Written by
Robert Burns |
THOU, Liberty, thou art my theme;
Not such as idle poets dream,
Who trick thee up a heathen goddess
That a fantastic cap and rod has;
Such stale conceits are poor and silly;
I paint thee out, a Highland filly,
A sturdy, stubborn, handsome dapple,
As sleek’s a mouse, as round’s an apple,
That when thou pleasest canst do wonders;
But when thy luckless rider blunders,
Or if thy fancy should demur there,
Wilt break thy neck ere thou go further.
These things premised, I sing a Fox,
Was caught among his native rocks,
And to a dirty kennel chained,
How he his liberty regained.
Glenriddell! Whig without a stain,
A Whig in principle and grain,
Could’st thou enslave a free-born creature,
A native denizen of Nature?
How could’st thou, with a heart so good,
(A better ne’er was sluiced with blood!)
Nail a poor devil to a tree,
That ne’er did harm to thine or thee?
The staunchest Whig Glenriddell was,
Quite frantic in his country’s cause;
And oft was Reynard’s prison passing,
And with his brother-Whigs canvassing
The Rights of Men, the Powers of Women,
With all the dignity of Freemen.
Sir Reynard daily heard debates
Of Princes’, Kings’, and Nations’ fates,
With many rueful, bloody stories
Of Tyrants, Jacobites, and Tories:
From liberty how angels fell,
That now are galley-slaves in hell;
How Nimrod first the trade began
Of binding Slavery’s chains on Man;
How fell Semiramis—G—d d-mn her!
Did first, with sacrilegious hammer,
(All ills till then were trivial matters)
For Man dethron’d forge hen-peck fetters;
How Xerxes, that abandoned Tory,
Thought cutting throats was reaping glory,
Until the stubborn Whigs of Sparta
Taught him great Nature’s Magna Charta;
How mighty Rome her fiat hurl’d
Resistless o’er a bowing world,
And, kinder than they did desire,
Polish’d mankind with sword and fire;
With much, too tedious to relate,
Of ancient and of modern date,
But ending still, how Billy Pitt
(Unlucky boy!) with wicked wit,
Has gagg’d old Britain, drain’d her coffer,
As butchers bind and bleed a heifer,
Thus wily Reynard by degrees,
In kennel listening at his ease,
Suck’d in a mighty stock of knowledge,
As much as some folks at a College;
Knew Britain’s rights and constitution,
Her aggrandisement, diminution,
How fortune wrought us good from evil;
Let no man, then, despise the Devil,
As who should say, ‘I never can need him,’
Since we to scoundrels owe our freedom.
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Written by
Rudyard Kipling |
And reports the derelict Mary Pollock still at sea.
SHIPPING NEWS.
I was the staunchest of our fleet
Till the sea rose beneath our feet
Unheralded, in hatred past all measure.
Into his pits he stamped my crew,
Buffeted, blinded, bound and threw,
Bidding me eyeless wait upon his pleasure.
Man made me, and my will
Is to my maker still,
Whom now the currents con, the rollers steer --
Lifting forlorn to spy
Trailed smoke along the sky,
Falling afraid lest any keel come near!
Wrenched as the lips of thirst,
Wried, dried, and split and burst,
Bone-bleached my decks, wind-scoured to the graining;
And jarred at every roll
The gear that was my soul
Answers the anguish of my beams' complaining.
For life that crammed me full,
Gangs of the prying gull
That shriek and scrabble on the riven hatches!
For roar that dumbed the gale,
My hawse-pipes guttering wail,
Sobbing my heart out through the uncounted watches!
Blind in the hot blue ring
Through all my points I swing --
Swing and return to shift the sun anew.
Blind in my well-known sky
I hear the stars go by,
Mocking the prow that cannot hold one true!
White on my wasted path
Wave after wave in wrath
Frets 'gainst his fellow, warring where to send me.
Flung forward, heaved aside,
Witless and dazed I bide
The mercy of the comber that shall end me.
North where the bergs careen,
The spray of seas unseen
Smokes round my head and freezes in the falling;
South where the corals breed,
The footless, floating weed
Folds me and fouls me, strake on strake upcrawling.
I that was clean to run
My race against the sun --
Strength on the deep, am bawd to all disaster --
Whipped forth by night to meet
My sister's careless feet,
And with a kiss betray her to my master!
Man made me, and my will
Is to my maker still --
To him and his, our peoples at their pier:
Lifting in hope to spy
Trailed smoke along the sky,
Falling afraid lest any keel come near!
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