We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dropping, a bucketful of gold.
We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.
Musical settings
2 settings of this poem. Listen, read the notes, get a feel for what each one argues.
Version 1
This setting treats the poem as an exuberant young-adult song — the music leans into the "very merry" half of the refrain rather than the "very tired" half. The arrangement carries forward the poem's modernist sensibility: Greenwich Village in 1919 as a place where two friends (lovers? collaborators?) could ride the ferry all night without explanation, and the music doesn't try to explain it either. The cyclical structure of the song echoes the three-stanza repetition of "We were very tired, we were very merry" — each return slightly altered, the way the original phrase shifts in meaning across the poem. The encounter with the shawl-covered woman in the third stanza arrives as a turn, not a climax; the music shapes it as a moral pivot rather than a swell.
Version 2
This setting argues that the poem is less about youthful joy than about the strange melancholy of staying up all night — the music finds the loneliness inside the merriment. The third-stanza encounter with the woman selling fruit is the song's emotional center: the speakers' generosity is presented not as triumphant charity but as an unsteady, impulsive gesture by two people whose own footing is uncertain. The arrangement makes audible the class distance the poem only glances at: the lilting refrain belongs to the speakers' world, but the encounter forces a different register in. The repeated "very tired, very merry" feels less like a refrain and more like a thing the speakers are convincing themselves of.