Robert Frost's late-career poem "Directive" famously eludes our attempts to decipher its allegoresis despite its strong allegorical suggestiveness. Moreover, the final lines present us with a problem of tone; does the speaker tell us in earnest that we will "be whole again," or does the poem's couching in symbolic and imaginative action (in a very literal and naive sense in the case of the goblet from which the addressee is told to drink) render the final directive ironic: an imperative towards intent without the possibility of real action or fulfillment? Regardless, "Directive" leads us to ponder the ambiguity and ambivalence of The Return, that revolution in its classic denotation of circling back to one's origins. The Homeric myth arguably stands as the ur-text of The Return; its hero, Odysseus, leaves his island kingdom of Ithaca for ten years to fight in the Trojan war and spends another ten years journeying back home. Indeed, Odysseus so iconically represents the long voyage finally consummated with the anticipated return that his name has passed into our language as a noun with this exact meaning.

Homer presents Odysseus's return as triumphant. The great trickster-king arrives to find his wife, house, and kingdom beleaguered with suitors, whom he contrives to dispatch in a great orgy of violence that restores him to his proper role as head of house and state. The triumphant restoration leaves us with things-as-they-should-be. However, poets writing in Homer's wake have paused at Odysseus's return. Might it be more complicated? As early as Dante, we get the sense that Odysseus might not be as satisfied or satiated as we assume. In The Inferno, Dante encounters the ghost of Odysseus, who ambitiously sets out to sea once again but this time is consumed by Poseidon's tempest. Why did he leave? Tennyson elaborates on this point in his dramatic monologue "Ulysses," which voices our hero as the archetypal retired explorer, fidgety and dissatisfied in the complacency in domestic life and the bureaucratic matters of state. Leaving behind his "aged wife" and "savage race," Tennyson's Odysseus rouses his mariners "to seek a newer world." The poem concludes with one of the most rousing lines in English poetry (indeed, adopted as a rallying cry of the British empire for decades), but we don't know what to make of such magisterial rhetoric in the context of Dante's portent.

As Constantine Cavafy suggests, we shouldn't expect anything of the destination to which we've long bent our travels. "And if you find her poor, Ithaca won't have fooled you," his speaker declares in "Ithaca," for the island--here figured as more of a symbolic goal rather than a physical place)--functions quite literally as a consummation: the hero consumes his destiny, the journey itself becoming an iterative fulfillment. Thus, in place of an Abrahamic notion of progressive suffering rewarded with final transcendence, Cavafy proposes a progressive reward and warns against misguided expectations of Edenic restoration. Similarly, Joseph Brodsky implies that Odysseus's return might be less than satisfactory, though Brodsky frames his poem before the return, when Odysseus languishes in Circe's woods. "[A]way from me / you are quite safe," Brodsky's Odysseus apostrophizes to his son Telemachus, and we're left wondering whether we ought to read this consolation earnestly or with a grain of salt: the rationalization of a man long in his journey away from home, as Tennyson would say, "made weak by time a fate," but in this case not so strong in will.

Brodsky moves us to a more intimate understanding of Odysseus's return, which Louise Glück imagines as the first moment when Odysseus reunites with his wife Penelope, just after the mass slaughter of the suitors. How do you jump back into a life you've left vacant for two decades? Can you even? Perhaps the triumphal return strikes us just like Odysseus's return to Penelope: in Glück's treatment, the fragile, yet tender touch of an arm backdropped by the implied vanitas of the relationship, the inevitable bittersweetness when "she sees who he is, [and] she will know what he's done." Thematically, we tend to read this return in its human contradictions, in the space after "the end," when the story inevitably keeps going, no matter how hard we try to control the narrative. Poetry allows that inhabitation of subjectivity, that expression of imagined desire for us to work through the tangled affects of yearning and attaining, and it leads us to the possibility that, though we drink from our waters and our watering place, like Odysseus, we may never return from the war.