Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Judy Collins' "Farewell to Tarwathie"

Yester-day when I listened to that Judy Collins album, I noticed a small detail in "Farewell to Tarwathie."  The song starts and ends with the same stanza (although the ending stanza has "we" where the opening one has "I"), and the first two lines of that stanza exhibit structural parallelism:
Farewell to Tarwathie, adieu Mormond Hill
And the dear land of Crimond, I bid you farewell
The first line shows this more than the second, but each section ("Farewell to Tarwathie," "Adieu Mormond Hill," and "The dear land of Crimond, I bid you farewell") says goodbye to a particular place, just using different ways of saying goodbye and - obviously - different places.