Oh, it's home again and home again, America for me! I want a ship that's westward bound to plough the rolling sea To the blessed land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars, Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.

These lines come from Henry Van Dyke’s poem “America for Me,” a late‑19th‑century lyric that voices an immigrant’s (or traveler’s) longing for the United States as a place of space, opportunity, and belonging. Van Dyke—an American clergyman and man of letters—wrote the poem in an era when transatlantic travel and mass immigration made “westward bound” voyages a common lived reality and a potent symbol. The speaker contrasts the Old World’s constraints with a dreamed-of America figured as a “blessed land of Room Enough,” reached by ship across the Atlantic and greeted by the starry U.S. flag.

The stanza fuses physical journey with ideological aspiration. “Home again” frames America not merely as a destination but as an adopted homeland, while the ship “westward bound” evokes both migration and a mythic return to possibility. “Room Enough” condenses a national self-image: abundance of land, social mobility, and freedom from inherited limits. The poem’s bright sensory imagery—sunlit air, stars on the flag—turns patriotism into atmosphere, suggesting that national ideals are felt as much as they are argued. At the same time, the rhetoric participates in a celebratory tradition that can overlook the complexities behind expansion and belonging.