poem

An Old Song — Jun 24, 2026

Edward Thomas

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THE sun set, the wind fell, the sea
Was like a mirror shaking:
The one small wave that clapped the land
A mile-long snake of foam was making
Where tide had smoothed and wind had dried
The vacant sand.

A light divided the swollen clouds
And lay most perfectly
Like a straight narrow footbridge bright
That crossed over the sea to me;
And no one else in the whole world
Saw that same sight.

I walked elate, my bridge always
Just one step from my feet:
A robin sang, a shade in shade:
And all I did was to repeat:
"I'll go no more a-roving
With you, fair maid."

The sailors' song of merry loving
With dusk and sea-gull's mewing
Mixed sweet, the lewdness far outweighed
By the wild charm the chorus played:
"I'll go no more a-roving
With you, fair maid:
A-roving, a-roving, since roving's been my ruin,
I'll go no more a-roving with you, fair maid."

_In Amsterdam there dwelt a maid--
Mark well what I do say--
In Amsterdam there dwelt a maid
And she was a mistress of her trade:
I'll go no more a-roving
With you, fair maid:
A-roving, a-roving, since roving's been my ruin,
I'll go no more a-roving with you, fair maid._

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📖 About this poem

Edward Thomas builds this poem around a walk at dusk, then lets an old sailors' shanty drift in on the sea air and take over. The opening stanzas are quiet and exact — that mirror-still sea, the single wave making "a mile-long snake of foam," the shaft of light he claims as his own private footbridge. It's a poem about solitude and small wonder, the kind of moment you feel belongs only to you. Then the shanty's chorus intrudes, half-comic, half-melancholy, its refrain of roving and ruin bleeding into the personal scene until you can't quite separate the two. That collision is the trick: private epiphany and communal folk-song, sincerity and knowing irony, sitting side by side without resolving. It still lands because that mix feels true — how a stray tune can hijack a private mood, and how memory works by association rather than order.

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