The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #156708   Message #3694059
Posted By: Lighter
14-Mar-15 - 06:22 PM
Thread Name: Origins: Foggy Dew (Irish)
Subject: RE: Origins: Foggy Dew
Here is Graves's once highly admired poem, from his "Irish Songs and Ballads" (1880), p. 14:

THE FOGGY DEW

Oh! a wan cloud was drawn
O'er the dim, weeping dawn,
As to Shannon's side I returned at last;
And the heart in my breast
For the girl I loved best
Was beating — ah beating, how loud and fast!
While the doubts and the fears
Of the long, aching years
Seemed mingling their voices with the moaning flood;
Till full in my path,
Like a wild water-wraith,
My true love's shadow lamenting stood.

But the sudden sun kissed
The cold, cruel mist
Into dancing showers of diamond dew;
The dark flowing stream
Laughed back to his beam,
And the lark soared singing aloft in the blue;
While no phantom of night,
But a form of delight
Ran with arms outspread to her darling boy:
And the girl I love best
On my wild, throbbing breast
Hid her thousand treasures, with a cry of joy.


The melody (p. 207) is that collected by Bunting in 1839 and played, for example, by Eugene O'Donnell and James MacCafferty. I have also heard it played, perversely but effectively, as a march.

I can't tell if there's a meaningful resemblance between Bunting's tune and the well-known "Ye Banks and Braes" (composed by Niel Gow - as "The Royal Caledonian Hunt's Delight" - in or before 1788), a simplified version of which often carried "The Foggy, Foggy Dew" in England.

Superficially, of course, there is none.