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Description: | Verse 1 (to a Gaelic air): 'Turn again thou fair Eliza, Ae kind blink before we part, Rue on thy despairing Lover Can'st thou break his faithfu' heart! Turn again, thou fair Eliza! If to love thy heart denies, For pity hide the cruel sentence Under friendship's kind disguise!' 'Blink' means 'glance'.
The 'Scots Musical Museum' is the most important of the numerous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collections of Scottish song. When the engraver James Johnson started work on the second volume of his collection in 1787, he enlisted Robert Burns as contributor and editor. Burns enthusiastically collected songs from various sources, often expanding or revising them, whilst including much of his own work. The resulting combination of innovation and antiquarianism gives the work a feel of living tradition.
Burns wrote the lyrics for this ballad, with the words of the song being sung to two separate melodies - refer to song number 368. The airs that these song lyrics are sung to are both Highland tunes, and James Johnson highlights this in the 'Museum' underneath the song titles. John Glen (1900) writes that both tunes are taken from the Rev. Patrick McDonald's 'Collection of Highland Vocal Airs' (1784), and are listed as number 112 and number 133. The first air is from Perthshire and the second from Argyleshire. | License: | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0 | Publisher: | National Library of Scotland | Temporal: | 1787-01-01 - 1803-12-31 | Source: | Burns Scotland | Identifier: | Volume IV, song 367 and 368, pages 378-9 | Go to resource |
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