Carl An The King Come - Analysis

A rebel wish sung as a party chorus

The poem reads like a tavern chant that keeps trying to conjure history back into motion. Its central claim is less a plan than a collective wish: if Carl (Charles) and the king would only come, ordinary people could turn politics into celebration and reversal. The refrain—Carl an the king come—works like a spell: repeat it often enough, and the hoped-for arrival starts to feel imminent. Even the promise Thou shalt dance and I will sing makes the cause sound not grim or dutiful but bodily, communal, and happy.

Yet the poem’s happiness is tight with strain. The very need to keep restarting the chant suggests anxiety that the desired return won’t happen unless it’s constantly voiced, toasted, and performed into being.

Somebodie and the distance of exile

The second stanza opens the fantasy into logistics: An somebodie were come again—if only someone returned—somebodie maun cross the main. That small phrase cross the main suddenly puts a cold strip of sea between Scotland and the missing claimants. The poem doesn’t name armies or battles; it gives you the blunt obstacle of water, the kind of distance that makes political restoration feel like waiting for a ship you may never see.

Still, the stanza insists on fairness and recompense: every man shall hae his ain. In other words, the hoped-for return is imagined as a settling of accounts, not merely a change at the top. The dream is social as well as dynastic: a world where each person gets what is properly theirs.

Swapped for the warse: regret without surrender

The sharpest admission comes in the proverb-like complaint, I trow we swapped for the warse. The speaker claims the nation made a bad bargain: We gae the boot and better horse. The image is plain and humiliating—trading away something valuable and ending up poorer—and it casts the current regime as not just illegitimate, but a downgrade in everyday terms. This is not lofty royalist romance; it’s the language of a marketplace error, the kind of mistake anyone could feel in their gut.

But even that regret is immediately turned outward into public speech: we'll tell them at the cross. The cross evokes the town’s public center, a place for proclamations and gossip. So the poem balances two impulses: it nurses a private sense of having been cheated, and it wants to broadcast that grievance as communal truth.

The tonal turn: from procession to coggie

Late in the poem, the refrain mutates: Coggie an the king come. A coggie—a drinking bowl—enters like a prop slid onto the stage, and the tone turns from political anticipation to deliberate conviviality. The line I'se be fou and thou'se be toom is both comic and pointed: one person will be full (drunk or satisfied), the other empty. That tiny domestic contrast can be read as a toast shared between friends, but it also hints at a harsher economy of winners and losers. Even in celebration, someone ends up toom.

This is the poem’s cleverest move: it relocates a contested succession into the immediate, controllable world of drink and song. If the princes won’t land, the chorus can still rise; if the future can’t be forced, a cup can be filled.

A loyalty that knows it is improvising

The key tension is that the poem sounds triumphant while quietly acknowledging uncertainty. Its repeated command—come, come, come—is aimed at absent figures, and absence is the condition the song cannot escape. The speaker can promise singing and dancing, can imagine people receiving his ain, can complain about the bad trade, but the actual return depends on that risky crossing of the sea.

In that light, the poem becomes a portrait of political longing that survives by becoming festive. It refuses to let defeat be silent; it keeps the cause alive as a rhythm in the mouth, a claim in the street, and finally a drink passed hand to hand—half hope, half defiance, and half a knowing laugh at how far away the ship still is.