Lyr Req: Cease, my son, your grassy chewing

Subject: Lyr Req: Cease my son, your grassy chewing
From: GUEST,salarm
Date: 19 Jun 05 - 08:51 PM

Looking to find what this song is....and the rest of the words. Apparently, it's Irish:

Cease my son, your grassy chewing
Let us take shelter in your break
For I feel a storm is brewing
By the way my old bones ache.

Dear old Dad, the clumsy carthorse
Some so praise doesn't suit our days
But remember, that the smart horse
must survive this motor craze.

Thanks.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Cease my son, your grassy chewing
From: Gypsy
Date: 19 Jun 05 - 10:23 PM

Oooooooohhhhh, i like it. hope someone can help, otherwise, i'll just lift this one up higher.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Cease my son, your grassy chewing
From: Peace
Date: 20 Jun 05 - 12:44 AM

I am unable to find anything.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Cease my son, your grassy chewing
From: Mooh
Date: 20 Jun 05 - 08:41 AM

Well, I tried it to the tune of All Through The Night (Welsh, ain't it?) but it doesn't fit very well, though it easily could with a few changes. Otherwise no hits.

Peace, Mooh.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Cease my son, your grassy chewing
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 22 Jun 05 - 11:00 PM

I tried Googling with several phrases from the above quote, and found nothing.

It sounds more like a poem than a song to me, though of course it could be both.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Cease my son, your grassy chewing
From: GUEST
Date: 23 Jun 05 - 04:21 AM

This reads to me like an exercise in metrical composition with the unusual stress pattern, complex rhyme scheme and the extensive use of alliteration. It may be intended to illustrate some type of Irish poetic or even bardic composition, but there is nothing otherwise to suggest an Irish origin. It doesn't feel much like a song, though it could be sung I suppose to Praise my soul the King of Heaven.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Cease my son, your grassy chewing
From: Snuffy
Date: 23 Jun 05 - 09:01 AM

Or to It's The Same The Whole World Over

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Cease, my son, your grassy chewing
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 15 Dec 10 - 03:44 PM

When I search in Google Books for "Cease my son, your grassy chewing," it brings up the book Song Catalogue, Volume 3 by British Broadcasting Corporation. Central Music Library, (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1966), page 213.

Unfortunately, we can't see the book online. However, if I follow that link and then click "Find in a library" it shows me that the book is in a library 14 miles from here. Somebody else might do better.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Cease, my son, your grassy chewing
From: Matthew Edwards
Date: 15 Dec 10 - 05:54 PM

Thanks to Jim Dixon yet again for his untiring efforts in following up outstanding queries; this poem, or song, rings a very faint bell and, if the Irish attribution is correct, I'd bet on Oliver St. John Gogarty as being the author - or possibly his tutor at Trinity College Dublin, J P Mahaffy.

I think that GUEST of 23 June 2005,04.21AM, is right to describe this as a metrical exercise, although I'd go a bit further and call it a sort of scholarly jape. The phrase in the first line "grassy chewing" is so bizarre that I'm sure it must be some kind of play on words. The only likely source I can find through Google is a c.16th century poem 'The Court of Love' formerly attributed to Chaucer, which contains the lines:-

"By mine advise kneel down and ask him grace,
Eschewing perill and adversite"

Also the first line of the poem, and most of the following lines, scan as pure trochaic tetrameter; (four feet of two syllables each, where the first syllable is more strongly stressed than the second) which is a classical metre in Greek drama. This would certainly have been familiar to Gogarty, and he would have thoroughly enjoyed hiding it in a fake "traditional" song.

Matthew