Tune Req: Yeats/Colleen Bawn

Subject: Tune Req: Yeats/Colleen Bawn
From: belfast
Date: 09 Nov 02 - 09:43 AM

"Come All You Bold Parnellites" is one of Yeats' later poems. Offhand I can only recall the final lines which are "And Parnell loved his country and Parnell loved a lass"

He says it is to the tune of "The Colleen Bawn". I can only find one reference to this song in a previous thread CLICK

I don't think this refers to the same song.

Does anyone know the tune of "The Colleen Bawn"?

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Yeats/Colleen Bawn
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 09 Nov 02 - 11:06 AM

You might check the midi with the DT file LIMERICK IS BEAUTIFUL, nonetheless. Colleen Bawn was an alternative title for it, though the set in the DT is Michael Scanlon's re-write of an older song, and no reference remains to the lady in question. Another form of the song appeared in Boucicault's opera The Colleen Bawn (1860), so it was pretty well-known. There are various broadside examples, published in both Ireland and England, at Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads.

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Yeats/Colleen Bawn
From: masato sakurai
Date: 09 Nov 02 - 11:29 AM

There's a different tune titled "The Colleen Bawn" HERE (Fife & Drum Online page; scroll down).
~Masato

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Yeats/Colleen Bawn
From: belfast
Date: 09 Nov 02 - 01:21 PM

Dion Boucicault. I should have guessed. Yeats would have been well acquainted with his work. The tune given for "Limerick is Beautiful" certainly fits Yeats' poem insofar as I can recall it. (By a stroke of organizational genius the computer I use and the books I read are in two different parts of the city.)

The tune given in the fife and drum site seems to be quite different. (And I notice that they write "The Rocky Road To Dublin" in ¾ time. Tsk-tsk.)