Come By Chance - Analysis

A comic discovery that turns into a life theory

Paterson starts as if he is writing a parody of solemn reading: the speaker is very weary over a volume long and dreary that turns out to be the hilariously unpoetic Postal Guide. But that boredom becomes the poem’s engine. In the middle of lists of places like Puckawidgee and Murrumbidgee, the speaker stumbles on a name that feels like a door in a blank wall: Come-by-Chance. The central claim quietly forms here and then expands in the final section: what matters most in life arrives by accident, and chasing it directly may be beside the point.

The poem’s charm is that it earns its philosophy through silliness: township names, bureaucratic facts, and the petty power of the post inspector who can Closed the office up instanter. That world is all system, route, and regulation—until one unplaceable name breaks the spell.

The map that fails: one name with almost no coordinates

Come-by-Chance grips the speaker precisely because it resists the guide’s obsession with precision. The other places come with location, distance, size and population, but this one has No location… not a thing to help one find it, only an N which stood for northward. The joke is that the book designed to pin everything down can’t pin down the one place the speaker most wants to reach.

That missing data is not just a gag; it creates the poem’s main tension. The speaker wants to make a plan—leave my home, wander stoutly, settle down—but the object of the plan is defined by its refusal to be planned. The name promises an arrival that can’t be engineered.

Escape fantasy: a life beyond telegraph, railway, and immediate news

In the middle stanzas, Come-by-Chance becomes a utopia of delayed contact. The speaker longs for a place Where the telegraph don't reach you nor the railways run to town. Even the mail moves in a half-mythic way: a wiry young Australian leads a packhorse once a week, and the mail may simply vanish when the mailman drops the letters in a creek. Instead of treating this as inconvenience, the speaker reframes it as mercy: good news grows by keeping, and you’re spared the immediate shock of bad news.

So the dream isn’t only about remoteness; it’s about a gentler relationship to information, where time blunts pain and expectation loosens its grip. The speaker imagines a life with no hurry and no… worry, which is also a life where consequences arrive slowly, imperfectly, maybe not at all.

The poem’s turn: from a real place to the “careless country”

The tone shifts when the speaker admits, But I fear… that there's really no such city. The earlier voice is playful and determined; here it becomes wistful and a little chastened. Come-by-Chance stops being a settlement and turns into a moral geography: It never means a land of fierce endeavour; it is the careless country where the dreamers only go. That line has a double edge. It comforts—there is a refuge for dreamers—but it also criticizes the wish to opt out of effort, as if the fantasy depends on being exempt from the world’s demands.

The contradiction deepens: the speaker condemns fierce endeavour even while the earlier stanzas describe a determined trek forthward to find the place. The poem lets us feel how badly the mind wants a destination that will justify giving up the race, even if that destination is made of fog.

A sharper question the poem dares to ask

If Come-by-Chance is where the dreamers only go, does that make dreaming a kind of laziness—or a kind of wisdom? The speaker’s desire to be beyond telegraph and railway can sound like avoidance, but it can also sound like a protest against a life ruled by constant updates and relentless motion.

Fortune’s curtain: why the last section widens the meaning

After the asterisks, the poem stops pretending it’s only a bush sketch and states its worldview: in a life of haste and bustle, what’s worth living comes unstriven for and free. Paterson personifies luck as the fickle goddess Fortune, who gives pain or pleasure with indifference, careless what his worth may be. That cruelty matches the earlier image of letters lost in a creek: important things—news, joy, grief—arrive imperfectly and on no fair schedule.

And yet the poem ends tenderly. The catalogue of happiness—days of sport, nights of dancing, Moonlit rides, stolen kisses—is called an accident of access: looked behind the curtain, luck to linger. In the end, Come-by-Chance is less a place to escape to than a name for the brief, unearned intervals when life feels suddenly generous. The joke about postal routes becomes a serious recognition: we can toil for many things, but the moments we remember often arrive the way that town does—half-mapped, unlocatable, and real precisely because we didn’t manufacture them.