A Complaint of Coercion
O PEGGY, darlin’, listen to my sorrowful lamint,
And help me to recover from my state of discontint;
There’s an end to fun an’ sportin’ in these black and bitther days,
And we’ll have to drop our coortin’ by the moon’s enchanting rays.
For there isn’t a dacent gossoon,
By the light of that same silver moon,
Found out of his bed,
But will straightway be led
To a cushion of plank,
That of feathers is blank,
An’ he won’t fall in love with too soon.
Now it’s inconvanient, Peggy, to be spoonin’ in the day,
With all your male relations or your neighbors in the way;
Your boy’s poor heart, in lonesomeness, must palpitate and pant
Beneath the cowld inspection of your mother or your aunt;
An’ he’ll have to repress his ould taste
For resting his arm round your waist,
An’ except for a sigh,
Or a glance of your eye,
Or an odd little squeeze
That there’s nobody sees,
His comfort will be of the laste.
Do you mind last winter, Peggy, when the snow was on the ground,
Every night all stiff an’ frozen in the boreen I’d be found?
I didn’t care for painful demonstrations in my toes,
I didn’t feel the icicles that beautified my nose;
I despised my five miles of a thramp
In the dark, widout moon, star, or lamp,
For I knew at its ind
I could always dipind
That some one I’d find
Who had sootherings kind,
To rescue my sperits from damp.
But now, bad fortune, Peggy, if I venture out at all,
The peelers will be afther me with buckshot an’ with ball;
And if I keep purshuing my perambulatin’ course,
I shall find myself a target for the County Kerry force.
An’ some night I’ll be brought in my gore,
Stritched out on an ould cabin door,
With six ounces of lead
Settled inside my head,
An’ my bosom, that’s true
As the saints unto you,
Disarranged by an ounce or two more.
Or I might be taken, Peggy, an’ before a magisthrate,
Be called upon the rayson of my wanderin’s to state;
And it wouldn’t suit your character for me to tell the truth,
That my heart was thirsty, and I sought my girl to quinch its drooth;
So I’d have to tell thunderin’ lies,
And the law has such far-seeing eyes,
’Twould find thim all out,
And there isn’t a doubt
Introduced I would be,
By some dirty J. P.,
To a suit of the Government frieze.