Analysis of The Orphan Ballad Singers

O, WEARY, weary are our feet,
     And weary, weary is our way ;
Through many a long and crowded street
     We’ve wandered mournfully to-day.
My little sister she is pale;
     She is too tender and too young
To bear the autumn’s sullen gale,
     And all day long the child has sung.

She was our mother’s favourite child,
     Who loved her for her eyes of blue,
And she is delicate and mild,
     She cannot do what I can do.
She never met her father’s eyes,
     Although they were so like her own ;
In some far distant sea he lies,
     A father to his child unknown.

The first time that she lisped his name,
     A little playful thing was she ;
How proud we were,—yet that night came
     The tale how he had sunk at sea.
My mother never raised her head ;
     How strange, how white, how cold she grew !
It was a broken heart they said—
    I wish our hearts were broken too.

We have no home—we have no friends,
     They said our home no more was ours ;
Our cottage where the ash tree bends,
     The garden we had filled with flowers.
The sounding shells our father brought,
     That we might hear the sea at home ;
Our bees, that in the summer wrought
     The winter’s golden honeycomb.

We wandered forth mid wind and rain,
     No shelter from the open sky ;
I only wish to see again
     My mother’s grave, and rest and die.
Alas, it is a weary thing
     To sing our ballads o’er and o’er ;
The songs we used at home to sing—
     Alas, we have a home no more !