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“Thrice have you seen me, brother, But now shall see me no more, Till you meet your angry fathers Upon the farther shore. Thrice have I spoken, and now, Before the cock be heard, I take my leave for ever With the naming of a word. It shall sing in your sleeping ears, It shall hum in your waking head, The name–Ticonderoga, And the warning of the dead.”

Now when the night was over And the time of people’s fears, The Cameron walked abroad, And the word was in his ears. “Many a name I know, But never a name like this; O, where shall I find a skilly man Shall tell me what it is?” With many a man he counselled Of high and low degree, With the herdsmen on the mountains And the fishers of the sea. And he came and went unweary, And read the books of yore, And the runes that were written of old On stones upon the moor. And many a name he was told, But never the name of his fears – Never, in east or west, The name that rang in his ears: Names of men and of clans; Names for the grass and the tree, For the smallest tarn in the mountains, The smallest reef in the sea: Names for the high and low, The names of the craig and the flat; But in all the land of Scotland, Never a name like that.

II. THE SEEKING OF THE NAME

And now there was speech in the south, And a man of the south that was wise, A periwig’d lord of London, {3b} Called on the clans to rise. And the riders rode, and the summons Came to the western shore, To the land of the sea and the heather, To Appin and Mamore. It called on all to gather From every scrog and scaur, That loved their fathers’ tartan And the ancient game of war.

And down the watery valley And up the windy hill, Once more, as in the olden, The pipes were sounding shrill; Again in highland sunshine The naked steel was bright; And the lads, once more in tartan Went forth again to fight.

“O, why should I dwell here With a weird upon my life, When the clansmen shout for battle And the war-swords clash in strife? I cannae joy at feast, I cannae sleep in bed, For the wonder of the word And the warning of the dead. It sings in my sleeping ears, It hums in my waking head, The name–Ticonderoga, The utterance of the dead. Then up, and with the fighting men To march away from here, Till the cry of the great war-pipe Shall drown it in my ear!”

Where flew King George’s ensign The plaided soldiers went: They drew the sword in Germany, In Flanders pitched the tent. The bells of foreign cities Rang far across the plain: They passed the happy Rhine, They drank the rapid Main. Through Asiatic jungles The Tartans filed their way, And the neighing of the war-pipes Struck terror in Cathay. {3c}

“Many a name have I heard,” he thought, “In all the tongues of men, Full many a name both here and there. Full many both now and then. When I was at home in my father’s house In the land of the naked knee, Between the eagles that fly in the lift And the herrings that swim in the sea, And now that I am a captain-man With a braw cockade in my hat – Many a name have I heard,” he thought, “But never a name like that.”

III. THE PLACE OF THE NAME

There fell a war in a woody place, Lay far across the sea, A war of the march in the mirk midnight And the shot from behind the tree, The shaven head and the painted face, The silent foot in the wood, In a land of a strange, outlandish tongue That was hard to be understood.