Jockeys Taen The Parting Kiss - Analysis

A love that turns weather into a moral force

This songlike poem treats separation as something the natural world can either worsen or mercifully ease. The speaker’s central claim is simple but intense: if Jockey must go, then everything depends on whether he is kept safe on the road and held close in thought. The parting kiss is not just romantic detail; it’s the last physical proof of connection before the landscape swallows him: O'er the mountains he is gane. Once he crosses that boundary, the speaker feels her happiness has literally traveled with him: with him is a' my bliss.

Storm as the shape of grief

The first stanza turns grief into a climate. Instead of describing emotions in abstract terms, the speaker lists what can strike a traveler: winds that blaw, Plashy sleets, beating rain, and feath'ry snaw drifting across a frozen plain. The tenderness of Spare my Love is repeated like a protective charm, as if language itself might shelter him. That insistence reveals a quiet desperation: she cannot follow, cannot stop his leaving, and cannot do anything practical—so she petitions the elements, addressing them as if they have ears and conscience.

The hinge: from pleading to blessing

The poem’s emotional turn arrives with evening. After the harsh list of weather, the second stanza softens into a benediction: When the shades of evening creep, the speaker hopes he will Sound and safely sleep, and that his morning will be Sweetly blythe. The tone shifts from fear to a steadier faith, as if she forces herself to imagine a complete day in which he travels, rests, and wakes unharmed. Even the phrasing lingers on gentleness—sleep is not merely survival but comfort, not merely waking but waukening that is bright and light.

Distance that doesn’t count: the heart still at home

What finally calms the speaker is not certainty about the weather but certainty about Jockey’s inner life. She insists he will think on her he loves and repeat her name. The poem frames fidelity as a kind of homing instinct: where'er he distant roves, his heart is still at hame. That last claim answers the first stanza’s terror. If mountains and snow can remove his body, they cannot remove the place where he truly lives—his attachment. Home becomes not a location but a devotion he carries.

The poem’s key tension: helplessness versus control

Under the sweetness, the poem keeps a taut contradiction. The speaker calls the storms by name, as if naming them might control them, yet the very need to ask the wind to Spare him admits she has no power. She can picture his safe sleep, but she cannot verify it. That’s why the poem works so hard to transform worry into ritual: pleading in the first stanza, blessing in the second, and finally a conviction about his constant love. The most painful line is also the plainest: Nought but griefs with me remain. It’s a world emptied out—except for the voice that keeps speaking him safe.

A sharper question inside the tenderness

If Jockey’s heart is still at hame, why must the speaker bargain with sleet and rain at all? The poem suggests that love can keep someone faithful, but it cannot keep them from danger—and the speaker’s tenderness is partly a way of admitting that difference without saying it outright.