The Full Text of “Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree”
1"Farewell to barn and stack and tree,
2Farewell to Severn shore.
3Terence, look your last at me,
4For I come home no more.
5"The sun burns on the half-mown hill,
6By now the blood is dried;
7And Maurice amongst the hay lies still
8And my knife is in his side.
9"My mother thinks us long away;
10'Tis time the field were mown.
11She had two sons at rising day,
12To-night she’ll be alone.
13"And here’s a bloody hand to shake,
14And oh, man, here’s good-bye;
15We’ll sweat no more on scythe and rake,
16My bloody hands and I.
17"I wish you strength to bring you pride,
18And a love to keep you clean,
19And I wish you luck, come Lammastide,
20At racing on the green.
21"Long for me the rick will wait,
22And long will wait the fold,
23And long will stand the empty plate,
24And dinner will be cold."
The Full Text of “Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree”
1"Farewell to barn and stack and tree,
2Farewell to Severn shore.
3Terence, look your last at me,
4For I come home no more.
5"The sun burns on the half-mown hill,
6By now the blood is dried;
7And Maurice amongst the hay lies still
8And my knife is in his side.
9"My mother thinks us long away;
10'Tis time the field were mown.
11She had two sons at rising day,
12To-night she’ll be alone.
13"And here’s a bloody hand to shake,
14And oh, man, here’s good-bye;
15We’ll sweat no more on scythe and rake,
16My bloody hands and I.
17"I wish you strength to bring you pride,
18And a love to keep you clean,
19And I wish you luck, come Lammastide,
20At racing on the green.
21"Long for me the rick will wait,
22And long will wait the fold,
23And long will stand the empty plate,
24And dinner will be cold."
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“Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree” Introduction
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"Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree" is a mysterious murder ballad from A. E. Housman's famous 1896 collection A Shropshire Lad. The poem's speaker has just killed his brother and is on the way out of town (perhaps to go on the lam, perhaps to kill himself, too). But before he goes, he stops to wish his friend Terence a sad farewell and laments the countryside pleasures he'll no longer get to enjoy. Murder, in this poem, ends the murderer's life just as surely as it ends the victim's: there's no way for the speaker to go on living his former life after his fratricide.
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“Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree” Summary
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"Goodbye to the barns and the haystacks and the trees; goodbye to the banks of the river Severn. Terence, take a good last look at me, for I won't be coming home any more.
"The sun shines hot on the half-mowed hill; by now, the blood will have dried. Maurice lies dead in the hay with my knife in his body.
"My mother thinks we're far away; by this hour, we should have finished mowing the field. This morning, she had two sons, but by tonight, she won't have any.
"Shake my bloodied hand; goodbye, my friend. I won't be using these bloody hands to mow hay any more.
"My friend, I wish you a strength that will make you proud, and a love that will make you virtuous. And when the harvest festival comes around in August, I wish you luck in the races.
"The haystacks and the sheep pens will wait for me a long, long time. My dinner plate will sit there empty, and the food will go cold."
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“Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree” Themes
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Murder, Guilt, and Consequences
“Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree” expands on the old tradition of the murder ballad (a type of folk song that tells the story of a murder) to reflect that killing ends the killer’s life as surely as it ends the life of the victim. A transgression this deep cuts the murderer off from the world around him, marking him permanently with guilt and shame.
The poem’s speaker has just murdered his brother; about to go on the lam, he pauses to say goodbye to the countryside he grew up in, but also to life as he’s known it. He confesses his murder to his friend Terence, admitting that his brother Maurice lies dead in the hay with the speaker’s “knife [...] in his side.” He gives no motive for his murder: it’s simply something that he’s done, and (as Lady Macbeth knew) it can’t be undone.
This irrevocable crime means the speaker can no longer live as he has. He must bid farewell not just to Terence, but also to the familiar “barn and stack and tree” of the English countryside he's grown up in, alongside all its traditions and comforts: he won’t be there to bring in the hay, to eat the dinner his mother has made for him, or to share in the fun at the Lammastide harvest festival.
He's also going to have to live with his guilt for the rest of his life. He knows he's left his poor mother "alone" in the world as well as murdering his brother; his terrible actions have damaged more lives than one. And his repeated nervous thoughts of his "bloody hands" suggest that he feels his hands will stay symbolically bloodied forever.
The speaker’s farewell to Terence and to his home doesn’t merely suggest that, on a practical level, he’s going to have to go on the lam (or even kill himself) if he wants to evade punishment. It reveals that his killing has distanced him from ordinary life. The deep wrongness of murder (and fratricide, the murder of a brother, no less) irrevocably severs his connection to the people and places he knew, making him into an outcast—a fate that he must recognize and accept.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree”
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Lines 1-4
"Farewell to barn and stack and tree,
Farewell to Severn shore.
Terence, look your last at me,
For I come home no more.“Farewell to barn and stack and tree” begins with the speaker’s parting words to his friend Terence—the sort of things a guy might say before he emigrated to a new country or went off to war. The speaker bids farewell not just to Terence, but to the whole landscape: to the “Severn shore” (the banks of the river Severn, which flows through Wales and the southwest of England), and to every “barn and stack” (haystack, that is) “and tree” that dots his part of the English countryside.
The poem is a ballad, or a folk song that tells a story. Appropriately, then, it uses ballad stanzas: quatrains (or four-line stanzas) rhymed ABAB and written in common meter. That means that its stanzas alternate between lines of four iambs (metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm), as in “Farewell | to barn | and stack | and tree,” and lines of three iambs, as in “Farewell | to Sev- | ern shore.”) This earthy form suits the earthy setting; at first, readers might expect this poem (like many in Housman’s A Shropshire Lad) will tell a gentle, melancholy tale of loss in the English countryside.
It will not. This isn’t just a ballad, the reader soon realizes, but a murder ballad, a poem telling the tale of a killing. The speaker’s confession will reveal that, in becoming a murderer, he has destroyed more than another man’s life: his killing also effectively ends his own life. This farewell to Terence marks the beginning of a new and darker existence for him.
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Lines 5-8
"The sun burns on the half-mown hill,
By now the blood is dried;
And Maurice amongst the hay lies still
And my knife is in his side. -
Lines 9-12
"My mother thinks us long away;
'Tis time the field were mown.
She had two sons at rising day,
To-night she’ll be alone. -
Lines 13-20
"And here’s a bloody hand to shake,
And oh, man, here’s good-bye;
We’ll sweat no more on scythe and rake,
My bloody hands and I.
"I wish you strength to bring you pride,
And a love to keep you clean,
And I wish you luck, come Lammastide,
At racing on the green. -
Lines 21-24
"Long for me the rick will wait,
And long will wait the fold,
And long will stand the empty plate,
And dinner will be cold."
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“Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree” Symbols
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Bloody Hands
The speaker’s bloody hands symbolize inescapable guilt over a murder (and thus join a long tradition of bloody hands in literature).
Having killed his brother, the poem’s speaker offers his friend Terence a (rather unappetizing) “bloody hand to shake” on his way out of town. But he also reflects that he and his “bloody hands” will “sweat no more on scythe and rake,” that the blood on his hands means he’ll have to give up the rural life he’s known. That line suggests he feels his hands will stay symbolically bloody forever. Like Lady Macbeth’s, his “bloody hands” won’t wash clean, not this harvest season and not the next. Murder leaves a permanent mark of guilt on the murderer.
(The bloody hands here also support the poem's echoes of the biblical story of Cain and Abel. After Cain murders his brother Abel, God permanently scars him with what's become known as the "Mark of Cain"—a mark that sets him apart from other, less fratricidal people. The speaker's bloody hands work in just the same way.)
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“Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Repetition
Repetitions help to give this poem its haunted, driving rhythm. The very first lines set the tone:
"Farewell to barn and stack and tree,
Farewell to Severn shore.The anaphora of "farewell" makes the speaker sound solemn and dazed as he bids goodbye to everything he knows, from the familiar "barn and stack and tree" of his hometown to the whole sweep of the "Severn shore." The polysyndeton on "barn and stack and tree" might help to create the impression that the speaker's gaze is roving from one of these countryside landmarks to another.
Later moments of anaphora create a build like something out of a horror movie—as in the second stanza, for example:
"The sun burns on the half-mown hill,
By now the blood is dried;
And Maurice amongst the hay lies still
And my knife is in his side.Each "and" here creeps closer to the real shock: Maurice is dead, and the speaker is the one who did it. Similar echoes make the fourth stanza feel sinister, too:
"And here’s a bloody hand to shake,
And oh, man, here’s good-bye;
We’ll sweat no more on scythe and rake,
My bloody hands and I.Alongside the same sort of parallelism the poem has used before, the diacope on "bloody hand" waves that unsettling image in front of the reader's face like, well, a bloody hand.
These repetitions play a role in the poem's flavor as well as its drama: this poem draws on the old tradition of the murder ballad, a folk genre that's often full of punchy repetitions. The final stanza might sound most ballad-y of them all:
"Long for me the rick will wait,
And long will wait the fold,
And long will stand the empty plate,
And dinner will be cold."That sequence, with its emphasis on the countryside's "long" (indeed, eternal) wait for the speaker to return, might make readers think of the old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, with its similar ominously repeated "long."
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Allusion
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Imagery
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Assonance
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"Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Stack
- Severn
- 'Tis
- Scythe
- Lammastide
- Rick
- Fold
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Haystack.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree”
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Form
"Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree" is a latter-day murder ballad, a 19th-century take on a form that goes back centuries. (See the classics "Matty Groves" and "The Twa Sisters" for comparison.)
As well as a murder ballad, the poem is a dramatic monologue, a poem spoken in the voice of a particular character—rather like a monologue from a play. That character, in this instance, is a nameless murderer: a man who has just committed fratricide, killing his brother Maurice. Strangely enough, he still makes time to bid his friend Terence goodbye before he either goes on the lam or kills himself (a decision about which the poem remains ominously vague).
As any good murder ballad does, this poem tells the story of a murder in ballad stanzas. A ballad stanza is:
- A quatrain (or four-line stanza; this poem uses six of them)
- Rhymed ABAB
- Written in common meter: alternating lines of iambic tetrameter (four iambs in a row, as in "Fare well | to barn | and stack | and tree") and iambic trimeter (three iambs, as in "By now | the blood | is dried").
All these choices make this unsettling poem sound a lot older than it is. Like many of the poems in Housman's "A Shropshire Lad," "Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree" roots itself in the countryside world it describes by turning back to simple folk forms.
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Meter
"Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree" is written in common meter, also known as ballad meter. That means that its lines alternate between iambic tetrameter—lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm—and iambic trimeter, lines of three iambs. Here's how that rhythm sounds in lines 1-2:
"Farewell | to barn | and stack | and tree,
Farewell | to Sev- | ern shore.This rhythm (which is indeed common in all sorts of folk verse, from hymns to nursery rhymes) fits the poem into the ballad tradition. Housman is drawing on old murder ballads here, songs that told tales of dark deeds. In writing a countryside tale in ballad meter, he might also have been working in the tradition of Wordsworth, the Romantic poet who argued that poetry should tell the stories of real people in unpretentious, earthy verse.
The poem doesn't stick strictly to that iambic pulse all the way through. The first line of the closing stanza, for instance, does something different:
"Long | for me | the rick | will wait,
Housman lops the first unstressed syllable off the front of this line, so the line leans hard on that ominous "long."
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Rhyme Scheme
This poem's simple rhyme scheme runs as follows:
ABAB
That back-and-forth pattern of rhyme is in keeping with the ballad tradition this poem draws on. Most ballads (traditional folk poems often set to music) use a simple ABAB or an ABCB rhyme scheme. This poem keeps that scheme particularly straightforward: nearly all the rhymes here land on blunt, monosyllabic words (the only exceptions being away, alone, and Lammastide).
These simple rhymes support a mysterious and unsettling story. The reader learns that the speaker has murdered his brother, but not why he's done it. The straightforward sounds of the speaker's language make the ambiguity all the more disturbing: he's a plainspoken person who has done a terrible and inexplicable thing.
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“Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is a murderer—in fact, a fratricide (a person who kills their brother). Eerily enough, he also seems like a sentimental and even considerate fellow. The poem is his farewell speech to his friend Terence, to whom he's stopped to say goodbye as he prepares to get out of town (whether to go on the lam or to kill himself—the poem is ambiguous on this point, too).
Alongside his description of his brother Maurice lying dead in the sun, the speaker thinks wistfully of all the countryside habits and pastimes he's leaving behind; he even wishes Terence luck with the annual races when "Lammastide" (a late summer harvest festival) rolls around. He's sorry to be going and sorry to be leaving his friend and the world he knows.
He seems less concerned, however, with the murdered Maurice, merely reflecting that "by now the blood is dried" at the scene of the crime. Whether that's down to shock or cruel indifference is left up to readers to decide.
In fact, the poem leaves a lot about this speaker for readers to guess or imagine, including the reasons he might have killed Maurice in the first place. The speaker remains a resolutely mysterious figure: he could be an envious conniver, a panicking man who acted in self-defense, or any number of other flavors of murderer. All readers can really know about him is that he killed his brother and destroyed his own life in the same moment.
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“Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree” Setting
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"Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree" is set in the English countryside, somewhere along the course of the river Severn (one of the longest rivers in the UK). Readers can guess that the poem's deadly events likely take place somewhere in the county of Shropshire (as most of the poems in Housman's A Shropshire Lad do).
What really matters in this setting is its sense of ancient countryside tradition. The speaker and his brother are mowers who harvest hayfields together, following a familiar, predictable seasonal rhythm: their mother at home knows exactly when they come and go from their work (though this time, neither of her sons will be coming home when she expects them). And on his way out of town after committing fratricide, the speaker wistfully wishes his friend Terence "luck [...] at racing on the green" when "Lammastide" (a late summer harvest festival) rolls around; he, of course, won't be there to see it this time.
These allusions to the habits and rituals of country life suggest that the speaker's murder of his brother has interrupted a steady old rhythm. The hill where he and his brother were working together will go "half-mown": the killing has disrupted the way of things.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree”
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Literary Context
The English poet A. E. Housman (1859-1936) first published this poem in his popular 1896 collection A Shropshire Lad. He wrote many of the 63 poems in A Shropshire Lad after the death of his friend Adalbert Jackson; the collection revolves around themes of death, time, and fleeting youth.
Though initially rejected by publishers and not an immediate success, the collection's vision of an idealized Englishness and its valorization of soldiers made it a hit a few years after its release, when World War I made both of those perspectives fashionable.
In its praise of the beauty of nature, A Shropshire Lad continues the tradition of the Romantic poets of the earlier 19th century—like Wordsworth and Coleridge, who revived and championed the ballad form Housman uses here.
A Shropshire Lad has inspired both praise and condemnation, and Housman's literary reputation remains a matter for debate. For some readers, he's a sensitive soul whose poetry captures the dreamy beauty of the English countryside. For others, he's a fusty, gloomy, one-note sort of writer. (The modernist Ezra Pound, for one, mocked Housman's poetry in a parody with the refrain, "Woe! woe, etcetera.") Regardless of this debate, a number of his poems remain among the most beloved in English literature.
Historical Context
Housman was in his thirties when he published A Shropshire Lad and insisted that the poems were not overtly biographical. "I was born in Worcestershire, not Shropshire, where I have never spent much time," he wrote in a later letter. The poems' outlook, Housman said, simply stemmed from his "observation of the world." Still, this poem's tale of grief and guilt might derive from Housman's own experiences. When he wrote this collection, he was mourning his friend and housemate Adalbert Jackson (and perhaps mourning over the unrequited love he felt for Adalbert's brother Moses, too).
Housman published A Shropshire Lad in 1896, right at the tail end of the Victorian era. Under the reign of Queen Victoria, Britain had extended the reach of its empire around the world and made significant developments in technology; factories and railroads sprung up across the country, changing the texture of rural life (much to many Victorian writers' alarm). This was also a period of strict morals and religiosity on the one hand and scientific challenges to the accepted dogma on the other; new geological discoveries and Darwin's theories of evolution led to a crisis of faith as many questioned the biblical account of the world's creation.
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More “Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree” Resources
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External Resources
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More about Housman — Read this brief biography from the Poetry Foundation to learn more about Housman's life and work.
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A Shropshire Lad — Look through the notable collection this poem comes from.
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Portraits of Housman — See some images of Housman via London's National Portrait Gallery.
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Housman's Legacy — Read an article discussing Housman's literary reputation.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by A. E. Housman
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