Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. (1833–1908). An American Anthology, 1787–1900. 1900.
By Fitz-GreeneHalleck65 Burns
W
Thou ’mindst me of that autumn noon
When first we met upon “the banks
And braes of bonny Doon.”
My sunny hour was glad and brief;
We ’ve crossed the winter sea, and thou
Art withered—flower and leaf.
The doom of all things wrought of clay—
And withered my life’s leaf like thine,
Wild rose of Alloway?
My bosom bore thee far and long,
His—who a humbler flower could make
Immortal as his song.
That calls, when brimmed her festal cup,
A nation’s glory and her shame,
In silent sadness up.
Forgot—she ’s canonized his mind;
And it is joy to speak the best
We may of human kind.
Where the Bard-peasant first drew breath;
A straw-thatched roof above his head,
A straw-wrought couch beneath.
His monument—that tells to Heaven
The homage of earth’s proudest isle
To that Bard-peasant given!
Boy-minstrel, in thy dreaming hour;
And know, however low his lot,
A Poet’s pride and power:
The power that gave a child of song
Ascendency o’er rank and birth,
The rich, the brave, the strong;
Thy spirit’s fluttering pinions then,
Despair—thy name is written on
The roll of common men.
And longer scrolls, and louder lyres,
And lays lit up with Poesy’s
Purer and holier fires:
Few nobler ones than Burns are there;
And few have won a greener wreath
Than that which binds his hair.
In which the answering heart would speak,—
Thought, word, that bids the warm tear start,
Or the smile light the cheek;
The common pulse of man keeps time,
In cot or castle’s mirth or moan,
In cold or sunny clime.
Before its spell with willing knee,
And listened, and believed, and felt
The Poet’s mastery
O’er the heart’s sunshine and its showers,
O’er Passion’s moments bright and warm,
O’er Reason’s dark, cold hours;
In halls where rings the banquet’s mirth,
Where mourners weep, where lovers woo,
From throne to cottage-hearth?
What wild vows falter on the tongue,
When “Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,”
Or “Auld Lang Syne” is sung!
Come with his Cotter’s hymn of praise,
And dreams of youth, and truth, and love,
With “Logan’s” banks and braes.
Of Alloway’s witch-haunted wall,
All passions in our frames of clay
Come thronging at his call.
And our own world, its gloom and glee,
Wit, pathos, poetry, are there,
And death’s sublimity.
Though rough and dark the path he trod,
Lived—died—in form and soul a Man,
The image of his God.
With wounds that only death could heal,
Tortures—the poor alone can know,
The proud alone can feel;
His independent tongue and pen,
And moved, in manhood as in youth,
Pride of his fellow-men.
A hate of tyrant and of knave,
A love of right, a scorn of wrong,
Of coward and of slave;
That could not fear and would not bow,
Were written in his manly eye
And on his manly brow.
Like flower-seeds by the far winds sown,
Where’er, beneath the sky of heaven,
The birds of fame have flown.
Beside his coffin with wet eyes,
Her brave, her beautiful, her good,
As when a loved one dies.
Men stand his cold earth-couch around,
With the mute homage that we pay
To consecrated ground.
The last, the hallowed home of one
Who lives upon all memories,
Though with the buried gone.
Shrines to no code nor creed confined—
The Delphian vales, the Palestines,
The Meccas of the mind.
Crowned kings, and mitred priests of power,
And warriors with their bright swords sheathed,
The mightiest of the hour;
Is lit by fortune’s dimmer star,
Are there—o’er wave and mountain come,
From countries near and far;
The Switzer’s snow, the Arab’s sand,
Or trod the piled leaves of the West,
My own green forest-land.
Gaze on the scenes he loved and sung,
And gather feelings not of earth
His fields and streams among.
And pastoral Nith, and wooded Ayr,
And round thy sepulchres, Dumfries!
The poet’s tomb is there.
His funeral columns, wreaths and urns?
Wear they not graven on the heart
The name of Robert Burns?