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“The Lammas Hireling” Introduction
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"The Lammas Hireling" was written by contemporary British poet Ian Duhig. The poem is a dramatic monologue set some time in the past and is based on Northern Irish folklore. The speaker—a farmer—tells the story of a hireling (young man) he employed around the time of the Lammas Harvest (which celebrates the harvesting of the wheat). At first the hireling seems to have a natural aptitude for work on the farm. One night, however, the farmer catches the hireling in a fox-trap under the full moon and realizes that he's a witch. The hireling transforms into a hare, and the farmer kills his new employee with a gunshot to the heart. Switching to the present tense at the end, the farmer tells the reader—who acts like the speaker's priest hearing confession—that he rarely sleeps, and spends his nights making ammunition for his gun. The poem won the U.K.'s National Poetry Competition in 2000.
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“The Lammas Hireling” Summary
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After the Lammas festival (which celebrates the wheat harvest), I was happy and had a lot of money, such was the favorable deal I made with the young man I hired. My cows loved him—they had female babies that were plump and healthy. Farm productivity doubled. I liked him because he knew when not to speak.
One night I was having a nightmare about my dead wife, and I followed her voice to the hireling. There he was in low light, naked except for the fox-trap cutting into his leg. I realized he was a male witch, the sort that turns into a hare. Practicing magic, as the saying goes, brings you much pain and sorrow.
I resolved to shoot him and blasted a hole through his heart—you could see the moon on the other side. Under the moonlight, he became furry—like moss growing on a stone. His head became thinner and his top lip tucked up like a hare's. His eyes grew larger like bread in an oven.
I carried his lifeless body in a sack which seemed to become lighter with every step I took. I dropped him from a bridge into the water below. His body didn't make a splash. All my cows are diseased now. I never sleep, spending my nights melting coins into bullets. I spend my days, here, at church. Bless me for my sins, Father. I last made confession an hour ago.
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“The Lammas Hireling” Themes
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Passion, Sin, and Guilt
The poem tells a strange story. Back in the days of witchcraft and folklore, a farmer hires a young man to help on his farm. The speaker initially adores this "hireling" (as do the cattle), but soon kills him on suspicion of being a warlock—a male witch. After this, the speaker lives in fear of reprisal, repeatedly confessing his crime (ostensibly to a priest) without ever assuaging his guilt.
At least, that's how the speaker presents things. The farmer comes across as unreliable, and it's possible to read the supernatural parts of the story as a means for the him to justify murder. Indeed, in some interpretations of the poem, readers see the speaker as harboring sexual desire for the hireling, and this repressed, illicit passion spills out into violence. The poem ultimately explores the effects of guilt, as the farmer tries to excuse his actions before realizing, over and over again, that denial and obfuscation do no good in the face of divine judgment.
The speaker seems like a man struggling to keep control of his emotional life from the start. When he employs the hireling, everything seems to go well: takings from business double and the farmer has a “light heart.” The mention of the "heart" and the "dot[ing]" cattle both suggest love and attraction, perhaps giving the reader an early sign that the farmer can't help but see the hireling in these romantic terms. Talking about the hireling, he also mentions how he “grew fond of company / that knew when to shut up.” In other words, the speaker liked the tense silence between himself and the hireling. “Shut[ting] up” here is perhaps a sign of emotional oppression, and there's also again a suggestion of sexual tension; perhaps the speaker is implying that he consummated an affair with the hireling, and that the hireling smartly knew not to bring this up.
The speaker then starts talking about his dead wife, but the reader never learns anything about the circumstances of her death—and, given that the speaker comes to murder the hireling, this moment introduces significant doubt as to the reliability of the narrator. Pushed into an emotional fervor by dreams of his wife, the speaker suddenly suspects the hireling of being a warlock and shoots him in the heart. Emotion and passion, then, spill over into violent action.
The way that the speaker links the “torn voice” of his dead wife to the “pale form” of the hireling seems telling. The reader might rightly ask what this new employee could really have to do with the wife—but perhaps it speaks to the conflicting feelings of passion and guilt in the speaker’s subconscious. Maybe, in the unhinged world of dreams, the speaker admits his latent desire for the hireling, swapping his old object of affection (the wife) for the new (the hireling). In doing so, he feels an intense sense of having sinned and, buoyed by the extreme nature of this emotional guilt, kills the hireling in order to destroy his illicit desire.
The speaker justifies this killing by confirming that the hireling was indeed a warlock. The supernatural way that the hireling dies seems to prove the speaker’s theory—but, of course, the reader has no reason to definitively trust the speaker. Casting the hireling as a warlock grants the speaker an external reason for killing him, as opposed to admitting that his actions were driven by out-of-control emotion and guilt. Perhaps, then, the speaker is most afraid of himself and his own feelings.
Indeed, killing the hireling doesn’t even solve the speaker’s fraught emotional state—it makes it worse. Shifting into the poem’s present tense, the speaker relates how he now spends his time making “ball” (ammunition) for his gun. He doesn’t sleep, and calls on God for help—his last confession was only an hour prior. In other words, he now exists in a paranoid state of ongoing guilt and perceived sinfulness. This shows that the act of killing the hireling—perhaps, of trying to kill his own desires—hasn’t solved the speaker’s internal conflict, but merely made it worse.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-24
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Superstition and Folklore
"The Lammas Hireling" is a poem steeped in folklore and supernatural mythology. Over the course of the poem it becomes clear that folklore and myth become a means for the speaker—a farmer—to justify his killing of a young new male employee (the hireling). The poem thus explores the role the supernatural and folklore once played in people's lives and shows this role in action, the farmer using it to explain what happened with the hireling.
The poem hints at the hireling's secret (and alleged) witchiness in the first stanza. The effect that he has on the speaker's farm seems almost too good to be true, with the farm's productivity doubling in no time at all. The reference to "shut[ing] up" in line 6 further conjures an air of secrecy.
It's then in the middle two stanzas that the poem becomes intensely mystical. The farmer tracks down the hireling, somehow linking the voice of his dead wife to the physical form of the young employee. The hireling's nakedness seems to prove to the speaker that the hireling is in fact a warlock—a male witch. The hireling isn't actively practicing magic, but the speaker seems sure (or wants to come across as sure). He calls the hireling a "cow with leather horns," which is a reference to a hare—and hares have long been associated with witches and witchcraft. The speaker then uses a supernatural proverb in line 12 and 13, saying that "to go into the hare gets you muckle sorrow"—that is, to practice witchcraft (such as turning into a hare) brings you great pain. (Of course, it's the speaker who then inflicts this pain, eventually shooting the hireling through the heart.)
The poem then describes the magical transformation of the hireling into a hare, with the moon casting a kind of supernatural light over the scene. The farmer quickly kills the hireling, stuffs him into a sack that magically seems to weigh less "at every step," and then tosses the body into the water without a sound. On the one hand, these details suggest the hireling's mystical identity. On the other, they can be taken as symbolic manifestations of the speaker's newfound lightness upon having disposed of someone he viewed as a threat.
And again, as noted in our previous theme discussion, it's impossible to tell how much of this section is true—and how much of it is placed there by the speaker in order to justify his killing. That is, by placing the murder within the context of supernatural evil, the speaker attempts to absolve himself of guilt—though his hourly act of confession proves that he still feels intensely guilty.
Indeed, when the farmer's herd also suffers, the speaker again blames on the supernatural too: "my herd's elf-shot." This relates to a mythological belief that shooting pains are caused by invisible elves firing invisible arrows. Of course, the fact that the speaker no longer spends any time on his farm might have something to do with the cows' poor condition too! Perhaps the whole story is true, a creepy tale of a farmer getting more than he bargained for. Or perhaps the speaker's turn to the supernatural simply suggests a refusal to take responsibility for his actions.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 3-5
- Lines 6-21
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Lammas Hireling”
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Lines 1-5
After the fair, ...
... Yields doubled.Before looking at the main body of the poem, it's important to put the title context. The poem is set some time in the past. It's not specified when exactly, but it's certainly a time in which folklore, the supernatural, and agriculture labor held greater sway over society. It's also probably set in Northern Ireland. Lammas Day is a festival on the 1st of August to mark the wheat harvest—again linking the poem to agricultural labor. The speaker appears to take on the "hireling"—his new employee—because he needs more help on his farm.
Moving on to the poem itself, the speaker appears to hire his young new employee at a country fair linked to the festival, and, for some reason, gets a highly favorable deal ("he struck so cheap"). Indeed, the speaker is cheered—he has a "light heart"—by this bit of business. Already, the poem is notable as much for the details it leaves out as the ones it includes—why, for example, did the hireling strike such a one-sided deal?
The short phrases are given a kind of light bounciness by the caesurae in lines 1 and 2:
After the fair, I’d still a light heart
and a heavy purse, he struck so cheap.The enjambment between the two lines contributes to this feeling too. This lightness of touch helps convey how, at first, things seem to go well for the farmer and his new hireling—a little too well perhaps. The hireling brings appears to bring good fortune and has an instinctive relationship with the farmer's cattle (they "dote[]" on him). Business booms—in fact, it doubles.
It's also worth noting how the past tense affects the speaker's dramatic monologue. The poem already has a sense of foreboding, a sense that all these good things can't last forever. The word "still" makes an important contribution, separating the time when the speaker had a "light heart" from the poem's present, in which the speaker's heart is anything but light.
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Lines 5-8
I grew fond ...
... his pale form.
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Lines 9-13
Stock-still in the ...
... runs, muckle care. -
Lines 13-18
I levelled ...
... rose like bread. -
Lines 18-21
I carried him ...
... my herd’s elf-shot. -
Lines 21-24
I don’t dream ...
... my last confession.
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“The Lammas Hireling” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Allusion
Allusion is used throughout "The Lammas Hireling." Most of the allusions in the poem refer to folklore and mythology from Ireland and Britain. Part of the poem's power comes from the mystery of these allusions, and in particular the distance between what they mean to the speaker and what they mean to the reader. That is, to the speaker allusions to mythology help him justify killing the hireling—but most modern readers won't be familiar with his references. This creates tension throughout the poem, in keeping with the dark subject matter.
In line 11, the speaker alludes to an Irish riddle about hares: "a cow with leather horns." This plays on another myth, which says that witches sometimes turn into hares. Lines 12 and 13 continue this allusion, offering up a puzzling proverb:
To go into the hare gets you muckle sorrow,
the wisdom runs, muckle care.
"Muckle" here means much. The sentence is warning against witchcraft, but also has a faint suggestion of repressed sexuality (going "into"). The third stanza continues this allusion, with the hireling allegedly turning into a hare before the speaker's eyes. Relatedly, "elf-shot" in line 21 alludes to the Anglo-Saxon belief that shooting pains are caused by invisible arrows fired by invisible elves.
The other main allusion is in the last two lines:
... Bless me Father for I have sinned.
It has been an hour since my last confession.The two sentences highlighted above situate the speaker in the Catholic tradition, and suggest that he feels intensely guilty about what he has done (hence the obsessive confessions). The allusion also turns the reader into a kind of priest figure, hearing the speaker's confession (and casting judgment upon it). The guilt may not be about the killing itself, but the speaker's possible homosexual feelings towards the hireling.
Where allusion appears in the poem:- Lines 11-18: “I knew him a warlock, a cow with leather horns. / To go into the hare gets you muckle sorrow, / the wisdom runs, muckle care. I levelled / and blew the small hour through his heart. / The moon came out. By its yellow witness / I saw him fur over like a stone mossing. / His lovely head thinned. His top lip gathered. / His eyes rose like bread.”
- Line 21: “Now my herd’s elf-shot.”
- Lines 23-24: “Bless me Father for I have sinned. / It has been an hour since my last confession.”
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Alliteration
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Anaphora
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Assonance
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Caesura
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Consonance
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Enjambment
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Metaphor
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Simile
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“The Lammas Hireling” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- The Lammas Hireling
- Fair
- Light Heart
- Heavy Purse
- Struck So Cheap
- Doted
- Dropped Heifers
- Yields
- Stock-still
- Fox-trap
- Warlock
- Muckle
- Levelled
- Small Hour
- Elf-Shot
- Casting Ball
- Half-Crowns
The Lammas Hireling-
(Location in poem: )
The Lammas is an old festival that marks the wheat harvest, falling on August the 1st. Hireling means new employee. The speaker, then, hires the young "warlock" at the Lammas fair (a common way of finding laborers).
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Lammas Hireling”
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Form
"The Lammas Hireling" consists of four sestets (six-line stanzas). The poem is a dramatic monologue told in the past tense—up until the final stanza, which brings the action into the present.
The first stanza describes a brief period of happiness. Just after taking on the hireling from the fair, everything was going well for the speaker. His farm was making profits and he was feeling happy. Things take a darker turn in the second stanza when the speaker links his dead wife's voice to the "pale form" of the hireling, perceiving the latter to be a male witch. In the third stanza, the speaker recounts how he shot the hireling, and how the hireling (supposedly) transformed into a hare (proof that he was supernatural and evil).
The final stanza offers up a kind of perpetual present, with the speaker spelling out his repetitive behavior: he confesses his crime during the day and makes ammunition by night. This final stanza also transforms the reader's role, making the reader into a priest figure who hears the confession.
One other thing to note about the form is the way the sentences unfold. They are abrupt and disjointed, often stretched or stopped by enjambment and caesura. Furthermore, no stanza is self-contained: in each, the ending sentence wraps around into the next stanza. This gives the poem a fraught sense of tension, which fits with the speaker's troubled state of mind.
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Meter
"The Lammas Hireling" is written in free verse, so it doesn't have a metrical scheme. The free verse allows the poem to create a more disjointed feel that fits with the speaker's troubled state of mind (so troubled that he doesn't sleep and confesses in church all day long!). The lack of meter also perhaps signals that the speaker is thinking on his feet, trying to create a convincing story to justify his killing of the hireling.
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Rhyme Scheme
"The Lammas Hireling" doesn't use rhyme. In fact, it doesn't use all that much sound patterning generally. This is probably for two reasons. Firstly, it would seem too orderly and organized if the poem was neatly rhymed—it wouldn't really fit with the speaker's sleepless and paranoid state of mind. Secondly, the vocabulary and phrases in the poem are already intensely strange, drawing on folklore and mythology. Keeping the tone fairly conversational lets this strangeness ring out more clearly.
That said, there is an exception fo this. It's the internal rhyme between the end of the second stanza and the beginning of the third: "To go into the hare gets you muckle sorrow, // the wisdom runs, muckle care." The rhyme here gives the sense that this is a kind of proverb. In fact, according to Duhig (as quoted by the Poetry Archive):
There's one rhyme in this that I suppose it might be helpful for people to have pointed out, and that's the one "to go into the hare gets you muckle sorrow, muckle care"- that's from the Annals of Pursuit which is a North Country witches' chant, restored by Robert Graves.
So, just as the speaker is about to kill the hireling for practicing witchcraft, he himself breaks away from his conversational tone into a witchlike chant. In doing so, he captures the supernatural feeling of this scene and also casts doubt on his reliability as a narrator.
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“The Lammas Hireling” Speaker
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The first-person speaker in "The Lammas Hireling" is a farmer from sometime in the past. The poem takes the form of a dramatic monologue—so the only words that the reader has to go on belong to the speaker himself. This makes the speaker an unreliable narrator. It's hard, then, to necessarily trust his account of events, particularly as it seems so fantastical.
One of the most noticeable things about the speaker is the strangeness of his language. Either he genuinely believes in warlocks, witches turning into hares, and malicious elves—or he feels that mentioning these will help make him seem less guilty over the hireling's death.
And though the poem starts lightly, with the speaker recounting a happier time, violence soon starts to creep into his language and, then, his actions. He seems extremely confused by the hireling, and there's strong evidence that this is based on repressed sexual desire (though this evidence is veiled and unclear, since the speaker wants to hide it). With that in mind, the "light heart" in the first stanza seems to suggest passionate feelings for the hireling, and the fondness of the hireling's ability to "shut up" conveys the speaker's unwillingness to talk openly.
But it's in the speaker's unconscious mind where this sinful attraction takes shape. He confuses his dead wife with the hireling, suggesting a conflict of desire. It's plausible to read the killing as an act of unspent sexual desire, the speaker trying to eradicate his homosexual feelings by destroying the very thing that brings them into existence.
But killing the hireling only makes the speaker more paranoid. Back in the poem's present day, all the farmer can do is confess his sins or make ammunition for this gun. In other words, the intensity of his feelings—and his inability to resolve his inner conflict—makes him go insane.
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“The Lammas Hireling” Setting
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"The Lammas Hireling" is set in the past, though it's not specified exactly when. The emphasis on agricultural labor and folklore and mythology (drawn from British and Irish traditions) suggests that it's at least as far back as the 18th century, possibly further. Seasonally, it begins after the Lammas fair, which falls on the 1st of August and marks the wheat harvest.
That said, the above elements of the setting only really exist in the poem because they are selected by the speaker himself. Furthermore, the poem makes an important shift in the final stanza, switching to the present tense. The speaker uses a key word, "here," which leads in to his act of confession: "Bless me Father for I have sinned." That makes it likely that the speaker is actually in a church, casting the reader unwittingly as the priest (hearing the sins of the speaker).
The supernatural world is also an important part of the setting, informing the atmosphere of the poem (if it's only a metaphor, or even a lie). The third stanza in particular has a very fairy tale-like quality to it.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Lammas Hireling”
Literary Context
Ian Duhig is a contemporary British poet and short story writer. He has published seven collections with the publishers Bloodaxe and Picador and won numerous poetry awards, including the National Poetry Competition twice (once for this poem itself).
Duhig's work is steeped in a love of language and wide cultural learning. This poem intentionally makes use of the arcane—references and vocabulary that most readers will not, on first glance, be familiar with. This is part of the way the poem builds its atmosphere of mystery and suspense, with phrases like "to go into the hare gets you muckle sorrow" requiring the reader's active engagement.
Poetry, of course, has a longstanding relationship with witchcraft—with poetry often thought of as casting a kind of spell, and magic spells themselves often borrowing the rhythms and cadences of poetic form. Readers who like this sort of thing should read Duhig's collection of the same name (The Lammas Hireling). Sylvia Plath's "Witch Burning" is similarly about the punishment of a supernatural creature. Also worth checking out is the anthology Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry complied by Rebecca Tamás, So Mayer, and Sarah Shin.
In its use of an unreliable narrator and the dramatic monologue form, the poem also has links to the works of Robert Browning. His poem "My Last Duchess" makes for relevant reading—it too has a narrator telling the story of how someone died, perhaps inadvertently implicating themselves in the crime.
Historical Context
"The Lammas Hireling" doesn't specify when it is set, but it certainly feels like a fairly distant past, a time in Britain and Ireland when belief in witches and the supernatural held greater control over the population. Lammas day is a festival which marks the annual wheat harvest (August 1st), though it is no longer practiced widely in the British Isles. Juliet in Romeo and Juliet is born on Lammas eve—the night before, also signifying that her life ends before it's meant to.
Duhig himself emphasizes the influence of the Northumbrian landscape (in the northeast of England) on the poems in this collection, though the main idea comes from a story he heard in Northern Ireland (as quoted by the Poetry Archive):
[The poem is] based on a story I heard when I was in Northern Ireland, out for a very late night walk, a local person pointed out a house he told me was where the local witches used to live, and in their tradition witches would change into hares, and when the father was dying, his family was very embarrassed because the father’s body was turning into a hare’s and this bloke told me the story said he attended the funeral and the last thing you could hear was the hare’s paws beating the lid of the coffin as they lowered it into the ground. Hare stories are sort of found all over England and Europe in fact. There’s one rhyme in this that I suppose it might be helpful for people to have pointed out, and that’s the one "to go into the hare gets you muckle sorrow, muckle care"- that’s from the Allansford Pursuit which is a North Country witches’ chant, restored by Robert Graves. "A cow with leather horns" is another name for a hare – if you think about it you’ll see why. The story is: a farmer gets a young man from a hiring fair, which is how labour was engaged well into the last century, and takes him home with him, and finds he’s got more than he bargained for.
It's easy to forget how much of a hold ideas of witchcraft and the supernatural once had over people. Witchcraft was not always considered evil, though was often treated with suspicion and fear. It was officially deemed an offense in Britain in 1563. From the late 15th century to the mid-1700s around 200,000 supposed witches were killed or tortured. Witches were often depicted as haggard old women (making this poem a kind of subversive take on the usual cliché).
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More “The Lammas Hireling” Resources
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External Resources
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More Poems and a Bio of Duhig — A valuable resource from the Poetry Archive.
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Witchcraft and Britain — A short and interesting take on witches' place in society through the centuries.
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The Allansford Pursuit — A witches' chant restored by poet Robert Graves from manuscript fragments (which the Duhig's poem alludes to).
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Duhig Interviewed — An insightful interview with the poet for The Compass magazine.
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A Reading by Ian Duhig — Footage of Duhig performing the poem in 2016.
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