The Lammas Hireling

• Themes


  • Passion
  • Sin
  • Superstition
  • Folklore
  • Guilt
• Structure


  • Written in the form of a dramatic monologue
  • Each stanza has 6 lunes - known as sestets
  • Some half rhymes appear - known as a slant
  • the breaks between stanzas often act as ‘hinge points’ for the poem, particularly between the first and second stanza when the tone shifts to be more mysterious and disturbing.
  • Enjambment between all of the stanzas to create the effect of ongoing quick and frantic speech, with little opportunity to pause for reflection on what has been said.
• "After the fair, I'd still a light heart and a heavy purse"


  • Juxtaposition between light and heavy - sign something is wrong
  • Love of money is considered a sin in the catholic church
• "I hunted down her torn voice to his pale form"


  • 'his pale form' - supernatural element introduced
  • 'torn voice' and 'hunted' is primal
  • The farmers wife is dead - ambiguous as to what she was trying to tell him in the dream - whether she was warning him of the danger of the hireling, jealous of a possible sexual liaison, was having an affair with the hireling and killed by her husband or the husband was having an affair with the hireling
• "warlock" 


  • Part of the lexical field of witchcraft and the supernatural
• "I knew him a warlock, a cow with leather horns"


  • The ‘cow with leather horns’ indicates a blend of male and female, unnaturally combined - could be witchcraft
  • Ian Duhig says “the cow with leather horns” are like hares with its tall pointed ears, drawn from witchcraft. Tradition where witches turn into hares
  • “Dark lantern” is also oxymoronic evoking the unnatural - light and dark imagery is used repeatedly in the poem. The farmer begins with a “light heart”, the sack, later on, grows “lighter with every step”.
• "The moon came out. By it's yellow witness I saw him fur over like a stone mossing. His lovely head thinned..."

  • Full moon is when witches are about. Casts light on a Gothic transformation. The description ‘lovely head’ attests to the homo-erotic nature of the relationship.
  • The triplet of short, spare sentences describing the transformation begin with ‘His’, like a refrain. adds a hypnotic rhythm.
  • hissing sibilance in the words “witness”, “stone” and “mossing”, reminiscent of the serpent of the Garden of Eden and associated with evil.
• "His eyes rose like bread"

  • Moreover, the imagery associated with the last line, ‘his eyes rose like bread’, may draw connotations to the harvest that the hireling worked so hard to help with
  • wheat is used to make bread, which is considered the reward for the harvest.
  • The farmer’s reward for his greed and sin is the plague the hireling then brings upon his farm. You cannot stop bread from rising, in the same way that the farmer could not stop his cattle dying.
• "...sack that grew lighter at every step.. there was no splash"


  • That the sack grew lighter may indicate the farmer’s growing relief to be free of the hare/hireling. There is something eerie in that the dropped sack makes ‘no splash’.
  • Yet this is a temporary respite for the farmer
• "I don't dream but spend my nights casting ball from half-crowns"


  • Guilt - farmers luck has run out. The farmer suffers insomnia — a reference to sleep that first appeared in stanza two — but now he spends his nights making bullets, an echo of the earlier shot that killed the hireling. That he spends his days ‘here’, that is with the priest, indicates an obsession with religion and an inner struggle that robs his peace.
  • Half-crowns used to be made from silver. So the farmer is making silver bullets from coins. In folklore, silver is believed to repel fairies and witchcraft.