The Collaborative International Dictionary
Hark \Hark\ (h[aum]rk), v. i. [OE. herken. See Hearken.]
To listen; to hearken. [Now rare, except in the imperative
form used as an interjection, Hark! listen.]
--Hudibras.
Hark away! Hark back! Hark forward! (Sporting), cries used to incite and guide hounds in hunting.
To hark back, to go back for a fresh start, as when one has wandered from his direct course, or made a digression.
He must have overshot the mark, and must hark back.
--Haggard.
He harked back to the subject.
--W. E.
Norris.
Wiktionary
vb. 1 (context hunting English) Of hounds, to retrace a course in order to pick up a lost scent. 2 (context figuratively US English) To return or revert (to a subject etc.), to allude to, to evoke, to long or pine for (qualifier: a past event or era).
WordNet
Usage examples of "hark back".
If any of these writers had been told that the writers immediately subsequent to them would hark back to the English poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the French poets of the mid-nineteenth century and to the philosophers of the Middle Ages, they would have thought it a kind of dilettantism.
Since then the physicists have gone further, but even in those days educated people used to hark back with a certain wistfulness to times when the universe was merely strange-not incomprehensible.
The Western civilization to which ours is affiliated rose originally from the same kind of thing, that Roman Empire some of our rulers have liked to hark back to for examples of glory.
Since then the physicists have gone further, but even in those days educated people used to hark back with a certain wistfulness to times when the universe was merely strange—.
Since then the physicists have gone further, but even in those days educated people used to hark back with a certain wistfulness to times when the universe was merely strange&mdash.
I never see a shivering, white-faced wretch in the prisoners' dock that I do not hark back with shuddering horror to the strange events on the Pullman car Ontario, between Washington and Pittsburg, on the night of September ninth, last.