Im A Shepherd And My Parlours - Analysis

A Shepherd Who Lives Outside the House

The poem’s central claim is that belonging doesn’t have to be built out of walls, property, or social rank; it can be made out of attention. The speaker announces a paradox right away: my parlours are not rooms but ruffled pasture sides, slopes, and furrows. By borrowing a word associated with comfort and status and attaching it to working land, he quietly rewrites what counts as a good life. The pasture becomes a kind of home, not because it’s owned, but because it’s intimately known.

The Landscape Dressed Like a Room

Once the speaker renames the outdoors as interior space, the poem keeps “furnishing” nature with domestic elegance. Yellow foamy clouds are trimming the pine wood with lace designs, as if the sky were a seamstress and the forest a garment. This is not nature as harsh or indifferent; it’s nature made welcoming, even decorative. Yet the luxury is weightless—cloud foam, lace, whisper—so the poem’s comfort stays airy and provisional. The speaker is lightly dreaming, suggesting that this “home” is as much a mental state as a physical place.

Listening as a Way of Living

The second stanza’s key action is not herding but listening: he attends to the whisper of the pines. That whisper matters because it turns the speaker into a kind of receiver—someone who lives by taking in small signals. The tone is calm and slightly enchanted: poplars are softly waving, their dew makes them shine, and everything holds a gentle, green radiance. When he repeats, I am a shepherd, it feels less like a job title than a self-definition: he is someone whose identity is stitched into the field’s ongoing motions.

Animals and Flowers as Neighbors

The poem’s friendliness expands beyond trees into a whole social world. Cows salute and hail me, communicating in a tongue of nods—a charming idea that also implies the speaker has learned another language, one that relies on patience and recognition rather than speech. Even flowers become agents: Fragrant flowers are inviting him to the river spots. The field is not just scenery; it’s a community that notices him and, crucially, welcomes him.

The Turn Toward Prayer and Communion

The final stanza makes the poem’s deepest move: it turns pastoral comfort into a kind of worship. The speaker lies on a heap of twigs and says, I forget all grieves and cares. That line admits, briefly, that grief and care exist—there is a life outside this green dwelling, and it is heavy. The field doesn’t erase that weight by argument; it interrupts it through rest and reverie. Then the language becomes explicitly devotional: To the sun I say my prayers, and he makes communion by the stream. What was “parlour” becomes “church,” but without buildings, priests, or doctrine—only sun and water. The poem suggests the sacred is not elsewhere; it is reachable through simple, bodily presence in the world.

A Comfort That Might Be Fragile

One tension the poem never fully resolves is whether this peace is a permanent home or a temporary forgetting. The speaker can forget his troubles, but forgetting is not the same as being freed from them. And his “parlours” are made of weather and seasons: clouds, dew, whispers, river spots. The poem’s tenderness may be its honesty—this sanctuary is real, but it’s also delicate, renewed each time the speaker lies down, listens again, and chooses the field over the house.

What Does He Give Up to Live Here?

If the stream can serve as communion, what, exactly, is being left behind? The poem’s green world offers companionship (cows that hail, flowers that invite), yet it also implies a life where human voices are absent. The shepherd’s prayer to the sun feels both expansive and solitary, as if the price of this clean peace is the surrender of more complicated kinds of belonging.