Song: Let Us Go Back
Let us go back together to the hills.
Weary am I of palaces and courts,
Weary of words disloyal to my thoughts,—
Come, my belovèd, let us to the hills.
Let us go back together to the land,
And wander hand in hand upon the heights;
Kings have we seen, and manifold delights,—
Oh, my beloved, let us to the land!
Lone and unshackled, let us to the road
Which holds enchantment round each hiddenbend,
Our course uncompassed and our whim its end,
Our feet once more, belovèd, to the road!
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 7, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Song: Let Us Go Back” appears in Poems of West and East (John Lane, The Bodley Head Limited, 1917). In her essay, “Within Living Memory: Vita Sackville-West’s Poems of Land and Garden,” author and scholar Elizabeth W. Pomeroy stated: “In Sackville-West’s poems, the memory scheme captures her experience in a related way, recording the activities and language of rural life before they were lost to modern changes. The four seasons become her memory places. Into each she sets the work of men and the events of nature, where they belong (the precise time to cut hay, the bloom-time of the fritillaries). She saw clearly that the ways of country life, undisturbed for centuries, were threatened by encroaching land development, social change, and finally war.”
Vita Sackville-West
Vita Sackville-West, born Victoria Mary Sackville-West on March 9, 1892, in Knole, Kent, England, was an English poet, novelist, journalist, and diarist. She died on June 2, 1962.