Commentary:        According to Jónas, the incident giving rise to "A Ship Comes In, 1830" occurred on the first day of summer (which fell that year on 22 April). The poem takes Lárus's prosaic question to Jónas and amplifies it — along with Jónas's reply — into a lively portrait of street life in early nineteenth-century Reykjavík, suggesting the excitement that gripped everyone in town when the first of the "spring ships" (vorskip) arrived from Denmark.

Lárus Sigurðsson (1808-1832), a schoolmate of Jónas's at Bessastaðir, was a young man of exceptional promise. He wrote poetry not only in Icelandic, but Latin and English as well, and Jónas once told Páll Melsteð that he had the makings of a great poet. Lárus graduated from Bessastaðir in 1827, two years before Jónas, and studied theology at Copenhagen University until falling ill with tuberculosis and returning home. When Jónas himself left for Copenhagen on 23 August 1832, one of the last things he did — the morning of his departure — was pay a visit to his bedridden friend Lárus, who died a few hours later (see EPM50-1). Jónas recalled this incident in 1836 in his "Song of Grief" (a collective elegy on various dead relatives and friends):