Talk:A little pretty bonny lass (John Farmer)

Can anyone interpret the text to this song? The second part of it (beginning with "I swore...") is unclear to me.

Perhaps the meaning will be more clear to you if you take the verb "to will, would" not as an auxiliary verb as it's used nowadays, but as an archaic synonym for "to wish". So, after his initial seductive words, he says:

I swore I wished [to have something with her],

yet she kept saying I should not do what I wished to,

and despite all [my efforts] I could not [convince her].

That's how I understand it, but I may have missed something too... —Carlos  02:30, 13 November 2008 (UTC)