G'day Barry,

You could be right ... as well ... Trying to pin down the precise meaning of a poet's phrase can be very frustrating. The art of the poet is to compress many / much meaning(s) into very little language. My interpretation is based on the original " ... morning", rather than the substituted " ... north" plus a reading of the sense of the whole piece.

I am reminded that someone once wrote to a 19th c. poet (possibly Wordsworth) and asked what he meant by a particular phrase. He replied; "When I wrote that, only Wordsworth and God knew ... now only God knows!"

I have dug out the words from my files (as opposed to my memory) and two versions of the tune. I will post these to a separate thread "Lyr Add: Sailor Home from the Sea".

As I said before, my preference is for the Chris Kempster tune, but that must be affected by the fact that it was the first tune I heard to the song. The second tune is by Bill Berry - another ex-Sydney folkie now living up in the Blue Mountains (about 80 miles west of Sydney). I hope these MIDI/ABC files are readable ... I haven't got them working on my machine yet, but that may be because of problems with my computer.

Regards,

Bob Bolton