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It will not be long, love, till our wedding day.
She Moved Through the Fair, arranged for Aliro Voices, is a traditional Irish folk song. The first three verses of the poem were written by Padraic Colum to fit with the fourth verse, which he collected from a traditional song. He then set the poem to a traditional Gaelic melody.
The poem is a tragic story of two young lovers. The woman in the poem tells the narrator that it doesn’t matter that he is poor, her parents won’t mind, and “it will not be long, love, till our wedding day.” But the third verse suggests that something happens to the woman—perhaps an accident, or an illness that the narrator did not know she had—and it strongly implies that she dies before the marriage can take place, for he never sees her again. In the final verse, she comes to him in a dream, or perhaps as a ghost, and reiterates to him: “it will not be long, love, till our wedding day.”
My young love said to me
“My mother won't mind,
And my father won't slight you
For your lack of kine.”
Then she stepped away from me,
And this she did say:
“It will not be long, Love,
Till our wedding day.”
She stepped away from me
And she moved through the fair,
And fondly I watched her
Move here and move there.
Then she made her way homeward,
With one star awake,
As the swan in the evening
Moves over the lake.
The people were saying
“No two e’er were wed
But one had a sorrow
That never was said.”
And I smiled as she passed
With her goods and her gear,
And that was the last
That I saw of my dear.
Last night she came to me,
My dear love came in.
So softly she came
That her feet made no din.
Then she laid her hand on me,
And this she did say:
“It will not be long, love,
Till our wedding day.”
Recording of She Moved Through the Fair by Aliro Voices
