Folk and Traditional Song Lyrics:
Festive Song

A Festive Song

A Festive Song

Comrades, clasp hands,
The time demands
This night we spend enjoying
The jovial word
Round festive board,
Grim carking care destroying
Liquour this night
Shall sparkle bright,
With homage pay to Beauty,
And brave men who
Oft conflict knew,
Shall take a rest from duty.

Chorus
Then fill the cup
With liquor up,
Pledge evrly man his neighbor,
That in the light
Of Truth hell fight
Top win the world for labour.

Comrades, the tears
Or Class thro years
Hath Shed the wide world over,
Have taken root
And soon the fruit
Our tyrants shall discover
And when at length
We show our strength,
And send each despot flying,
With joy and mirth
Like ours the Earth
Shall hail Oppression dying
Chorus

For who with zest
Can laugh the best
But he who laughs the longest
And in the fight
Twixt wrong and right
The laugh is with the strongest

Since time began
Fates mighty plan
The laugh gave to the proudest
But History
Shall tend that w
Did laugh the last and loudest

Then,comrades, toast
Great Freedoms host,
And loudly sing her praises,
And honored be,
Oer land and sea
Whoeer her banner raises,
So, ere we leave,
A wreath well weave
Of flowrs of Earths best gleaning
With Maid and Wife,
With Hope of Life
Free from a tyrants scheming

From Songs of Freedom, James Connolly 1910
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