Tales Of A Wayside Inn Part 3 Interlude 7 - Analysis

A toast to plain song, and a suspicion of ornament

This interlude is less a poem about a single subject than a quick drama about what poetry should be. Longfellow stages an affectionate argument between two temperaments: the Theologian, who blesses the ballads of old times and their bards of simple ways, and the Student, who loves the same bread-and-ale plainness but refuses to make it a law. The central claim that emerges is that poetry needs roots and routes at once: it draws power from the native and the homemade, yet it also grows by crossing borders, borrowing, and bringing things back.

The Theologian’s praise is tactile and moral. He imagines poets who walked with Nature, whose country was their Holy Land, and even whose clothing is ethically right: homespun brown from looms of their native town. The detail about not being ashamed to wear that homespun turns taste into virtue. Even the rejected luxuries—silk, sendal, and cockle-shells from Outre-Mer—feel like temptations, foreign trinkets that would make a song untrue.

The Student’s counter-image: poets as migrating animals

The Student answers with a generous Yes and the same domestic metaphor—bread and ale, home-baked, home-brewed—but he insists that this diet is not enough. His strongest move is to shift the argument from clothing and food to animal nature: Poets...are birds / Of passage. Instinct, not fashion, drives them; they range abroad and return with seeds that may become flowers or weeds. That last phrase is crucially honest. It admits the risk of cosmopolitan influence—some imports will be harmful or ugly—yet it still argues that growth comes from exposure, not confinement.

To sharpen the contrast, he refuses the barnyard model of art. Poets are not fowls in barnyards born to cackle over a single grain of corn. The insult is funny, but it’s also a warning: when a culture demands only local material, it may end up with local noise rather than song. The most biting image comes when the Student imagines the horizon being shut down to the small limits of a town; then the poet is degraded into someone who thinks the all-encircling sun rises and sets in his back yard. The argument is not simply that travel broadens the mind; it’s that provincialism actually shrinks reality until even the sun becomes parochial property.

Where the debate can’t be resolved: holiness versus hunger

The tension is real because both speakers make claims that sound like needs rather than preferences. For the Theologian, the native is best because it carries a kind of innocence: “Holy Land,” “homespun,” and a refusal of gaudy adornment suggest purity, humility, and closeness to what is given. For the Student, the need is hunger—not enough for all our needs—and poetry’s health depends on variety, even contamination. The poem doesn’t let either view win outright; instead it shows the debate as a recurring human split between belonging and becoming. The same word home appears as comfort and as cage.

The graceful dodge: late hour, long story

After the Student’s long, soaring metaphor of horizons and suns, the Theologian retreats into authority and timing: It may be so; yet I maintain and then the hour is late. This is a subtle tonal turn. The earlier praise is warm and idealizing; the debate becomes sharper; then the Theologian ends it not by conceding but by controlling the room. The line We will not waste it in debate is especially telling, because it treats argument—this very clash of ideas—as a kind of waste, as if only stories (not disagreement) deserve time. In other words, the poem shows how communities manage conflict: not by solving it, but by moving on to the next voice.

Damocles and the Landlord: the joke that keeps the peace

The final shift is comic and theatrical. The classical image of the sword of Damocles drops suddenly onto the Landlord, who blushes, offers vain apologies, and only then began to tell. This ending does two things at once. It relieves the ideological pressure by turning to performance—someone must entertain, regardless of who is right—and it quietly suggests that storytelling is also a kind of burden, a duty that falls on the next speaker. The interlude ends by naming what is coming—The Rhyme of one Sir Christopher—as if to say: whatever your theory of the native or the foreign, the immediate truth is that a tale has to be told, and someone has to risk being its mouth.