Songs and lyrics of Robert Burns

Chapter 113: THE GALLANT WEAVER

Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

About This Book

A collected selection of the poet's songs and shorter lyrics presents his explorations of love, nature, rural Scottish life, patriotism, and social observation, often rendered in Scots dialect and intended for musical performance. The volume groups brief pieces alongside several longer poems, supplies a glossary of dialect terms and an index of first lines, and includes illustrative plates. Many lyrics evoke landscapes, domestic scenes, and communal gatherings, balancing tenderness and satire while varying tone from celebratory to elegiac. The arrangement favors lyrical vitality rather than strict chronology, offering readers both popular airs and more extended narrative poems within a single accessible anthology.

THE GALLANT WEAVER

Where Cart rins rowin’ to the sea,

By mony a flower and spreading tree,

There lives a lad, the lad for me,

He is a gallant weaver.

Oh I had wooers aught or nine,

They gied me rings and ribbons fine;

And I was fear’d my heart would tine,

And I gied it to the weaver.

My daddie sign’d my tocher-band,

To gie the lad that has the land;

But to my heart I’ll add my hand,

And gie it to the weaver.

While birds rejoice in leafy bowers;

While bees rejoice in opening flowers;

While corn grows green in simmer showers,

I’ll love my gallant weaver.