Andrew Lang’s New Collected Rhymes is a varied poetry collection that ranges from Jacobite history, Scottish loyalty, and nostalgia for lost causes to cricket, angling, love, literature, art, collecting, and social satire. Poems about Culloden, Loch Lomond, the White Rose, and exiled princes transform political defeat and vanished hopes into expressions of historical memory and personal longing. Other verses turn to dead cricketers, the contented angler, collectors, writers, marriage, the subconscious, and optimism, humorously exposing the vanities of everyday life and contemporary culture through lively rhyme and playful criticism. Tributes to Joan of Arc and Robert Louis Stevenson, together with folk songs and traditional-style ballads, unite sorrow for loss, delight in sport and literature, and amusement at human folly in a voice that moves easily between sincerity and wit.
