Rain is falling on a Cambridge skyline, and a speaker sits at a window watching the spires of "King's" for the last time. Amy Levy's "A Farewell" is a poem about leaving, but its real subject is a stubborn kind of loyalty. The speaker admits to having won nothing from this place, neither friendship nor distinction, and still finds the goodbye painful. Love for a place, the poem suggests, does not need to be earned or repaid.
The framing is simple and effective. The first and last stanzas begin with the same line, "The sad rain falls from Heaven," so the poem ends where it started. Nothing outside has changed, but something inside has. Early on, the sadness belongs to the weather and to a bird that "pipes and sings," a word pairing that sits oddly with "sad" and gives the scene a faintly sorrowful music. By the final stanza the feeling has moved indoors: "My heart is great with woe." "Great" suggests something brimming and heavy, a heart too full to hold what it carries. The weather has become a mirror.
The second stanza breaks into praise, and the language becomes almost childlike in its gushing. "O fairest of all fair places, / Sweetest of all sweet towns!" The speaker repeats the root word inside each superlative, as if she cannot find a bigger one and can only say "fair" and "sweet" again. The rhythm loosens here too. The line "With the birds, and the greyness and greenness" tumbles along in a rush of unstressed syllables, and the near-echo of "greyness" and "greenness" captures a damp English landscape in a few words. Then the stanza ends on something small and slightly comic: "the men in caps and gowns." After all that rapture, the town is summed up by its academic dress. The speaker is looking at the community from a distance, and the poem's mix of tenderness and mild irony shows in that line.
The third stanza turns to argument, and it is neatly built. People leave this town unwillingly, we are told, "For one man gets friends, and another / Gets honour, and one gets both." The sentence runs across a line break, so "Gets honour" arrives with a small, dry emphasis. It sounds like a complete account of what a university can give. The archaic "thee" and "loth" lend the lines a ceremonial, old-fashioned dignity, as though this were a general truth passed down. Yet the list has a gap. Friends, honour, both: the fourth possibility, neither, is missing. The last stanza supplies it, and it is the speaker's own case: "I have neither a friend nor honour." The earlier stanza was setting a trap, and the speaker walks into it herself.
The poem's last line is its best. "Yet I am sorry to go" is made almost entirely of plain, one-syllable words, and after the elevated diction before it, the bareness is striking. "Yet" is the hinge on which the whole poem turns. We expect someone with no friends and no honours to leave without regret, and the speaker's sorrow defies that logic. "Sorry" is also an understated word, far quieter than the "woe" of the line before. The restraint makes the admission more believable.
Formally, the poem is made of four quatrains with an ABCB rhyme scheme: "sings" and "King's," "towns" and "gowns," "loth" and "both," "woe" and "go." Only the second and fourth lines rhyme, and each rhyme lands on a simple word. The short, roughly three-beat lines have the swing of a folk song or ballad, which suits a poem that keeps its feelings in plain view. The subtitle "(After Heine)" tells us the poem is modelled on another writer's work. Whatever it owes to that model, the finished poem is rooted in a particular English place, with its spires, rain and gowns.
What makes "A Farewell" worth reading is how much it does in sixteen lines. It moves from scenery to praise to a wry piece of reasoning and then to a confession, and it never raises its voice. Its argument is that attachment is not a transaction. We may love a place that gave us little, and the proof is how much leaving it hurts.