The Lark In The Morning

Like many other songs of the rural life with puzzling lyrics, you have to dig back into other versions to find that the song is about a young woman who is trying to keep her pretty ploughboy lover from leaving her in the morning. Some versions are more of the wink-wink, nudge-nudge of what a fine life those ploughboys have, showing their healthy limbs off with no shirt in May, other versions are more plaintive, of girls taken advantage of and abandoned. I think the tone of the music favors the latter as more appropriate, and thus likely more original. But there's no guarantee of that in folk music.