MacGrath I believe you have some of it. I've always thought of it as a death song. His life as a rootless drunk, trading in his youthful good looks is wearing thin. Drink makes him inert, he cannot cross over.

Anyway if he crossed to his true love, he is not the same man she loved. Drunk today and seldom sober, the marble stone is what he will lie under before too long.

The Clancys used to introduce this song with a poem that made the meaning very clear. i wrote to Liam and he told me it was by a man called Naylor and from Oxford book of Irish verse.

The poem and the song fitted beautifully.

A haunted song like Robert Johnson Stones in my Passway.