Lyr Req: Song from "Mountains of the Moon", 1990

06 Oct 97 - 10:20 PM (#14123)
Subject: Tune from *Mountains of the Moon*
From: [e-mail]

Can anyone name the tune that Burton sings in the movie "Mountains of the Moon"? It is approx. 55 minutes into the film, when Speke has just punctured his eardrum to kill a beetle, and Burton is caring for him.

The lyrics I could catch go something like this:

verse: On that Monday (inaudible)... Far away you did roam Calm and peaceful the sea was An hour ere dawn's glow

verse: (inaudible)... (inaudible)... That sad day still haunts me Where ever I go

If anybody has any idea what this song could be, please email and/or post!

Wes Atwood [e-mail]

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12 Dec 10 - 10:40 AM (#3051762)
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Song from "Mountains of the Moon", 19
From: Jim Dixon

I got this much from a book Le Voyage dans la littérature anglo-saxonne by Société des anglicistes de l'enseignement supérieur (M. Didier, 1973), page 267, where the translation into English is attributed to Donal O'Sullivan (but from what language, I couldn't see):

On that Monday of woe far away you did row
Calm and peaceful the sea was an hour ere dawn's glow
And you little did know that cold death hovered low
That sad day still haunts me wherever I go...

The book is classified as "snippet view" by Google, so that's all I could see. It also seems to be in Songs of the Irish:
an Anthology of Irish Folk Music and Poetry by Donal Joseph O'Sullivan (Crown Publishers, 1960).

I don't understand how the song can be both Irish and Anglo-Saxon, unless the French classify languages differently than we do.

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13 Dec 10 - 08:39 PM (#3052895)
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Song from "Mountains of the Moon", 1990
From: Jim Dixon

Here's a bit more, perhaps the whole thing (but I still don't know the title, or from what it was translated):


On that Monday of woe far away you did row.
Calm and peaceful the sea was an hour ere dawn's glow,
And you little did know that cold death hovered low.
That sad day still haunts me wherever I go.

Young Donal, ah, he was the babe of the three,
Two weeks from their sailing he came back to me;
With the wind on the lee and the waves running free,
A pale lifeless corpse he returned from the sea.

And Thomas he too has left me to rue
So handsome, so sturdy a man through and through.
With the hasp of his shoe he wrote out the clue
That the lone rock had claimed him her lover for to woo.

Lastly Cormac, my pet, I've not mentioned him yet.
A comelier huntsman no man ever met.
The best salmon he'd net, the best woodcock he'd get
In the pools, on the hills, in fair weather and wet....

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