the group, was an accomplished painter and poet.
Today, Rossetti is often remembered as a proto-feminist figure for her poetry's explorations of women's hopes, sufferings, and desires—and the ways in which male shortsightedness and cruelty can smash women's lives.
Historical Context
Christina Rossetti lived in a world marked both by revolutionary change and reactionary conservatism. The Victorians were innovators and empire-builders, and England reshaped itself considerably under the reign of Victoria, its first truly powerful queen since Elizabeth I. A primarily rural population began to move into the cities as factory work outpaced farm work. Writers from Dickens to Hardy worried about the human effects of rapid change and rapacious commerce.
Perhaps in response to this speedy reconfiguration of the world, Victorian social culture became deeply conservative. Women were expected to adhere to a strict code of sexual morals: a woman must be chaste, pliant, and submissive, and any deviation could mean social exile. But within this repressive landscape, women writers began to flourish, asserting the complexity and meaning of their own lives. Rossetti's work was part of a tide of bold and moving poetry and fiction by Victorian women; George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë are only a few of the writers whose work achieved contemporary recognition against the odds.
But being a woman writer in this period wasn't easy. Rossetti, for instance, found herself stuck with one of an unmarried Victorian woman's traditional burdens: as a teenager, she was charged with staying home to care for her father when he fell seriously ill. The strain made Rossetti herself collapse only a couple of years into these duties. She would suffer from severe mental and physical health problems for the rest of her life—some of which struggles, readers might suspect, are reflected in this poem. The ghostly speaker's fears that she might not truly matter to any of the people she loves might reflect some of Rossetti's own terrors (and perhaps a hint of self-pity).
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More “At Home” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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Rossetti at the Victorian Web — Visit the Victorian Web to find a trove of Rossetti resources.
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A Brief Biography — Read the Poetry Foundation's short biography of Rossetti to learn more about her life and work.
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Portraits of Rossetti — Take a look at some portraits of Rossetti (including two made by her artist brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti).
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Christina Rossetti
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