The Lammas Hireling/The Gun/Guiseppe

Themes

• guilt - the farmer feels immense guilt for shooting the hirelingl as seen by him having to confess to a priest, and admitting that he can no longer sleep "i dont dream" "spend my nights casting half crowns".
• mystery - the poem is largely ambiguous, we do not know what happened to his wife, or what the hireling truly was. This theme is empahsised by the moon and the sack not making a sound in the river.
• lonliness - the farmer enjoyed beying around the company for a time, he admits he "grew fond of company that knew when to shut up". The farmer is also a widow, and is seen to be alone and trying to pass the time after the hireling's death.

Form/ Structure

4 stanzas of 6 lines.

Syllable count for each line: 9/9/10/9/10/9 and 9/11/10/12/12/12

This could perhaps reflect the mundane country life the farmer is accustomed to experiencing.

This regular structure could also reflect the strong theme, or presence of religion and sin within the poem. It can also reflect on the theme of the supernatural as there are ideas of ‘warlock’ and ‘elf-shot' present in the poem.

Lammas Hireling- Vocab

"Lammas" - 1st August harvest festival

"elf-shot" - ill due to the agency of elves

"leather horns" - possibly fake horns. In the singular the horn would more likely be an instrument. "a wee brown cow with two leather horns" is an Irish riddle, meaning "hare".

"To go into the hare gets you muckle sorrow, the wisdom runs, muckle care". muckle (or mickle) means "much", the commonest usage being "many a little makes a mickle".

"struck so cheap" means "struck so cheap a bargain"

"casting ball" meaning casting shot for shotguns - maybe "silver bullets" to ward off evil spirits. "casting ball from ... my days here" "here" is ambigious, does he mean church, earth or somewhere else?

"I knew him a warlock" means "I realised he was a warlock" (possibly assuming his wife's form)

I levelled and blew the small hour through his heart". The small hour is the darkest time of night, he may have levelled his gun and shot darkness into the hireling's heart, killing him (?).

"The moon came out" - possibly double meaning of the big hole in the body made by the bullet.

Plot

Stanza 1 - A farmer hires a farmhand at a fair. It turns out to be a bargain

Stanza 2 - The farmer's a widower. Woken in the night he thinks the farmhand is a warlock

Stanza 3 - When the farmer shoots the warlock it changes into something else; most likely a hare.

Stanza 4 - He disposes of the body. He melts down his money. His herd falls ill. He goes to confession at the church often.

The Gun

Links to other poems

• The poem highlights a link between sex, death and fantasy.
• Morbid tone throughout showing the pleasure the narrator gets from holding a gun and killing.
• As the poem progresses we see the development of the voice's obsession with the gun.
• 'at first it's just practice' it starts off innocently with the voice shooting 'tins' and small targets until she shoots a rabbit and begins hunting, from this point she becomes progressively mezmerised with the sense of fullfilment she obtains from killing.

• Pampas Grass Versus the Chainsaw- Manmade vs Nature
• Please Hold- Empowerment shift from man
• The Lammas Hireling-Fantasy and similar setting/atmosphere.
• Guiseppe- Fantasy

Lammas Hireling-Background

Lammas is a traditional festival that marks the beginning of the harvest season. The ‘he’ of this poem is a hireling presumably taken on to help with this busy farming time. Things start well, and the hireling is popular with the cattle, which ‘doted on him’. However, this mysterious narrative poem immersed in folklore takes a turn for the macabre at the end of the first stanza following the anecdotal ‘Then one night’. Perhaps highlighting the theme of sorcery and fantasy.

It's based on a story I heard when I was in Northern Ireland, out for a very late night walk, a local person pointed out a house he told me was where the local witches used to live, and in their tradition witches would change into hares, and when the father was dying, his family was very embarrassed because the father's body was turning into a hare's and this bloke told me the story said he attended the funeral and the last thing you could hear was the hare's paws beating the lid of the coffin as they lowered it into the ground. Hare stories are sort of found all over England and Europe in fact. There's one rhyme in this that I suppose it might be helpful for people to have pointed out, and that's the one "to go into the hare gets you muckle sorrow, muckle care"- that's from the Annals of Pursuit which is a North Country witches' chant, restored by Robert Graves. "A cow with leather horns" is another name for a hare - if you think about it you'll see why. The story is: a farmer gets a young man from a hiring fair, which is how labour was engaged well into the last century, and takes him home with him, and finds he's got more than he bargained for."

Key Quotations-The Gun

• 'A gun brings a house alive' this line seems ironic as the gun infact brings death however it is clear here that the voice receives an adrenaline rush from holding and using the gun and even justing knowing it is in the house with her.
• 'you lay it on the kitchen table...on the green checked cloth' This is an example of Juxtaposition perhaps the 'grass is greener on the otherside' highlighting the theme of manmade vs nature.

Themes-The Gun

• Death
• Gender Stereotype
• Empowerment
• Pleasure
• Fantasy

The Lammas Hireling/The Gun/Guiseppe