Boyzone?  Good heavens.  Mind you, good as so many of the contemporary recordings of the song are, to my mind they're really "covers" rather than distinct variants in their own right, at least for the moment.

I was maybe a bit abrupt earlier, Bernard; sorry about that.  I should really have gone into more detail.  A look at other traditional versions will soon make it plain what sort of fair we're talking about!  As to the supernatural element, in the traditional versions that I've seen, with one exception, the young man loses his love, not to death, but either for an unspecified reason (as in the version Paddy Tunney heard from Barney MacGarvey in 1960, and printed in The Stone Fiddle) or, more usually, to another man; as in, for example, Our Wedding Day (in Kennedy, mentioned above by Muriel Doris; there is another version, from Sam Henry's Songs of the People, here: Our Wedding Day ) or My young love said to me (Paddy Tunney).

The exception is Margaret Barry's four-verse version; this is virtually identical to Padraic Colum's rewrite, but instead of "she came softly in", she sang "my dead love came in".  I strongly suspect that it was she who introduced that bit to the song, and in so doing completely changed its meaning.  That would be some time in the 1940s or 50s, presumably.  As it happens, I think that it was a stroke of genius, but it does mean that any speculation as to the deeper meaning of that particular version of the song can only be subjective and personal; a matter of opinion, not fact.  I'm hoping that John Moulden will look in and tell me if I'm hopelessly wrong in my guess, and that somebody will post the Gaelic version that gets mentioned from time to time.

Malcolm