poem

An Old Song, Sep 30, 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 out of borrowed music. The opening stanzas are his own quiet observation, a walker at dusk watching light split the clouds into "a straight narrow footbridge bright" only he can see, while a robin sings nearby. Then, almost without warning, an old sailors' shanty about a fickle Amsterdam maid drifts in on the sea air, and Thomas lets it take over the poem entirely, repeating its weary refrain of roving and ruin.

The effect is uncanny: private wonder and secondhand song blur together, as if the walker's solitary vision and the sailors' communal tune are both just ways of making sense of dusk, loneliness, and desire. The imagery of the "mile-long snake of foam" and the imagined bridge of light are lovely on their own, but it's the collision with the earthy old ballad that gives the poem its charge. It still lands because it captures how memory and mood are stitched from things we didn't write ourselves — borrowed songs that somehow become our own.

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