CORBIE

Yet the corbie's reputation has always been grisly rather than joyful.

The corbies returned and gathered round their companion.

Of course, these cages are legal and are for controlling two pests, namely magpies and carrion corbies.

Her essay begins by celebrating the 'border vision' that can at once share and remain separate from the feelings of the tribe, and ends, far more darkly, by identifying 'The Twa Corbies' of Scott's Minstrelsy as representative borderers:

He was incorrect in his idea that the ballad was collectively as opposed to individually composed, though, as Northrop Frye has noted, the ballad is "so close to the poem of community as to have led some scholars to believe that its origin was in communal composition." The individual singer of the traditional ballad--of "Sir Patrick Spens" or "The Twa Corbies" or "Lord Randall"--stands in for the community, serving as the deputy of a public voice.

She is exposing a rift in the imagination, a great glittering crack in our power to make images, that's been around since before "The Twa Corbies." Imagination has not been the great healing force that Coleridge and the Romantics proposed but an energy flawed by human evasion and limitation.

The verse included a number of his own compositions along with items from Scots poet WD Cocker, his own translation of Pushkin's version of the old Scots poem "Twa Corbies" and appropriately a spirited rendering of Burns "To A Louse".