“O, what will all the lads do
When Maggy gangs away?
There's no' a heart in a' the glen
That does not dread the day.”
— James Hogg, When Maggy Gangs Awa’ (1810)

“yugāyitaṁ nimeṣeṇa cakṣuṣā prāvṛṣāyitam
śūnyāyitaṁ jagat sarvaṁ govinda-viraheṇa me”
(“Every moment seems an age, my eyes shed torrents of rain, the whole world is void in separation from Govinda.”)
— Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 10.31.15

To listen to Lori Watson sing When Maggy Gangs Awa’ ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0ldt1SUbic )is to experience something beyond mere performance. It is to witness an act of reverent scholarship, where every flattened vowel, every traditional turn of phrase, and every choice of verse is a deliberate brushstroke painting a picture of a specific place and a universal heartbreak. The song, in her keeping, is not a relic; it is a living, breathing lament. It is also, remarkably, a key that unlocks a shared human language of loss, a grammar of grief that finds its most striking parallel in a seemingly distant tradition: the Vaiṣṇava poetry of separation. Through its sophisticated use of ambiguity and its collapse of linear time, the Scottish ballad becomes a poignant echo of the sacred sorrow felt in the groves of Vṛndāvana.

The power of the lament begins with its central, unspoken mystery: what does it mean that “Maggy gangs away”? The song masterfully refuses to tell us. We are never given the comfort of a clear narrative. Has she died, her departure a final, tragic finality? Has she been married off to a privileged lord, a fate that is a kind of death to the hopeful lads of the glen? Or has she simply left for the city, a modern departure that still leaves an ancient void? The genius of the poem is that it understands that the answer does not matter. The specifics of the story are secondary to the absolute truth of the loss. This ambiguity makes Maggy not just a person, but a symbol of that which we cannot bear to lose.

Yet the ballad does provide a crucial clue in one striking stanza:

The young laird o’ the Lang-shaw
Has drunk her health in wine;
The priest has said—in confidence—
The lassie was divine,
And that is mair in maiden’s praise
Than ony priest should say.

Here the outlines of a marriage emerge. The “young laird o’ the Lang-shaw” is not in mourning but in celebration, raising a toast as if at a wedding feast. The priest, too, is present, compelled to confess her radiance even beyond the bounds of clerical propriety. Only the laird rejoices, because he has gained what all others have lost. To the rest of the glen, Maggy’s marriage is as total a loss as death itself. This stanza suggests that the song is not about death but about the end of youth, the closing of the magical season of courtship, when even fairies rise from their “beds o’ dew” to mourn. It is a rite of passage, a cultural necessity that feels, to those left behind, like an existential tragedy.

This stands in fascinating dialogue with the departures of Krishna in the Vaiṣṇava tradition. His absences are narratively precise: in the Rāsa-līlā (Bhāgavata Purāṇa 10.29–33), he vanishes first to humble the gopīs’ pride, but above all so that Śrī Rādhā will seek him out. Only she can trace him into the forest, because only her love is without limit. Yet even she is then deprived of him, so that her longing may reach its highest pitch. Later, he leaves Vṛndāvana for Mathurā (Bhāg. 10.39–47), not because he has ceased to love the gopīs, but because destiny and cultural duty demand it. Like the laird claiming Maggy through marriage, Kṛṣṇa steps out of the enchanted world of adolescence into the ordained role of a prince. His departure is framed as dharma, as social necessity. But for the gopīs, as for the lads of the glen, that context does not soften the wound. The explanation is irrelevant; the loss is absolute.

This sense of a world unmade is deepened by the song’s most subtle and powerful device: its apparent disregard for linear time, which is enhanced by Watson's particular phrasings. The lament does not take place before, during, or after the departure; it exists in a single, eternal moment of heartbreak. The linguistic clues are exquisite. There is no one in the glen that “does not dread the day,” a remarkable phrasing that elicits a sense of present mourning for a future event. The sorrow is so certain that the anticipation and the experience have merged. This is reinforced by the immediate shift to the past tense to describe the consequences: Jock becomes a “waefu’ wight” and the priest confesses that “the lassie was divine.” They are already memories. This is a perfect, if unintentional, illustration of the specific spiritual mood described in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava theology as prema-vaicittya: a state of such intense love that the mere anticipation of separation creates the immediate, painful reality of that separation. It is the experience of loss while the beloved is still present, a temporal collapse where future dread becomes present grief. The lads, like the gopī-queen Śrī Rādhā, are living in this suspended moment of exquisite agony.

In this heightened emotional state, the landscape itself is drawn into the drama, becoming a witness and a participant in the sorrow. This shared “grammar of grief” is perhaps the most profound connection between the Scottish glen and the Indian grove. In the song, the wailing will “quaver high,” drawing the “red-breast frae the wood, / The laverock frae the sky.” It is a lament so powerful it even rouses the “fairies frae their beds o’ dew” to join the lay. Nature is not a passive backdrop; it is an active mourner. So too in Vṛndāvana, when Krishna leaves for Mathurā, the sacred Yamunā river is said to become stunned in sorrow, the peacocks refuse to dance, and the very trees and vines begin to wither. In both traditions, a loss this foundational is understood not as a merely human event, but as a cosmological one that rends the fabric of the world.

Krishna departs to fulfill a divine destiny, yet to the gopīs — and above all to Śrī Rādhā — his purpose brings no consolation. For them, as for the lads of the glen, the departure is experienced not as an event with meaning but as an unbearable void. The theology of līlā explains why Krishna must leave, but the poetry of separation preserves what it feels like: a heartbreak so absolute that the body, the mind, and the very landscape are thrown into mourning. In this sense, Maggy’s (implicit) marriage and Krishna’s royal ascendency converge. Both mark the end of adolescence, the closing of the magical world where love unbound by marriage seems everything, and the beginning of a destiny that leaves behind shattered hearts and grieving valleys.

And here lies perhaps the deepest resonance: in both the Scottish glen and the Indian grove, separation is also the end of enchantment. The fairies slip back into their hidden places; the Yamunā falters; the peacocks fall silent. What is lost is not only a beloved person but an entire world of youthful magic, where love seemed infinite and eternal. To lose that is to awaken into adulthood — whether through marriage, duty, or destiny — and to know that the age of wonder has closed. Yet the lament itself, sung across centuries, keeps that world alive in memory. The song of Maggy, like the poetry of Vṛndāvana, becomes the vessel that carries the sound of paradise lost, and in that echo we are reminded that even when the joys and sorrows of youth are lost to time, they live forever in poetry and song.

Notes and References

  • Śrīmad-Bhāgavata Purāṇa 10.29–33: Rāsa-līlā and Kṛṣṇa’s disappearance from the gopīs.
  • Śrīmad-Bhāgavata Purāṇa 10.39–47: Departure from Vṛndāvana to Mathurā.
  • Rūpa Gosvāmī, Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi, on the gradations of vipralambha-bhāva and prema-vaicittya.
  • James Hogg, “When Maggy gangs awa’,” first published in The Forest Minstrel (Edinburgh: Manners and Miller, 1810). Digital edition available at Wikisource