And slow the advance unto Ireland accruing,
From forcing the coach-wheels of Albion to pause.
‘Sad is our fate,’ cries the famishing peasant;
‘The wild bird is left to its home on the tree,
And corn is full lavishly flung to the pheasant,
But no roof and no food for my children and me.
O, harder our fate than the horrors of fiction!
When thrust by the merciless laws of eviction
From the home that is held by the heart’s predilection,
We are forced o’er the bare breast of Erin to flee.