Note 688 — Chapter V · THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF COMMUNAL POETRY (continued 2)

“Is your throat clear for hooky hooky?” asks Harvest; and the reapers sing the refrain again. Later he speaks of weeping out “a lamentable hooky hooky.” Drake connected hooky with hockey, the hock or harvest cart sung by Herrick. But perhaps “hooky” is to be kept without any such change. Leyden, see Complaynte of Scotland, p. xciii, speaking of ring dances at the kirn or feast of cutting down the grain, says that reapers who first finished the work danced on an eminence, in view of other reapers, and began the dance “with three loud shouts of triumph, and thrice tossing up their hooks in the air.” Cf. the Oxford Dict., s.v. hook, the common word for reaping scythe or sickle from Anglo-Saxon down.