Among the Heather

William Allingham (1824–1889)

ONE evening walking out, I o’ertook a modest colleen,

When the wind was blowing cool, and the harvest leaves were falling:

“Is our way by chance the same? might we travel on together?”

“Oh, I keep the mountain side,” she replied, “among the heather.”

“Your mountain air is sweet when the days are long and sunny,

When the grass grows round the rocks, and the whin-bloom smells like honey;

But the winter ’s coming fast with its foggy, snowy weather,

And you ’ll find it bleak and chill on your hill, among the heather.”

She praised her mountain home, and I ’ll praise it too, with reason,

For where Molly is there ’s sunshine and flow’rs at every season.

Be the moorland black or white, does it signify a feather,

Now I know the way by heart, every part, among the heather?

The sun goes down in haste, and the night falls thick and stormy;

Yet I ’d travel twenty miles to the welcome that ’s before me;

Singing hi! for Eskydun, in the teeth of wind and weather!

Love ’ll warm me as I go through the snow, among the heather.