Coming Home

Coming Home is a brief, piercing poem from Ring Lardner's 1915 collection Bib Ballads. Written in the baseball vernacular that made Lardner famous, it captures the moment a man returns to a place that has changed, or perhaps the moment he realizes he himself has changed. Lardner was a sports columnist turned satirist, and his poetry carries the same sharp ear for American speech and the same gift for finding tragedy inside comedy. The poem operates in very few words, but those words land with the weight of something much larger: the particular loneliness of arrival, the way home can feel foreign. This is American poetry before the modernists, gritty and unpretentious, rooted in the actual speech of actual people. It doesn't pretend to be high art, and that's exactly what gives it power.