No autograph copy of this poem is known. It is here reproduced from the letter to Maria Whitney in which it is incorporated.

PUBLICATION: Letters (ed. 1894), 340-341; (ed. 1931), 329-330; also LL (1924), 349. The letter was written in the spring of 1883, and the poem is an elegy written in memory of her own mother who had died in November, 1882. The paragraph introducing the poem focuses upon her mother's death and those who can be "Homeless at home."