The narrator imagines all the women of the county standing in a line, with Polly shining out among them as a "fountain of snow".
Anne Gilchrist in the Journal of the Folksong Society (number 26) points to many tales about women turning into swans.
A version of this story was recorded as "Cailín na Gruaige Báine" on the album Aoife by Moya Brennan.
In Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Aeolian prince Cephalus accidentally kills his wife Procris with a javelin while hunting.
Jamieson writes about this song, "This is indeed a silly ditty, one of the very lowest description of vulgar English ballads which are sung about the streets in country towns and sold four or five for a halfpenny".
This seems like a misinterpretation, since there is a Child Ballad (number 73) called "Lord Thomas and Fair Elleanor" which involves a man killing a woman.
The symbol of a bird to represent a departing spirit from a dead body is common in art, particularly in scenes of the death of Christ.
The word bán in Irish means "white", "pale", or "fair";[5] bawn is an Anglicized version.
There is also a song by Samuel Lover in the one-act opera Il Paddy Whack in Italia (1841) called "Molly Bawm".
The story is adapted and illustrated by Barry Moser in 1992 as the children's book, Polly Vaughn: A Traditional British Ballad, which is set in the Southern United States,[6] and again as part of the 1998 children's book, Great Ghost Stories, complete with an afterword by Peter Glassman.
There is a poem called "Polly Vaughn" in Les Barker's book Alexander Greyhound Bell.
The tune appears in "The Concertina and How to Play It" (1905) by Paul de Ville (as "Molly Bawn"), implying it is for beginners.
In Atlantic Canada, particularly Newfoundland, a variation of the original song, titled "Molly Bawn", depicts a man, reminiscing in despair, over the loss of his young bride many years ago.
[8] (The Leach song, not Molly Bawn, is a version of Boating on Lough Ree by John Keegan Casey (1816–1849), from "Amatory Poems", ref.