They belong more properly to Hallowe’en or Christmas (viz. the two excellent anthologies I read over the season, P.D. James’s The Mistletoe Murders and Sayers et al’s Murder Under The Christmas Tree) but I’ve just come across a superlative ghost story. Or, rather, ghost song. Because I am writing about EARLY MODERN CORPSES at present, and thus am locked in the slow-loading embrace of EEBO, I stumbled across this, from that oddly-neglected seventeenth-century classic Choyce drollery, songs & sonnets being a collection of divers excellent pieces of poetry, of severall eminent authors, never before printed (1656), published by my new best friend, Robert Pollard. Pollard seems a bit obscure (he has the misfortune to share his name with a far more successful publisher who lived a century later), but he’s mentioned briefly by Adam Smyth in ‘Profit & Delight’: Printed Miscellanies in England 1640–1682, and his editorial note to the miscellany is charming. But best of all is the spooky little offering which ends the collection: ‘The Ghost-Song’. It felt vaguely Christmassy to me, and although it’s January 7th, I include it on that basis (it’s always Christmas somewhere on the internet):
The Ghost-Song
‘Tis late and cold, stir up the fire,
Sit close, and draw the table nigher,
Be merry, and drink wine that’s old,
A hearty medicine ‘gainst the cold;
Your bed of wanton down the best,
Where you may tumble to your rest:
I could well wish you wenches too,
But I am dead, and cannot do.
Call for the best, the house will ring,
Sack, White and Claret, let them bring,
And drink apace, whilst breath you have,
You’l finde but cold drinking in the grave:
Partridge, Plover for your dinner,
And a Capon for the sinner,
You shall finde ready when you are up,
And your horse shall have his sup.
Welcome, welcome, shall flie round,
And I shall smile, though under ground.
P.S. Happy New Year!
CLAMOROUS VOICE 