I am amazed that people think that there is clumsiness in this song. It is a piece of extraordinary writing: it is deliberately written in a kind of archaic, heroic storytelling language (note the Longfellow feel to the opening), full of rough "telegraphed news", mingled with modern terminology. It is completely and utterly brilliant writing. Lightfoot has written a lot of bad quasi-poetry: this is not. My hat is off to him.

yours, Peter T.