Farewell And Adieu - Analysis

A cheerfully reckless goodbye that masks danger

The poem’s central trick is that it sings a carefree farewell while describing work that could kill the speaker at any moment. The opening repeats Farewell and adieu to the Harwich Ladies with the sound of a music-hall send-off, but the reason for leaving is bluntly martial: they’ve got orders to work to the eastward, and they hope soon to strafe 'em some more. That buoyant, almost flirtatious address to women on shore stands in tension with the mechanical, impersonal world the crew is headed into. The poem keeps the shore’s warmth in view only long enough to make the sea’s cold feel sharper.

The submarine as a childlike creature and a weapon

The speaker describes the vessel in deliberately toy-like terms: little tin turtles that duck and dive under the North Seas. The childish metaphor is funny, but it also shrinks the crew’s agency; they are not heroic captains steering a ship so much as small creatures trained to flinch and hide. That’s the poem’s first big contradiction: the language is playful, yet the action is predatory—waiting to strike something that doesn't expect us. Even the line it's go as you please! sounds like freedom, but in context it’s freedom inside a mission of surprise attack, where “please” means “if you survive the route.”

Accidents, not glory: the minefield episode

The poem turns from jaunty travel to misadventure when The first thing we did is not a feat but a mistake: they dock in a minefield, a place where repairs should be done least of all. The comedy of understatement—saying a minefield is merely inconvenient—becomes a way of swallowing fear. They lay doggo in twelve-fathom water while tri-nitro-toluol is hogging our run: the technical precision of depth and explosive name suddenly punctures the earlier nursery-image of turtles. Here, the real antagonist isn’t an enemy sailor; it’s the environment and the hidden mathematics of explosives and pressure.

Meeting the Zeppelin: bravado collides with limits

The next encounter brings the war visibly into the sky: they rose under a Zeppelin with a shiny big belly that is half blocking the sky. The scale is almost mythic—an enormous body blotting out light—yet the crew’s response is constrained by their equipment. The speaker’s near-censored outburst, what in the--Heavens, signals a crack in the bravado; it’s the closest the poem comes to admitting panic. The question that follows is practical, not philosophical: what can you do with six-pounders? They fire anyway—we fired what we had—and then bade him good-bye, turning a potentially fatal mismatch into another casual farewell. The repeated refrain, Farewell and adieu, etc., starts to sound less like a song chorus and more like a coping mechanism: if everything is “goodbye,” then nothing has to be fully felt.

The poem’s toughest joke: farewell as a way of not looking

The speaker keeps converting danger into sociable talk—goodbyes, pleasantries, the brisk narration of The first thing and The next thing. But that quick, episodic pacing also implies a life lived from incident to incident, with no time to process what nearly happened in the minefield or under the Zeppelin’s shadow. The poem’s humor depends on a grim recognition: in this kind of war work, you may not get a grand ending or even a clear story, just a sequence of close calls told fast so they won’t catch up with you. If the shore-side ladies represent stable attention and memory, the sea-side voice survives by refusing both—by treating terror as just another verse that can be rounded off with etc..