"...September Seventeen
For a girl I know it's Mother's Day
Her son has gone alee
And that's where he will stay"

From Have Not Been The Same: The Can-Rock Revolution: "The album's most moving image was saved for the acoustic vignette "Fiddler's Green," written as a tribute to Downie's young nephew Charles Gillespie who had died of a heart ailment the previous September."

"...Tearing blue eyes sailor-mean
As Falstaff sings a sorrowful refrain
For a boy in Fiddler's Green"

The song itself is a lament-in-lyric for a mother, related to Downie, who has lost her son. It is an elegiac, mournful and beautiful farewell and reassurance all at once. Falstaff, another reference to a Shakespearian character within Hip lyrics, is a comic creation who appears as relief in four of Shakespeare's plays. His presence here sheds light on just how sad this moment is, as even the legendary literary clown is moved and reticent. 

Fiddler's Green is a kind of Celtic Heaven for men lost at Sea. It is said to be "...the happy land imagined by sailors where there is perpetual mirth, a fiddle that never stops playing for dancers who never tire."