The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #31609 Message #412631
Posted By: Malcolm Douglas
07-Mar-01 - 06:57 AM
Thread Name: Origins: Skye Boat Song
Subject: RE: Skye Boat Song
The DT text omits Boulton's final verse:
Burned are our homes, exile and death
Scatter our loyal men;
Yet ere the sword cool in the sheath
Charlie will come again.
Easy to see why it often isn't sung.
Robert Louis Stevenson didn't much care for Sir Harold Boulton's words, and, in 1887, wrote a set of his own:
Sing me a song of a lad that is gone,
Say, could that lad be I?
Merry of soul he sailed on a day
Over the sea to Skye.
Mull was astern, Rum on the port,
Eigg on the starboard bow;
Glory of youth glowed in his soul:
Where is that glory now?
Give me again all that was there,
Give me the sun that shone!
Give me the eyes, give me the soul,
Give me the lad that's gone!
Billow and breeze, islands and seas,
Mountains of rain and sun,
All that was good, all that was fair,
All that was me is gone.
Stevenson puts the song into the mouth of Charles Stewart himself, old, drunk and dying, though the elegy for lost youth was from his own heart, too.
Malcolm