“The cock doth craw, the day doth daw,”
having a middle rhyme, can scarcely be of extreme antiquity. Probably,
in the original poem, the dead return to rebuke the extreme grief of the
Mother, but the poem is perhaps really more affecting in the absence of a
didactic motive. Scott obtained it from an old woman in West Lothian.
Probably the reading “fashes,” (troubles), “in the flood” is correct, not
“fishes,” or “freshes.” The mother desires that the sea may never cease
to be troubled till her sons return (verse 4, line 2). The peculiar doom
of women dead in child-bearing occurs even in Aztec mythology.