Marion Paul Aird

Marion Paul Aird was a Scottish poet and devotional writer born in Glasgow in 1815. After spending her early years in her native city, she relocated to Kilmarnock, where she devoted herself to literary pursuits and published several volumes of sacred verse and prose. Her major collections include Home of the Heart, and Other Poems Moral and Religious (issued between 1846 and 1863), Heart Histories, Violets from Greenwood, &c. (1853), and Sun and Shade (1860).

Her contributions to nineteenth-century Scottish literature earned her inclusion in James Grant Wilson's biographical anthology Poets and Poetry of Scotland (1876). Although only a handful of her compositions entered widespread congregational use, her tender lyric "Had I the wings of a dove, I would fly" achieved lasting appreciation among worshippers for its poignant expression of spiritual longing.