Aubrey's version of the words includes fire and fleet, rather than fire and sleet, and this is also how it appears in the Oxford Book of English Verse. F.W. Moorman, in his book on Yorkshire dialect poetry, explains that fleet means floor and references the OED, flet-floor. He also notes that the expression Aboute the fyre upon flet appears in the mediaeval story Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and explains that "Fire and fleet and candle-light are a summary of the comforts of the house, which the dead person still enjoys for this ae night, and then goes out into the dark and cold."
Read more about this topic: Lyke-Wake Dirge
Famous quotes containing the words fire and, fire and/or fleet:
“Your eyes were frosted starlight,
Your heart fire and snow.
Who was it said, “I love you”?
Alice: Mother, let me go!”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
“There was the murdered corpse, in covert laid,
And violent death in thousand shapes displayed;
The city to the soldier’s rage resigned;
Successless wars, and poverty behind;
Ships burnt in fight, or forced on rocky shores,
And the rash hunter strangled by the boars;
The newborn babe by nurses overlaid;
And the cook caught within the raging fire he made.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“On the middle of that quiet floor
sits a fleet of small black ships,
square-rigged, sails furled, motionless,
their spars like burned matchsticks.”
—Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)