| I know she rose early, for I heard her sweet singing
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| Echoing over the flowering heath.
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| She gathered the willow, the elder, the linden,
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| The holly, the ivy twined into a wreath.
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| Oh, the notes you are forming, I long to possess them.
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| They leap from your tongue and ascend on the breeze.
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| Had I risen early from bed in the morning,
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| Then I would have hold of the notes you release.
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| And she gave me the wreath and she sang like a starling,
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| My fingers intwined in her feathery hair,
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| But she shrugged me away and said Alasdair, darling,
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| When a song’s on the wind it belongs to the air.
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| See Polly, she sings as she sits at the spinning wheel.
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| Mary, she sings as she skips with her rope.
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| Jonny, he sings as he fetches the herring creel
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| And Billy, he sings as he rolls down the slope.
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| And the whole house is singing, The whole house is singing,
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| The rafters are ringing, and the timbers are thrown,
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| The whole house is singing, the whole house is singing,
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| And I overhear them, and this is their song.
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| We are stronger when the moon glows in the sky,
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| And the moon causes the tide to rise and rise,
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| And the weed carried upon the drawing foam
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| We will gather to bedeck our happy home. |