Sailor’s Lament: A Sea Chantey

Sometimes you just want to ditch all the heavy stuff and play with words. And if you can’t think of the right words, set your mind free from everything your English teacher told you and make stuff up. Dust off your fiddle and sing with me!

 

‘Twixt the brothe and the brithey on the Binneylarken Sea

Lived a bonnybuckom lassie, a most tithywickam she.

When the moon waned thin

And the stars grew dim

She would call to the sailors from the dinneys and the dunes

Cast a spell on the sailors with her canticles and tunes

And they’d leave their ships

With her name on their lips

And betoddle in the barken on the Binneylarken shore

‘Til they dinna want to sail to their home no more

And the maids they’d kissed

Turned to clouds in the mist

While they dallied by the lassie with the skitheyweeden locks

And the waves sprayed high on the wildercliffen rocks.

Then she (in a trance)

Would flee (in a dance)

And she’d leave behind a flurrium of disenchanted men

Who’d be beggin’ her to set ‘em on their ships again

Which had drifted overnight

Over rift and out of sight

And a man without a ship he canna sail no more

And a sailor not a sailor when he sleep on a shore.

Beware of the lass

In the blitheydune grass–

Tie your body to the mast when you pass by she

‘Twixt the brothe and the brithey on the Binneylarken Sea.