The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [300]
[Outlander, p. 121]
Hurley, hurley, round the table, Eat as muckle as you’re able. Eat muckle, pooch nane, Hurley, hurley, Amen.
I don’t for the life of me remember where I got this, and my usual authority, Jack Whyte, can’t place it either, though he says “hurley” sounds like the Aberdeen area. We’ll call it folk verse and leave it at that, unless anybody knows better.
[Dragonfly, p. 547]
REQUIEM
Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
[Voyager, p. 446]
Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive!
—from “Marmion,” Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
[Voyager, p. 486]
Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.
—from “The Death of the Hired Man,” Robert Frost (1874-1963)
[Voyager, p. 763] Water, water, everywhere… Water, water, everywhere, and all the boards did shrink. Water, water, everywhere Nor any drop to drink.
—from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834)
[Drums, p. 752]
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and
wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
—from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
[Voyager, p. 634]
“She moves! She stirs! She seems to feel/The thrill of life along her keel!”
Claire is here slightly misquoting the original, which reads:
And see! She stirs!
She starts—she moves—she seems to feel The thrill of life along her keel.
—from “The Building of the Ship,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
[Voyager, p. 661]
“The weeping Pleiads wester/And the moon is under seas.”
Claire, always fond of Housman, is here conflating a couple of lines from different stanzas. The original first line (from “More Poems”) is from a verse that reads “The rainy Pleiads wester/Orion plunges prone,/ And midnight strikes and hastens/And I lie down alone.”
Later, she quotes from another poem:
Halt by the headstone naming The heart no longer stirred, And say the lad that loved you Was one that kept his word.
and on p. 904:
Oh, who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?
And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?
And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?
Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
’Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of
hair as his; In the good old time ’twas hanging for the
colour that it is; Though hanging isn’t bad enough and flaying
would be fair For the nameless and abominable colour of his
hair!
—from “Additional Poems,” Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936)
[Drums, p. 430]
“Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!”
—from “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” John Keats (1795—1821)
[Drums, p. 431] “Make me thy lyre…”
—from “Ode to the West Wind,” Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
[Drums, p. 430]
While Claire does not directly quote this poem in the text, she does mention reciting Keats’s “Sonnet Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition”:
The church bells toll a melancholy round, Calling the people to some other prayers, Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares,
More hearkening to the sermons horrid sound. Surely the mind of man is closely bound In some black spell; seeing that each one tears
Himself from fireside joys, and Lydian airs, And converse high of those with glory crown’d. Still, still they toll, and I should feel a damp,—
A chill as from a tomb, did I not know That they are dying like an outburnt lamp, That ’tis their sighing, wailing ere they go Into oblivion;—that fresh flowers will grow, And many glories of immortal stamp.
[Drums, p. 431]
“Fiend, I defy thee! with a calm, fixed mind.”
—from Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, Act I
[Drums, p. 147]
Amo, amas, I love a lass,