Scroggam
Scroggam - meaning Summary
Domestic Farce and Folk Humour
This short Scots ballad recounts a bawdy, comic domestic scene: a wife who brews ale, her daughter stricken with fever, and the parish priest also taken ill. To try to cure them they are laid together in one bed "that the heat o' the tane might cool the tither." The poem uses plain narrative and dialectal voice to compress a risqué situation into a jaunty, singsong stanza form, inviting laughter rather than moralizing while foregrounding communal, earthy humor.
Read Complete AnalysesThere was a wife wonn'd in Cockpen, Scroggam; She brew'd gude ale for gentlemen, Sing auld Cowl, lay ye down by me, Scroggam, my Dearie, ruffum. The gudewife's dochter fell in a fever, Scroggam; The priest o' the parish fell in anither, Sing auld Cowl, lay ye down by me, Scroggam, my Dearie, ruffum. They laid the twa i' the bed thegither, Scroggam; That the heat o' the tane might cool the tither, Sing auld Cowl, lay ye down by me, Scroggam, my Dearie, ruffum.
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