Yes, there are at least three different variants of this wonderful ballad
whose eponymous heroine has never been identified--a fictional fourth Mary
(the ballad's also titled "The Four Marys") added to the three who served La
Stuart. Most of the versions can be found on the standard ballad sites--does
Rebecca know the Contemplator's Child Ballads site or the Mudcat Café (my
own favorites). I just recently discovered the small but excellent
"Traditional Irish Tunes" site
(http://www.fortunecity.com/bally/westport/118/irshmenu.htm), which has some
of the loveliest midi arrangements I've ever heard--lots more percussion,
e.g., than you usually get, and more marches to use them in, as well as a
nice selection of carolans.
What Rebecca is capturing syntactically in the wonderful "Your Gown" and
elsewhere is the way that repetition plays off peculiarities of balladic
diction that recall its folk/oral-trad origins and make for some gorgeous
lyrics, as in the stunningly beautiful second verse of "Londonderry Air"
(variant of "Danny Boy"):
Yea, would to God I were among the roses
That lean to kiss you as you float between
While on the lowest branch a bud uncloses
A bud uncloses, to touch you, queen.
Nay, since you will not love, would I were growing
A happy daisy, in the garden path
That so your silver foot might press me going
Might press me going even unto death.
And here's Rebecca's "Your Gown" (stanza 5):
If your berry brown gown, your gown,
your journey to pull off, cast off, light black rain,
that do love your body next.
In both cases it's (to my ear) the forcing of the repetition and the
enjambment together that makes it sing. The effect you get when the
supernatural is in play--as in Rebecca's "For the Cat..."--is a kind of
heightening of the homely that really spooks up the scene, for example, the
way these self-reflexive lines from "The Spinning Wheel" indicate how awry
or out of joint everything goes with the appearance of "the form at the
casement":
What makes you shoving and moving your stool on
And singing all wrong the old song of the "Coolin"?
The embedded lyric in "For the Cat..." that begins "What ails thee, among
the red silk" works very similarly, I think, and I've never seen poems that
work the ballads' subtle construction so well. More please, Rebecca!
Candice
on 7/23/01 6:47 AM, domfox at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Re: Mary Hamilton, this has one of the best verses I know:
>
> O little did my mother think
> when first she cradled me
> what lands I was to journey through
> what death I was to die.
>
> There is a bawdier - to my admittedly filthy mind - version which says
> something like
>
> He's kissed her in the kitchen
> and he's kissed her in the hall
> and he's kissed her in the low parlour
> and that was worst of all
>
> - see the two versions given in the Norton Anthology, which I don't have to
> hand.
>
> Also listening at the moment to Martin Simpson's "The Bramble Briar", which
> I recommend especially to devotees of bastard hard fingerpicking guitar.
>
> - Dom
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