The Hue And Cry Of John Lewars - Analysis

A mock manhunt that is really a love poem

Burns frames the speaker’s infatuation as a public emergency: a hue and cry for a criminal on the loose. The opening shout—A thief, and a murderer!—sounds like a town crier warning neighbors to Look well to your lives and your goods! But the supposed crime quickly reveals itself as erotic theft. The target is the far-famed and much-noted Woods, less a felon than a locally legendary beauty whose fame makes the speaker’s panic feel half-performative, half-sincere: he’s announcing danger while also advertising her.

“The devil is in it”: desire dressed as moral alarm

The poem’s central claim is that this woman’s attractiveness feels like violence to the speaker—violent enough that he reaches for the vocabulary of sin and death. When he looked at her eye, he insists that the devil is in it, as if lust must be explained as possession rather than choice. The speed of the “attack” matters: In a trice she whipt off my poor heart. The phrase makes his heart sound like a wallet lifted in a crowd, and it lets him present surrender as victimhood. Even her face becomes weaponry: Her brow, cheek and lip are listed like implements, and his peace takes a murderous dart. The extravagance is comic, but it also tells the truth of sudden infatuation: it feels like being robbed of composure.

The “description” that refuses to describe

The speaker promises a useful identification—Her, features, I'll tell you them over—then immediately balks: but hold! That hesitation is revealing. He can’t reduce her to a set of stable details because her power, as he imagines it, is precisely that she changes the observer. Instead of eye color or height, he offers superstition: She deals with your wizards and books. The “evidence” slides from physical description to occult rumor, and the warning becomes a dare: to peep in her face is to risk death, because There's witchery kills in her looks. The contradiction is the poem’s engine: he warns others away while making her sound irresistible.

The turn: from public warning to private pursuit

The final stanza pivots on But softly, a stage-whisper that collapses the crowd scene into a private plan. Having played the alarmist, the speaker confesses he knows her haunts and will at midnight watch her. The diction of stalking—slily, in the dark, all alone—pushes the joke to an edge: the “lawful” pursuit begins to resemble the very criminality he accused her of. Then the mask drops completely in the shouted punchline: Good lord! The dear THIEF HOW I'LL CATCH HER! The word dear flips the entire poem. He doesn’t want justice; he wants capture as intimacy, “catching” as courtship. What began as civic protection ends as personal appetite.

The poem’s main tension: victimhood as flirtation

The speaker keeps insisting he is endangered—his heart taken, his peace wounded—yet he is also arranging the circumstances for another “crime.” By calling her a thief and a murderer, he dramatizes how thoroughly she has undone him, but he also dodges responsibility: if the devil and witchery are to blame, then his desire can pretend it isn’t his. The poem flirts with moral panic while quietly enjoying it. Even the imagined “capture” at midnight feels less like punishment than consummation—his fantasy of being overpowered, again, by her presence.

A sharper question the poem forces

If she is truly so dangerous that There's witchery kills, why does he seek her out at midnight—the hour most associated with that very witchery? The poem answers by implication: the speaker prefers the story in which he is “robbed” to the simpler one in which he wants her. His loud accusation is a kind of permission slip, letting desire parade as alarm while it moves, predictably, toward the dark.