Northern Farmer - Analysis

Overall impression

The poem presents a rural speaker in strong dialect asserting practical values in the face of death. The tone is defiant, homespun, and at times bitterly comic; it shifts between stubborn self-reliance and anxious worry about property and legacy. Repetition and colloquial voice give the poem immediacy and character.

Authorial and social context

Written by Alfred Lord Tennyson, a Victorian poet attuned to social change, the poem gives voice to a working farmer threatened by modern institutions and change. The speaker's worries about doctors, parsons, and prospective land changes reflect 19th-century tensions: professional authority versus local custom, the encroachment of modernization, and rural insecurity about property and stewardship.

Theme — Resistance to authority and expertise

The farmer repeatedly distrusts doctors and the parson: "Doctors, they knaws nowt" and the parson's announcements are met with impatience. The poem develops this theme through blunt refusals of external pronouncements and a proud insistence on local knowledge and longstanding practice as true authority.

Theme — Attachment to land and legacy

Concern for land and who will tend it pervades the speaker's speech: fears that Squoire, Joanes, or Robins will mishandle the fields, and vivid references to past labor—stubbing, plowing, markets—show identity bound to stewardship. The repeated claim "I done my duty by un, as I 'a done by the lond" ties moral worth to agricultural care and continuity.

Theme — Mortality mixed with practical anxieties

Death is present but personalized through mundane anxieties: the speaker accepts mortality in the refrain "If I mun doy I mun doy" while simultaneously fearing the practical chaos left behind—who will tend the cows, plow the holms, or allow encroachment by steam-driven change.

Imagery and recurring symbols

Key images—the yaale (ale), the waste/waaste, and the barn—function symbolically. The yaale stands for habitual comfort and routine that defines the speaker's life and resists medical orders; the waaste/boggle episodes recall contested pastures and the speaker's role as protector; Bessy Marris's barn and Thornaby holms symbolize contested moral and material claims. The juxtaposition of coarse rural objects with institutional figures encourages reading the poem as defense of lived practice over abstract authority.

Final synthesis

Narratively simple but thematically rich, the poem gives a vivid, sympathetic portrait of a rural voice defending dignity through work and custom. Its power lies in dialectal immediacy and the way everyday details—ale, plow, sheep, barn—become moral touchstones for confronting death, change, and authority.