Farewell Thou Stream - Analysis

A farewell that is really an admission

The poem pretends to be a goodbye to a landscape, but its real subject is a man cornered by desire. The opening Farewell, thou stream sounds pastoral and controlled; then the speaker immediately turns inward and begs, O mem'ry, spare. That pivot reveals the central claim: leaving the place near Eliza cannot free him, because the true torment lives in remembrance and in the body. The stream winding around her dwelling becomes a natural emblem for how his thoughts keep circling what he can’t have.

The body as a prison: chain, fire, swelling

Burns loads the first stanza with images of constraint and overheating that clash with the cool, flowing water he addresses. He is Condemn'd to drag a hopeless chain, as if love were a sentence, not a choice. At the same time, he feels a fire in every vein, an image that makes desire sound like fever. The tension is sharp: he burns with feeling, yet he Nor dare disclose it. Even his chest becomes an adversary—cruel thoes / Within my bosom swelling—as if pain physically rises against his will. The tone here is controlled in diction but frantic in sensation: he’s trying to speak calmly while describing a body that won’t stay quiet.

Unseen, unknown: the humiliation of secrecy

The second stanza shifts from private suffering to social invisibility: Love's veriest wretch, unseen, unknown. He wants to cover his grief, but the body betrays him—The bursting sigh and th' unweeting groan give him away. That word unweeting (unwitting) matters: even his self-control happens by accident. The speaker’s contradiction deepens: he claims he’s fated—I know thou doom'st me to despair—yet he still petitions Eliza for mercy. The plea hear one prayer and forgive me suggests he feels guilty simply for loving, as though the emotion itself were an offense that requires pardon.

When fascination turns to disaster

The final stanza acts like an origin story for the obsession, and it changes the emotional temperature. He recalls hearing The music of thy voice and not knowing while it enslav'd me; he saw her eyes and nothing fear'd until it was too late. The tone becomes less pleading and more fatalistic, as if he is diagnosing how he fell. The extended comparison to Th' unwary Sailor watching a wheeling torrent sharpens the poem’s logic: attraction is not gentle; it is a force that looks mesmerizing right up to the moment it becomes lethal. The watery setting returns, but now water is not a stream beside a home—it is a vortex of circling horrors and overwhelming ruin. What began as a farewell to a calm place ends as a vision of drowning.

The cruelest possibility inside the prayer

His request for forgiveness is striking because he never asks for love back—only that she not condemn him for what he cannot stop feeling. In that light, the poem’s tragedy may not be rejection alone, but a deeper shame: that he experiences desire as both enslavement and guilt. If Eliza’s voice and eyes can enslav[e] without her intending it, what exactly is he asking her to forgive: his hope, his imagination, or the way he has made her into the center of his private storm?

Leaving the stream, carrying the torrent

By addressing the stream, memory, love, and Eliza in quick succession, the speaker shows how little control he has over where his mind goes. The physical departure implied by Farewell is almost irrelevant next to the internal chain he drags. The poem’s final image insists on a grim clarity: even if he walks away from her dwelling, he is still the sailor who has already looked too long at the torrent—and the real danger is that he cannot unsee it.