The Jolly Beggar was first published in a collection of old Scots songs in 1776. It’s not long so let’s read it.
He took the lassie in his arms, and to bed he ran,
O hooly, hooly wi’ me, Sir, ye’ll waken our goodman!
And we’ll go no more a roving
Sae late into the night,
And we’ll gang nae mair a roving, boys,
Let the moon shine ne’er sae bright.
And we’ll gang nae mair a roving.
Leap forward forty-one years. We are in Venice in 1817 with Lord Byron and he has been overdoing it at the Carnival. This is what he wrote to Thomas Moore:
“At present, I am on the invalid regimen myself. The Carnival–that is, the latter part of it, and sitting up late o’ nights–had knocked me up a little. But it is over–and it is now Lent, with all its abstinence and sacred music… Though I did not dissipate much upon the whole, yet I find ‘the sword wearing out the scabbard,’ though I have but just turned the corner of twenty nine.”
Rather pathetic to be ‘knocked up’ aged only twenty-nine. Lucky that Thomas Moore didn’t throw the letter in the wagger-pagger as Byron added a poem – his version of The Jolly Beggar.
So, we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.
The last line doesn’t seem to scan but what the heck, it’s Byron, and it didn’t bother Thos Moore who published it in 1830, after Byron’s death in 1824. The poem reappears as a ballad and I like Joan Baez’s 1964 rendition best.