ABSTRACT
A Galashiels factory weaver, Effie Williamson began writing poetry late in life. She published her poems in The People’s Journal, in Chambers’s Journal and in other periodicals, and like many other labouring-class Scottish poets gradually built up her reputation. Her posthumously published volume of poems, The Tangled Web: Poems and Hymns (Edinburgh and Galashiels, 1883) is dedicated to her mother’s memory, and the tenderness evinced in several poems in remembrance of her mother sets the emotional tone. There is also social and political comment, including a poem on the familiar labouring-class Scottish theme of emigration. Williamson had lived for a few years in Ireland, and there are several poems on Irish subjects. The literary sublime is attempted in poems like ‘An Evening in Melrose Abbey’. There are respectful poems on the Queen and on ‘The Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone’—a politician who patronised at least one labouring-class poet (Frederick Bartlett, q.v.). But Williamson’s verse most successfully focuses on friendship, love and loss, children and home, often with a counterpoint of religious sentiment or natural observation, and with either a poignant or a gloomy undertone. In ‘Bonnie White Snaw’ (q.v.), seasonal pleasures are set against harsher realities the cold weather brings—as they are in Robert Bloomfield’s ‘Winter Song’ (published in his Rural Tales, 1809).
