Elizabeth Madox Roberts, born in 1881 in Kentucky, built her literary name on novels rooted in rural Southern life, but her short lyric poems often make room for a child’s way of seeing. “In Maryland” first appeared in her 1922 collection Under the Tree, where many poems speak in a young voice. Written early in the twentieth century, when American life was growing more urban and hurried, the poem turns back to a quieter world: a hill above a wide river, a grandmother at the door, and ships moving all day.
The speaker remembers “When it was Grandmother Barbara’s day,” as if that time belonged to the grandmother herself. The family lived on a hill, and below the pasture and trees “a river used to go.” That phrase “used to go” quietly tells readers this is memory, not present scene. The central idea is not simply a landscape but a shared act of looking. The water is “very wide and blue” and deep, and the speaker exclaims, “my! it was a sight,” a touch of childlike enthusiasm. Grandmother Barbara waits beside “the window or the door,” never tired of watching. She and the child watch “all day long and all day long” as the little ships pass. The shared looking becomes the poem’s quiet subject: loving attention to a place can pass between generations and become a form of memory itself.
The construction supports that mood. Four quatrains follow a ballad-like ABCB rhyme pattern, with pairs such as “below” and “go,” “sight” and “white,” “door” and “more,” “sky” and “by.” The rhythm is mostly tetrameter with shorter final lines, creating a gentle rise and fall, like the river’s movement. Repetition works strongly in the last stanza: “all day long and all day long” stretches time beyond a single afternoon, and “blue, as blue as the sky” doubles the color until water and air seem to meet. The word “my!” interrupts the measured lines and keeps the speaker’s voice young and direct. The repeated “And” at the start of three final lines links sight after sight, as if the watching never quite stops.
Imagery is visual and deliberately limited. The colors are mostly blue and white: blue water, blue sky, white sails. The speaker can “hardly see across,” so the river feels vast and almost dreamlike. Yet the “little ships” shrink that vastness into something a child can take in, like toys moving along the water. The hill and pasture place the house above the scene, and the grandmother at the window or door stands at the boundary between home and the larger world. Her patience gives the poem its emotional center. “She never was too tired of it” is an understated way of saying she loved this view—or perhaps that it kept her company.
What makes the poem significant is its restraint. It never announces loss or grief, but the past tense “used to” colors every line. The grandmother’s day is gone, yet the blue river and white sails are preserved through the child’s remembered gaze. Roberts shows that memory can be as simple as repeating what was seen and who was there. The poem matters because it captures an ordinary family ritual—watching ships—and makes it feel like a small, enduring gift. In a few plain stanzas, it teaches that attention to the natural world and to the people beside us is itself a way of holding time.