Prologue: Glenmerle Revisited Summary and Analysis

Sheldon Vanauken (Van) first revisits Glenmerle, his childhood home, after ten years away. He arrives alone on a summer evening and recounts the smells, the grand, welcoming look of the place, and his cornucopia of memories. New owners live in it, but he imagines the house filled with the people and memories of his boyhood, and as the setting for his earliest love with Davy. With his father several years gone and Davy dead now six months, it is hard to imagine so much different yet still the same.

The poetry of Shakespeare and Shelly, and a year in Kensington, made England real to him and birthed his discovery of beauty here. He stood on a starry night under the bare branches of trees in winter and looked up. The sensation was like pain and longing, choking...