Notes on The Moon Pool

I can’t do a Coleraine accent. But then, the O’Keefes were a Munster clan. Let’s just suppose the man did a lot of visiting his granny down south in Tipperary, or that the Virginia accent softened things. Or you can just accept my sad attempt at acting…. 🙂

“Eilidh”, aka “The Love-Chant of Cormac Conlingas” is a poem/song lyric by William Sharp, aka “Fiona Macleod”. You can find it in this 1901 book but it was originally published in 1884. Merritt took out all the “ho-i” burdens, so one assumes that O’Keefe is not singing the lyrics as a Hebrides-style song.

In next week’s chapters, we have another snatch of song, “The Little Red Lark”. It comprises lyrics written by Katherine Tynan and collected in this 1921 book, to a traditional Irish air I don’t know. Thus 8Notes.com has a midi up. However, there’s an almost totally different version up as a Scottish children’s song. I will assume that Tynan, being Irish, was putting lyrics to the Irish one, but I could be wrong.

UPDATE: I believe that the use of Tynan as a song may come from William Arms Fisher’s 1915 book Sixty Irish Songs: For High Voice. “All in the Morning Early, O!” uses Tynan’s lyrics and a traditional Irish tune of which we are not given the name. Alfred Perceval Graves’ lyrics are set to a different tune, “The Little Red Lark of the Mountain”, under the song title “The Little Red Lark”. I’m not totally sure I found the right tune for the right lyrics, though, as my music-reading skills are not great!

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