Homecoming

“The Lotos-eaters” does envision the experience of homecoming but in a form that ironizes this experience. In Tennyson’s poem, though those who eat the lotos fall into a malaise that makes them physically unwilling to rally themselves for the journey home, the images of childhood in the warmth of a homely, familiar hearth are still evoked – While “Eating the Lotos day by day,” they “muse and brood and live again in memory, / With those faces of our infancy” (105, 110-111). While this remembrance of “infancy” reveals that the lotos-eaters, in their oblivion, are not completely without desire for home, the desire is realized at an imagined, psychological distance, rather than accomplished in actuality as the end point of heroic striving. As such, a subtle irony arises in how the homecoming that is so greatly sought after, even by the lotos-eaters, is completely idealized and veiled in...