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Lost
for words?
Lost and found On these pages are the poems we have been searching for. Have a browse, and if you see one you think you know, please use our form to tell us about it! Can you help us find these quotations? Submitted Friday, July 28, 2006 An enquirer from Australia has sent in an interesting question: his grandfather (born in Glasgow around 1900) used to recite a piece which sounds to us very like verses from the mummers' plays put on all round the country at Christmas / New Year. We know that the words and sometimes the characters varied from village to village, but we think the Scottish version (Galoshins) never usually featured a St George. If anyone knows the lines below, whether from one of the folk plays or elsewhere, please get in touch."Here stands I St George a brave and noble man. My hands are made of nicklebone my head is made of ..... ? And by my side a sword of iron worth ten thousand pounds in gold .... And I challenge you to the duel. Answer: We are informed that it is possible a 'Galoshins' play performed in Glasgow probably would feature St George, since the chapbooks containing the text on sale in Glasgow were copied from ones sold in Lancashire or Yorkshire. Submitted Monday, July 24, 2006 This is not the Jacobite poem 'Braes of Mar' by Alexander Laing; we hope you will be able to tell us what it is! "A horseman sweeps at the dead of night Through the forest Braes of Mar" Answer: It is a 19th century poem telling of the midnight ride to Queen Victoria at Balmoral with the news of the fall of Sevastopol. We have the text as handed down from a grandmother who learned it at school in the early 1900s, and we have references to the poem in books about Deeside, but would love to find the published text and an author. update: We now have it, having traced the poem, 'The Bonfire at Craig-Gowan' to its author, William Shand Daniel, a Dumbarton man who wrote a series of poems about the Crimean War, one of which was distributed among the troops at the front. Our thanks to Aberdeenshire Libraries for their help. Submitted Friday, July 21, 2006 An enquirer remembers being taught the lines below by an uncle in Ontario in the 1930s; we know that the four lines appear in the Project Gutenberg etext of Mrs. Molesworths children's book Rosy, but wonder if they come from a longer poem? "Whenever you find your heart despairs of doing some goodly thing Con over the strain, try bravely again Remember the spider and king" Answer: We have discovered that this is the last verse of the favourite old poem 'Try Again' by Eliza Cook (also to be seen on the web under the title 'Robert the Bruce & the Spider'), though we don't know how or why it came to be detached from the rest of the text. Submitted Wednesday, July 12, 2006 A favourite family recitation was once a poem about the burning of a bishop's house, with the neighbours all coming to help. Can anyone place it? Looking for a poem about the laird of Auchantary going out for a day of sport; going out to see how many pheasants they could shoot, he took the wife and daughter the son and dog and all the servants said good hunting ... This section uses Blogger If you are interested in seeing more of one of the poems we have found, contact librarian2@spl.org.uk
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