Health and Joy Be With You

Here's another sweet Scotch song by John Stuart Blackie. In Songs of the North it has the heading 'Health and Joy be with you', with the Gaelic title 'Gu ma slan a chi mi', and consists of these three verses:

1. Health and joy be with you,
My bonnie nut-brown maid,
With tresses richly flowing,
With virgin grace arrayed;
Thy voice to me is music
When heavy I may be,
It heals my heart's deep sorrow
To speak a word with thee.

2. In sadness I am rocking
This night upon the sea.
For troubled is my slumber
When thy smile is far from me ;
On thee I'm ever thinking,
Thy face is ever near,
And if I may not find thee
Then death alone is dear.

3. Before we heaved our anchor
Their evil speech began.
That you no more should see me
The false and faithless man ;
Droop not thy head, my darling.
My heart is all thine own,
No power on earth can part us
But cruel death alone.


So simple, and yet so lovely!

I found another version in this e-book of The Selected Poems of John Stuart Blackie, which has some more verses and a different phrasing for some of the lines. To my taste (probably influenced by blind loyalty to Songs of the North), the shorter version is superior, but verses 3 and 4 are delightful:

1. May health and joy be with you,
My bonnie nut-brown maid,
With your dress so trim and tidy
And your hair of bonnie braid.
Thy voice to me is music
When heavy I may be,
And it heals my heart's deep sorrow
To speak a word with thee.

2. 'Tis in sadness that I'm rocking
This night upon the sea.
Right scanty is my slumber
When thy smile is far from me;
'Tis on thee that I am thinking,
'Tis thy face that I behold.
And if I may not find thee
May I lie beneath the mould.

3. Thine eyes are like the blaeberry
Full and fresh upon the brae;
Thy cheeks blush like the rowans
On a mellow autumn day.
If the gossips say I hate thee,
'Tis an ugly lie they tell,
Each day's a year to me since
I left my lovely Nell.

4. They said that I did leave thee
To feed on lovelier cheer,
That I turned my back upon thee
For thy kiss was no more dear;
O never heed their tattle,
My bonnie, bonnie lass.
Thy breath to me is sweeter
Than the dew upon the grass.

5. Before we heaved our anchor
Their evil speech began.
That you no more should see me
The false and faithless man;
Droop not thy head, my darling.
My heart is all thine own,
No power from thee can part me
But cruel death alone.

6. There are story-telling people
In the world, great and small,
Their heart it swells with poison,
And their mouth it droppeth gall;
Ev'n let them spin their lies now,
They'll see the thing that's true,
When the minister shall speak the word
That maketh one of two.

7. The knot of love that binds us
Is tied full sure and tight;
What matters if they wrong me.
When I know that I am right?
There's many a rich curmudgeon
Frets his heart with bitter spleen;
But I can live, and love, and laugh,
Although my purse be lean.