James Stephens, an Irish poet and storyteller of the early twentieth century, wrote in the midst of the Irish Literary Revival, when writers were reaching back toward folk song, ballad rhythm, and the textures of rural life. “The Rivals” belongs to that world, yet it is far from a sentimental nature lyric. It stages a small comedy of wounded pride between a man and a bird, both of whom are busy praising the same morning.
The situation is simple enough. At dawn, the speaker hears a bird singing “sweetly on a tree,” and the bird’s subject is the fresh, clean world: “the dew was on the lawn, / And the wind was on the lea.” Rather than enjoying this, the speaker decides not to listen, with the rather petulant explanation that “he didn’t sing to me.” That petulance is the heart of the poem. The speaker behaves like an artist whose vanity has been bruised because another performer has not acknowledged him. His solution is to sing himself, “Just as prettily as he,” about exactly the same dew and wind. The central idea, then, is a gently ironic one: the two rivals are not really competing for the song; the morning belongs to both of them, and their refusal to listen to each other only isolates two voices that are saying the same thing.
The construction makes that irony audible. The poem moves in three six-line turns, and its short lines lilt between three and four stresses as if mimicking a casual air. The rhymes stay close to one syllable, returning to chimes like “tree,” “me,” and “he,” while “dawn” and “lawn” gather the opening scene into a quiet pattern. Repetition is central: the phrase about the dew and the wind appears almost as a refrain, and “I didn’t listen to him” returns with comic stubbornness. The imagery is deliberately plain—dawn light, dew on grass, wind moving across an open meadow. That plainness matters because the speaker and the bird are both drawn to the same uncomplicated beauty. The word “prettily” is especially sly: it sounds like a child’s word, yet it carries the speaker’s need to claim equal skill. The archaic “lea” gives the song a folk-like, pastoral flavor, as though the speaker is half-consciously placing his own voice within an old tradition.
What makes “The Rivals” significant is its lightness of touch with a serious human flaw. The speaker protests that he did not listen, but the poem proves otherwise: he reproduces the bird’s song almost word for word. That contradiction quietly exposes self-absorption. The speaker wants the bird’s song to be directed at him, and when it is not, he responds with rivalry rather than attention. Stephens turns this small moment into a recognisable portrait of artistic ego. At the same time, the poem does not scold. Its repetition and bounce make the speaker lovable in his vanity, like a man caught humming the tune he claims to ignore. The title’s rivalry is therefore both real and absurd: two singers, one morning, no actual contest. The only meaningful rival is the speaker’s own need to be the centre of the dawn.