A young lord, Willie, asks his 'gay lady' whose the child is that she is going with. She owns that a priest is the father, which does not appear to disconcert Willie. A boy is born, and the mother charges Willie to throw him into the sea, 'never to return till white fish he bring hame.' Willie takes the boy (now called his son) to his mother, and tells her that his 'bride' is a king's daughter; upon which his mother, who had had an ill opinion of the lady, promises to do as well by Willie's son as she had done by Willie. Returning to his wife, he finds her weeping and repining for the 'white fisher' that she had 'sent to the sea.' Willie offers her a cordial; she says that the man who could have drowned her son would be capable of poisoning her. Willie then tells her that his mother has the boy in charge; she is consoled, and declares that if he had not been the father she should not have been the mother.
To make this story hang together at all, we must suppose that the third and fourth stanzas are tropical, and that Willie was the priest; or else that they are sarcastic, and are uttered in bitter resentment of Willie's suspicion, or affected suspicion. But we need not trouble ourselves much to make these counterfeits reasonable. Those who utter them rely confidently upon our taking folly and jargon as the marks of genuineness. The white fisher is a trumpery fancy; 2, 7, 8, 12 are frippery commonplaces.
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