Today’s Poem: Over the Hills and Far Away

A love song for thieves and prostitutes

Johann Georg Meyer von Bremen, Auf der Höhe, 1871 (Artvee)

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Over the Hills and Far Away

by John Gay

MacHeath:
Were I laid on Greenland’s coast,
And in my arms embrac’d my lass;
Warm amidst eternal frost,
Too soon the half year’s night would pass.
And I would love you all the day.
Ev’ry night would kiss and play,
If with me you’d fondly stray
Over the hills and far away.

Polly:
Were I sold on Indian soil,
Soon as the burning day was clos’d,
I could mock the sultry toil
When on my charmer’s breast repos’d.
I would love you all the day.
Ev’ry night would kiss and play,
If with me you’d fondly stray
Over the hills and far away.

Duet:
Were I laid on Greenland’s coast,
And in my arms embrac’d my lass;
Warm amidst eternal frost,
Too soon the half year’s night would pass.
And I would love you all the day.
Ev’ry night would kiss and play,
If with me you’d fondly stray
Over the hills and far away.

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In 1716, Jonathan Swift suggested that someone should write a “Newgate pastoral,” with peaceful bucolic tropes given an ironic jail setting. But as John Gay (1685–1732) played with the idea, the result was his 1728 “ballad opera,” The Beggar’s Opera — a satire filled with thieves, thugs, and prostitutes with such names as “Trull,” “Vixen,” “Tawdry,” and “Brazen.” The Beggar’s Opera grew into a lampoon of the contemporary upper-crust taste for opera in the Italian style. (It also targeted — or so it was believed — the Whig Party luminary Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Oxford, who used his power to suppress performances of Gay’s 1729 sequel, Polly.)

Among the songs in The Beggar’s Opera is Today’s Poem: “Over the Hills and Far Away.” The melody — published in the 1706 edition of Thomas D’Urfey’s Pills to Purge Melancholy — was snapped up immediately by the playwright George Farquhar (1677–1707) for his comedy The Recruiting Officer. Farquhar’s lyrics are about joining the army (and thus easily adapted to, for example, a Napoleonic War setting for the 1990s television show Sharpe’s Rifles, made from Bernard Cornwell’s stories).

Engraving of John Gay (Wikimedia Commons)

Twenty-odd years later, John Gay took the tune — and the line with which Farquhar ended each verse — to make a new love song, sung as a duet by MacHeath and Polly. The phrase “Over the hills and far away” became, in Gay’s hands, the setting for a faery land, a fantasy location of love’s extremes, rather than a British soldier’s march to Flanders, Portugal, and Spain. (That love setting is what later prompted Led Zeppelin to use the title for one of their own rock songs.)

For Gay, each verse is a tetrameter quatrain, rhymed abab, followed by a mono-rhyme chorus, “I would love you all the day / . . . Over the hills and far away.”

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