The speaker in this poem watches Peggy, a farm girl he clearly admires, choose a life of wealth and status as the lady of a grand house. He asks, with a kind of wistful disbelief, whether she can really trade her familiar world — woollen aprons, wild roses, robins, and the company of her humble friends — for cold “lady’s array.” There’s no anger in his voice, just a deep sense of loss. The mood is a slow, rural twilight: golden cowslips and evening milking songs give way to autumn hips and haws, and then to Peggy’s silent disappearance. The final stanza leaves us in a hush. The shepherd now milks where the wren builds, and Peggy is gone, imagined far off in her silks. Everything that made the glen happy seems folded away with her. The poem doesn’t judge Peggy; instead, it lets the empty hillside and the robin’s unanswered song speak to the cost of that departure.
Peggy's the Lady of the Hall — Summary
And will she leave the lowly clowns For silk and satins gay, Her woollen aprons and drab gowns For lady's cold array? And will she leave the wild hedge rose, The redbreast and the wren, And will she leave her Sunday beaus And milk shed in the glen? And will she leave her kind friends all To be the Lady of the Hall?
The cowslips bowed their golden drops, The white thorn white as sheets; The lamb agen the old ewe stops, The wren and robin tweets. And Peggy took her milk pails still, And sang her evening song, To milk her cows on Cowslip Hill For half the summer long. But silk and satins rich and rare Are doomed for Peggy still to wear.
But when the May had turned to haws, The hedge rose swelled to hips, Peggy was missed without a cause, And left us in eclipse. The shepherd in the hovel milks, Where builds the little wren, And Peggy's gone, all clad in silks-- Far from the happy glen, From dog-rose, woodbine, clover, all To be the Lady of the Hall.