2. trysted, 'appointed,' participial adj. formed from the substantive tryst, an appointment to meet.' The word tryst is a variant of trust. 5. stoure. The oldest meaning seems to be a storm of dust (Douglas' Virgil); then, metaphorically, trouble, vexation. Sometimes it is used in O. E. as well as Scottish, for a fight. It inay be connected with the English stir. 9. Yestreen. See note on No. 13. 29. 13. braw, smart, The same word as the English and French brave and the German brav. 14. toast. The use of this word to signify a person whose health is drunk is said to be derived from the old custom of putting toasted bread in liquor: cp. Falstaff in Merry Wives of Windsor, III. v. 3, "Go fetch me a quart of sack; put a toast in't." See the story told in the Tatler, No. 24, June 4, 1709. WRITTEN in 1792, in honour of Miss Lesley Baillie, of Mayfield, Ayrshire. Mr. B., with his two daughters, accompanied with Mr. H. of G., passing through Dumfries a few days ago on their way to England, did me the honour of calling on me; on which I took my horse-though God knows I could ill spare the time— and accompanied them fourteen or fifteen miles, and dined and spent the day with them. 'Twas about nine I think that I left them, and riding home I composed the following ballad, of which you will probably think you have a dear bargain, as it will cost you another groat of postage. You must know that there is an old ballad beginning with: My Bonnie Lizzie Baillie, I'll rowe thee in my plaiddie. So I parodied it as follows, which is literally the first copy 'unanointed, unannealed,' as Hamlet says" (Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, Aug. 22, 1792). Metre.-Iambic, with three accents in each line, and an extra syilable, which gives a trochaic or 'feminine' ending. The third line in several stanzas is lengthened by another syllable, and becomes an iambic line of four feet. 2. ye. Another reading is she. border. See note on No. 11. 17. 6. but, only. 8. Another reading is "And never made anither." 13. scaith. See note on No. 18. 23, "Nae maiden lays her skaith to me. 17. tent, protect. A Scottish variant of the English tend. 18. steer, meddle with. The same word as the English stir. 22. Caledonie. Caledonia, the Latin name for Scotland. 39. O my Luve's like a red, red rose THE research of commentators-notably of Messrs. Henley and Henderson (Poetry of Burns, 1901 edition, III. 402)—has shown that each stanza of this exquisite lyric is derived from an earlier original. The first stanza is traced back to a blackletter ballad, The Wanton Wife of Castle Gate: "Her cheeks are like the roses That blossom fresh in June. O, she's like a new-strung instrument Another blackletter ballad, The Unkind Parents, or the Lan- If I go ten thousand mile Mountains and rocks on wings shall fly, Then wait for my return." Other songs contain such stanzas as this: Or this: "The Day shall turn to Night, dear Love, "The seas they shall run dry, And rocks melt into sands; When all those things are done." The superiority of Burns' poem to these rude originals is obvious. We may give to him the praise that was given to Virgil, who borrowed freely from the old Italian poets: "he has touched nothing that he has not adorned." And if any reader finds in the fame of this lyric an injustice to Burns' nameless predecessors, he should reflect that the tiny seeds of poetry that lay hidden in their work would long ago have perished from memory if the touch of Burns' genius had not quickened them into lovely flowers. 40. Ye banks and braes and streams around Highland Mary was Mary Campbell, in whose honour Burns also wrote the song, My Highland Lassie. It is worth remarking that there are no exact rhymes in this poem, their place being supplied, as so often in popular songs and ballads, by mere assonances. 2. Montgomery, in Ayrshire, on the river Faile. 41. When the sheep are in the fauld, and the kye a' hame "THERE can hardly exist a poem more truly tragic in the highest sense than this: nor, perhaps, Sappho excepted, has any Poetess equalled it" (F.T.P.). Sir Alfred Lyall (Tennyson, p. 118) remarks that its resemblance to a genuine ballad "comes from that absence of colouring adjectives (there is but one in all the eight stanzas) which is the note of all primitive and popular verse-a woodnote wild that is very seldom caught and domesticated by elaborate culture": he contrasts with its simplicity the picturesque detail of Tennyson's May Queen. The story of a woman who allows herself to be persuaded into marriage in the long-continued absence of a lover or husband whom she believes to be dead is a favourite theme in literature. "It is the Odyssey of humble mariners, and many traces of it may be found in the folklore and in the superstitions of Asia as well as of Europe, where the forgotten husband is liable to be treated on his reappearance as a ghostly revenant, or even as a demon who has assumed a dead man's body in order to gain entrance into the house" (Sir A. Lyall's Tennyson, p. 115). It is the theme of old sea-ballads, both English and Breton; of Mrs. Gaskell's romance, Sylvia's Lovers; of Tennyson's Enoch Arden, Crabbe's Parting Hour, and Adelaide Procter's Homeward Bound. LADY ANNE LINDSAY (after her marriage, BARNARD) wrote this ballad, the only poem by which she is remembered, in her twenty-first year. She told the story of its composition long afterwards in a letter to Sir Walter Scott, July 8, 1823: "Robin Gray, so called from its being the name of the old herd at Balcarres, was born soon after the close of the year 1771. My sister Margaret had married, and accompanied her husband to London. I was melancholy, and endeavoured to amuse myself by attempting a few poetical trifles. There was an EnglishScotch melody of which I was passionately fond. Sophy Johnstone, who lived before your day, used to sing it to us at Balcarres. She did not object to its having improper words, though I did. I longed to sing old Sophy's air to different words, and give its plaintive tones some little history of virtuous distress in humble life, such as might suit it. While attempting to effect this in my closet, I called to my little sister, now Lady Hardwicke, who was the only person near me, I have been writing a ballad, my dear; I am oppressing my heroine with many misfortunes. I have already sent her Jamie to sea, and broken her father's arm, and made her mother fall sick, and given her auld Robin Gray for a lover; but I wish to load her with a fifth sorrow within the four lines, poor thing! Help me to one!' 'Steal the cow, sister Anne,' said the little Elizabeth. The cow was immediately lifted by me, and the song completed. At our fireside and amongst our neighbours Auld Robin Gray was always called for. I was pleased in secret with the approbation it met with; but such was my dread of being suspected of writing anything, perceiving the shyness it created in those who could write nothing, that I carefully kept my own secret." Lady Lindsay was born in 1750 and died in 1825. 4. gudeman. 'Goodman' is common in older English in the sense of (1) master of the house, (2) husband. Cp. A.V. of Matthew, xxiv. 43, "If the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come.' 9. na... a week but only twa, not more than two weeks. The idiom often occurs in the old ballads, as in Sir Patrick Spens: 66 'They hadna sail'd upon the sea 27. wraith. 6 A day but barely three, Till loud and boisterous grew the wind And gurly grew the sea. See note on No. 12. 23. 29. greet, weep,' now only used in Scottish and northern dialects, but often found in old English. It occurs in English literature as late as Spenser, Shepherd's Calendar, April, "Tell me, good Hobbinoll, what garres thee greete?" ("what makes thee weep?"). 66 WRITTEN by Burns for a Scottish tune- a lighthorse gallop of an air," as he called it, "that precludes sentiment." The refrain that forms lines 2, 4, 8 of the first stanza should be understood as repeated similarly with the following stanzas. 3. Yule, Christmas, Old English as well as Scottish. Skeat follows Fick in explaining the word to mean 'noise,' especially the loud sound of revelry and rejoicing. Jolly (Fr. joli) is a derivative of Yule. fou, full (of food and drink), merry with drink. 6. skeigh, properly 'skittish,' used of a horse or other animal. Applied to women it seems to combine the notions of coyness and disdain. The word is akin to the German scheuch, scheue, shy, and the English shy and skittish. 9. fleech'd. Cp. No. 11. 11, “nae wooing, nae fleeching." 10. Ailsa Craig, a rocky islet in the Firth of Clyde. It is 'deaf' because it is undisturbed by the screaming of the sea-fowl that frequent it. 12. Grat. See note on No. 41. 29. 14. Time... tide. Perhaps with an allusion to Shakespeare's "There is a tide in the affairs of men" (Julius Caesar, IV. iii. 218). 'Tide' properly means 'time' (which word is from the same root); the use of it for the flux and reflux of the sea is derived from this. Cp. "Alike to him was time or tide," in Scott, Lay of the Last Minstrel, 1. xxi. 15. sair to bide, difficult to endure. 16. Cp. G. Wither's Manly Heart (G. T. cxxxI.): "Shall I, wasting in despair, Die because a woman's fair?" 18. France, substituted euphemistically for a less desirable locality. 43. And are ye sure the news is true "BURNS justly named this 'one of the most beautiful songs in the Scots or any other language.' One stanza, interpolated by Beattie, is here omitted: it contains two good lines, but is out of harmony with the original poem" (F.T.P.). The authorship of this poem is uncertain. Mr. F. T. Palgrave attributed it to W. J. Mickle (1735-1788), translator of Camoens into English verse, and author of the ballad Cumnor Hall which Scott quotes in the introduction to Kenilworth. But the only evidence is the fact that a copy was found among his papers in his own handwriting: he never included it among the poems published during his lifetime. The doubt cannot be set at rest. The song has often been ascribed to Jean Adam, or Jane Adams (1710-1765). The claim is rejected by the Dictionary of National Biography on the double ground that "it is unlikely that such a strain of home and married love could have been written by this wayward and unwedded woman," and that "her verses, although correct in phrase and sentiment, are inflated and childish." But Nos. 11 and 41 in this book are instances of poetic heights attained once in a lifetime by women-writers. 13. bigonets, little cap, diminutive of biggin, O.F. béguin, child's cap; or it may have come straight from the O. F. diminutive, béguinet. |