"Red Wing" is a popular song written in 1907 with music by Kerry Mills and lyrics by Thurland Chattaway. Mills adapted the music from Robert Schumann's composition for piano "The Happy Farmer, Returning From Work" from his 1848 work Album for the Young, Opus 68. The song tells of a young Indian maid's loss of her sweetheart who has died in battle. It is most memorable for its chorus:
- Now the moon shines tonight on pretty Red Wing,
- The breeze is sighing, the night bird's crying,
- For afar 'neath his star her brave is sleeping,
- While Red Wing's weeping her heart away.
Famous quotes containing the words red and/or wing:
“Iconic clothing has been secularized.... A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)