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Home  »  Poems of Places An Anthology in 31 Volumes  »  The Hills of Sweet Tipperary

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Ireland: Vol. V. 1876–79.

Tipperary

The Hills of Sweet Tipperary

By Robert Dwyer Joyce (1830–1883)

O MARY dear, ’t is long ago

Since hand in hand together

We sat in pleasant Rossaroe,

Amidst the blooming heather;

Your eyes were like the lustre shed

By heaven so blue and airy,

Your cheeks were like the roses red

Mid green hills of Tipperary.

O, the hills, the hills so green,

The hills so high and airy,

May heaven shine o’er them ever sheen,

The hills of sweet Tipperary.

We sat while evening’s light illumed

Comailthe’s stately mountain,

Where heather bells and gorse flowers bloomed

Round old St. Brendan’s fountain;

The redbreast’s song, the thrush’s lay,

Like strains from haunts of faery,

Our vespers for the closing day

Mid green hills of Tipperary.

O, the hills, etc.

The bubbling well, the ruined cairn

Where slept some warrior olden,

The foxglove, heath, and waving fern,

And gorse flowers gay and golden:

The sunlit tree, with shattered arm,

That eve, true love unchary

Cast o’er them all some magic charm,

Mid green hills of Tipperary.

O, the hills, etc.

What vows in that sweet spot we made

Of true love, fond and tender,

Nor dreamed that joy could falsely fade,

Like that gay sunset’s splendor;

Nor thought death’s gloom and misery

Our happiness could vary,

So blindly rapt in love were we,

Mid green hills of Tipperary.

O, the hills, etc.

What hopes were doomed, what fortunes fell,

Since you and I together

Sat by St. Brendan’s sunlit well,

Amidst the blooming heather!

I wander far from Rossaroe,

No longer blithe and airy,

And on your grave the shamrocks grow,

Mid green hills of Tipperary.

O, the hills, the hills so green,

The hills so high and airy,

May heaven shine o’er them ever sheen,

The hills of sweet Tipperary.