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The last lines of "Sir Patrick Spence" in the Percy version of this poem1-the whole of which I herewith produce-significantly reflect the first lines:
In the first lines, the king sits with an old knight at his knee; in the last, Sir Patrick lies with the assembled Scots lords at his feet-a pattern of contrast that defines the difference between authority and nobility to which the whole poem is devoted. We may also notice that one of the two principal actors is named here, as he has been throughout the Percy version, and that the other, here as elsewhere, remains quite nameless, merely acknowledged as "the king."
The last stanza shares the weighty term "guid" with the first: "guid sailor;" "guid Sir Patrick Spence." This echo enforces the difference between the poem's protagonists, the king, whose irresponsible power dominates the first five stanzas, and Sir Patrick, whose heroic action determines the final six. To the king "guid" means merely servicable, useful: it is a term as appropriate to a tool as to a man. The old knight who describes Sir Patrick as "the best sailor," using the superlative of "guid," obviously accepts his ruler's sense. Sir Patrick will accept this understanding as well when he announces that "our guid schip sails the morne," applying it, however, to a tool. By the end of the poem, as a consequence of Sir Patrick's conduct, "guid" has acquired an obvious human, an obvious moral, value: noble, heroic. In the poem's first lines, the king-not "the guid king"-speaks of "this schip of mine" and asks about someone he can command to sail it while he himself sits drinking wine comfortably at home. In the last lines, "guid Sir Patrick Spence" holds silent, everlasting court on the floor of the transparent sea.
No other early publication of the poem printed or in manuscript-every one of which appeared after Percy's Reliques first introduced it-presents the last stanzas like Percy except for the inflated version in the Minstrelsy of Sir Walter Scott,2 who knew and loved Percy's book all his adult life. In his MS, which dates from a few years after the Reliques, Motherwell,3 while preserving Sir Patrick's relationship to the Scottish lords, reversed the order of the last stanzas and...