Molly - Sligo Poets

Sligo Times 4 May 1912

MOLLY.

I meet her every morning,
   As she gaily trips to school,
Where all conventions scorning,
   She breaks each golden rule.
A gay blue ribbons fastens
   Her hair of golden brown,
She deigns we with one coy glance
   And then looks quickly down.
Blue eyes, whose demure meekness,
   Is kept for me alone,
Red lips, against whose sweetness,
   I long to press my own.
Heigh-ho, I know ’tis folly
   To worship as I do,
A little flirt like Molly,
   Molly with eyes of blue.

Audacious, heedless, ever,
   She lives to do and dare,
But one must needs forgive her.
   She is so wondrous fair.
For me the world grows brighter
   When her fairy form I see,
And my heart, it beats the lighter
   When Molly smiles on me.
Blue eyes, whose demure meekness,
   Is kept for me alone,
Red lips, against whose sweetness,
   I long to press my own.
Heigh-ho, I know ’tis folly
   To worship as I do,
A little flirt like Molly,
   Molly with eyes of blue.

If but my years were fewer
   Or she were older grown,
Then fearlessly I'd woo her
   And make her all my own.
I wonder ’spite of waiting
   For what the years unfold.
Will youth with youth be mating
   And I be deemed “too old”
Blue eyes, whose demure meekness,
   Is kept for me alone,
Red lips, against whose sweetness,
   I long to press my own.
Heigh-ho, I know ’tis folly
   To worship as I do,
A little flirt like Molly,
   Molly with eyes of blue.

                —Louie Stockdale.

Louie Stockdale lived in Manorhamilton, County Leitrim. She worked as a station clerk at Manorhamilton Railway Station on the Sligo, Leitrim & Northern Counties Railway line where her father, Robert, was Station Master. Louie, who had been born in County Fermanagh and was Church of Ireland, was 26 years of age in 1912.

She had three poems published in the same newspaper in 1911. This poem, Molly, which is written from the point of view of an older man watching a younger girl go to school every day would hardly be published in a newspaper today. The desire expressed by the narrator and the apparent sexual awareness of the girl are both unexpected ina conservative journal in the west of Ireland at this time.

The poem is well composed with good use of rhythm and rhyme. Some of the rhymes are clever, ever - forgive her, for example and the refrain is remarkable not just for its explicitness but for its composition. Blue eyes, red lips make great couplet starts.

Stockdales in the 1911 Census.

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