Another elaborate variation on the theme of the return of a mother from her grave to rescue her children. Miss Crawford's mother does not go as far as the ghost in Robert Buchanan's "Dead Mother," who not only makes three trips to assemble her neglected family, but manages to appear to their delinquent father, to his great discomfort and the permanent loss of his sleep.
Dobell, Sydney. The Ballad of Keith of Ravelston. (In The Oxford Book of English Verse.)
A ballad unsurpassed in our literature for its weird suggestiveness.—Richard Garnett.
She makes her immemorial moan,
She keeps her shadowy kine;
O, Keith of Ravelston,
The sorrows of thy line!
Drummond, William Henry. The Last Portage. (In Wilfred Campbell's The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse.)
An' oh! mon Dieu! w'en he turn hees head
I'm seein' de face of my boy is dead.
Eaton, Arthur Wentworth Hamilton. The Phantom Light of the Baie des Chaleurs. (In T. H. Rand's A Treasury of Canadian Verse.)
This was the last of the pirate crew;
But many a night the black flag flew
From the mast of a spectre vessel sailed
By a spectre band that wept and wailed
For the wreck they had wrought on the sea, on the land,
For the innocent blood they had spilt on the sand
Of the Baie des Chaleurs.
Field, Eugene. The Peter-bird. (In his Songs and Other Verse.)
These are the voices of those left by the boy in the farmhouse,
When, with his laughter and scorn, hatless and bootless and sockless,
Clothed in his jeans and his pride, Peter sailed out in the weather,
Broke from the warmth of his home into that fog of the devil,
Into the smoke of that witch brewing her damnable porridge!