“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,—
“To right, to left,”
and cries
“Ho, Enderby!”
For at that moment he hears the bells ring “Enderby!” which seem to be the knell of his hopes. The next line,
“They rang ‘The Brides of Enderby,’”
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
“They rang ‘The Brides of Enderby’”