I was speaking not long ago to an old, dear friend, the Canadian Philip O’Meara. Philip made a remarkable contribution to his adopted country. He taught at the Guyana Training College 1970-74 when he was cited by the government for his “outstanding contribution to life in Guyana.” Students of that time have said to me he was the teacher of their lives. Dr Jagan in 1996 asked Philip to return and made the formal request to Canadian PM Jean Chretien. Philip had been back in Guyana as Canadian Head of AID 1980-83 and his former students wrote a musical play for him To Love Somebody which ran at St Roses’ auditorium in 1982.
Philip also did much work at the Theatre Guild, including playing in King Lear in 1973 when an eminent Theatre Guild director of the time considered Philip’s character Edmund might leap upon the stage stark naked at one crucial moment. Philip was preparing himself to make Guyanese theatrical history but unfortunately the director changed his mind. I have wondered what CIDA headquarters in Ottawa would have thought of their august representative if the director – and Philip – had held their nerve.
I was saying to Philip that it had been good to “pluck the gowans fine” with him and mutual friends of ours in those years when we were much younger – intending to convey the memory of those sweet and sometimes riotous times of wine and roses.
He asked me where I had got the quotation which he, whom I knew as an encyclopaedia of quotations from all the great poets, did not know. I said I wasn’t sure but I thought it must come from Shakespeare. He said he didn’t think so. But there it was in my mind and I had to find the source.
I then began the search. Being of the (very) old school, I first looked up my books of poetry and glossaries of the great lines. I could not find the phrase. I took down my precious illustrated edition of all Shakespeare’s plays and poems and tried to find the phrase. “Plucking the gowans fine” was nowhere to be found.
And so at last – and my sons were quick to say it should have been at first – I resorted to Googling the phrase. And sure enough, problem solved in seconds, there it was – “Pluck the gowans fine” – its history and usage. And it makes a wonderful literary story.
I had read the phrase most recently in a book I was reading, Joy in the Morning by P G Wodehouse, one of the great prose stylists in the English language and the funniest writer of the 20th, or I think any, century whose words I have read and re-read and re-re-read with utter delight all my life from the age of twelve. I thought Wodehouse must have taken the phrase “plucking the gowans fine” from Shakespeare since Wodehouse was a master of introducing such quotations appropriately and with relish in his own writing. But it turns out this was not so in the case of this phrase. Here, instead, is the story as contained in World Wide Words unearthed in my Google search.
The phrase as it stands was an invention by Wodehouse himself. He uses it in many of his books. In Joy in the Morning (1947) which I was re-reading at the time of my conversation with Philip O’Meara this is the reference:
“It was many years since this Cheesewright and I had started what I believe is known as plucking the gowans fine, and there had been a time when we had plucked them rather assiduously.”
It is a phrase that is used by nobody else in their writings. But quite a few examples of “gowans fine” occur in online references. And so we are led, at last, to the ultimate source. The source, I could hardly believe it, is the world-wide famous poem/song ‘Auld Lang Syne’ by the great Scotsman Robbie Burns. The original version of this song has this stanza:
We twa hae run about the braes
And pu’d the gowans fine
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary foot
Sin’ auld lang syne.
Pu’d is the past tense of the Scots verb pou. It covers the actions of plucking flowers or gathering fruit. A gowan with a supporting adjective may be a wild flower of any sort, but standing alone it’s the common daisy. Pu’d the gowans fine may be translated in modern English less obscurely but also less romantically as “picked the fine daises.”
So, as the Old Year turns into the New, and you dance or sing to the famous old song at home or party place, recall those days long ago when with friends you “plucked the gowans fine” and rejoice again in days which, burnished by memory, were so carefree and full of hope and wondrous adventures still to come.
