The author by presenting this old mother talking about her beloved daughter-in-law, Elizabeth, with "her two bairns," and the excited race of the son to reach home before she went for the cows, appeals to sympathy and feeling, awakens imagination, and presents not only a vivid and specific picture, but such distinct types of character as to make the event real. The poem is a fine example of the union of lyric and dramatic imagination.
The speaker becomes more and more excited and animated as she gives her memories of the successive events, but in the midst of each event relapses into grief. Again and again at the close of stanzas, a single clause or line indicates her emotion, rather than her memory of the exciting events. The event is portrayed dramatically, but these last lines are decidedly lyric. After the excited calling of "Elizabeth! Elizabeth!" by her son the very name seems to awaken tenderness in her heart, and she utters this deep lyric conviction:--
"A sweeter woman n'er drew breath Than my sonne's wife, Elizabeth."
The son, when he reaches home after his excited chase to save his wife, looks across the grassy lea,--
For at that moment he hears the bells ring "Enderby!" which seem to be the knell of his hopes. The next line,
expresses the emotion of the grandmother as she recalls the effect of the bells upon her son, and possibly her own awakening to the meaning of the tune which has taken such deep hold of her imagination, and becomes naturally the central point of the calamity in her memory.
The poem brings into direct contrast the excited realization of each event and her feeling over the disaster as a whole. The first is dramatic; the second, lyric. The mother realizes dramatically her son's exclamations and feelings, but the line
is purely lyric and expressive of her own feeling in remembrance of the danger.
The climax of the dramatic movement of the story comes in the intense realization of the personal danger to herself and her son when they saw the mighty tidal wave rolling up the river Lindis, which
"Sobbed in the grasses at our feet: The feet had hardly time to flee Before it brake against the knee."
Then the poet does not mention the son's efforts in her behalf, the flight to the roof of their dwelling in the midst of the waves, and makes a sudden transition again from the dramatic situation to the lyric spirit as she moans with no thought of herself: