Thomas Moore

Faintly as tolls the evening chime Our voices keep tune and our oars keep time. Soon as the woods on shore look dim, We'll sing at St. Ann's our parting hymn. Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast, The rapids are near and the daylight's past. Why should we yet our sail unfurl? There is not a breath the blue wave to curl. But when the wind blows off the shore, Oh! sweetly we'll rest our weary oar. Blow, breezes, blow, the stream runs fast, The rapids are near and the daylight's past. Utawas' tide! this trembling moon Shall see us float over thy surges soon. Saint of this green isle! hear our prayers, Oh, grant us cool heavens and favouring airs. Blow, breezes, blow, the stream runs fast, The rapids are near and the daylight's past.

Source: The Music of the Waters, 1888

The words are by Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779-1852). After a visit to Canada in 1804, Moore wrote these stanzas to a tune sung by voyageurs as they rowed him from Kingston to Montreal over five days. The wind was so unfavourable that the boatmen were obliged to row the whole way. “Our voyageurs had good voices,” Moore recalled, “and sang perfectly in tune together.” The rhythm of the poem is suggestive of the motion of dipping oars.

The original words of the air, to which I adapted these stanzas, appeared to be a long, incoherent story, of which I could understand but little from the barbarous pronunciation of the Canadians. It begins, “Dans mon chemin j’ai rencontré / Deux cavaliers trés-bien montès”. And the refrain to every verse was, “A l’ombre d’un bois je m’en vais jouer / A l’ombre d’un bois je m’en vais danser.”

The tune comes from that old French folk song, “Dans mon chemin j’ai rencontré,” but as Canadian folklorist Edith Fowke notes in Folk Songs of Canada (Waterloo 1954), Moore’s verses “have little in common with genuine voyageur songs, which are considerably livelier and less genteel.” Still, the song gained considerable popularity in Britain over the following fifty years and was printed on some New England broadsides. It is widely included in collections as representative of Canada, even if it is hardly typical of Canadian folk song (The Music of the Waters).

St. Ann’s refers to the church of St. Anne, patron saint of travellers, which stood on the western tip of Montreal island where the Ottawa flows into the St. Lawrence. There the fur brigades made their last halt before heading into the wilderness. Utawas was given as the name of a river (the Ottawa) dividing upper and lower Canada.