Anon is plainly a poet of Imagist potential …
The night is “lang and mirk” … and all we initially see of the visitors are the three hats hanging on the birch tree. Martinmas, a festive occasion, falls on 11 November. It’s a terrific stanza, true to the psychology of intense grief, in which lamentations for the unjustly dead may be intertwined with vengeful anger against the living. The wish centres on images of relentless wind and “troubles” (fashes) “in the flood” – eternal shipwrecking weather until the drowned sons “ come hame to me / In earthly flesh and blood”. Stanza four may echo a mother’s cry of grief, or a witch’s spell: it’s possibly both. The term “ carline” can apparently allude to both “old woman” and “witch” – concepts once thought naturally interchangeable. The Wife’s three sea-going sons are “gane” (but just conceivably might have survived the shipwreck) in stanza two, but the worst is confirmed in three, “Whan word came to the carline wife / That her sons she’d never see.” Our suspense, now sharpened, builds in the time-span of one to three weeks noted in the second line refrains of stanzas two and three. The expanded version I’ve picked is online here. Also collected by Francis James Child, the ballad became particularly popular in America. Scott’s incomplete version was recited to him by an old woman living in Kirkhill, West Lothian. This ancient ballad, shaped over centuries by the keen tongues and inventive memories of “Anon”, appeared in print for the first time in 1802, in Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Gin my mother should miss us when she wakes, ‘Lie still, lie still but a little wee while,
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