My toil-beat nerves and tear-worn eye
60 Keep watchings with the nightly thief:
Or, if I slumber, Fancy, chief,
Reigns, haggard-wild, in sore affright:
Ev’n day, all-bitter, brings relief
From such a horror-breathing night.
65 O! thou bright Queen, who, o’er th’ expanse
Now highest reign’st, with boundless sway!
Oft has thy silent-marking glance
Observ’d us, fondly-wand’ring, stray!
The time, unheeded, sped away,
70 While Love’s luxurious pulse beat high,
Beneath thy silver-gleaming ray,
To mark the mutual-kindling eye.
Oh! scenes in strong remembrance set!
Scenes, never, never to return!
75 Scenes if in stupor I forget,
Again I feel, again I burn!
From ev’ry joy and pleasure torn,
Life’s weary vale I wander thro’;
And hopeless, comfortless, I’ll mourn
80 A faithless woman’s broken vow!
Written in the rhyming format of Ramsay’s Ever-Green, this expresses the poet’s deep anguish at the forced break-up of his relationship with Jean Armour. He informed Dr Moore, after causing a stir among the Ayrshire clergy by circulating a copy of Holy Willie’s Prayer, that:
Unluckily for me, my idle wanderings led me, on another side, point-blank within the reach of their heaviest metal. – This is the unfortunate story alluded to in my printed poem, The Lament.’ Twas a shocking affair, which I cannot bear yet to recollect; and had very nearly given [me] one or two of the principal qualifications for a place among those who have lost the chart and mistake the reckoning of Rationality. – I gave up my part of the farm to my brother … (Letter 125)
Burns told Mrs Dunlop of his vexation at Jean being taken away by her family and their ‘detestation of my guilt of being a poor devil, not only forbade me her company & their house, but on my rumoured West Indian voyage, got a warrant to incarcerate me in jail till I should find security in my about-to-be Paternal relation’ (Letter 254). The closing line would suggest that Burns blamed Jean Armour as ‘faithless’ to him, although she was as much the victim of her parents’ extreme action as Burns.
Kinsley notes two minor influences from Blair’s poem The Grave and Goldsmith’s popular The Deserted Village (Vol. III, no. 93, p. 1174). The poem could easily be mistaken for an early work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, given lines such as ‘… I nightly vigils keep,/ Beneath thy wan, unwarming beam; /And mourn, in lamentation deep, /How life and love are all a dream!’ It is an arguably underrated English poem.
Despondency: An Ode
First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
Oppress’d with grief, oppress’d with care,
A burden more than I can bear,
I set me down and sigh;
O Life! Thou art a galling load,
5 Along a rough, a weary road,
To wretches such as I!
Dim-backward, as I cast my view,
What sick’ning Scenes appear!
What Sorrows yet may pierce me thro’,
10 Too justly I may fear!
Still caring, despairing,
Must be my bitter doom;
My woes here shall close ne’er
But with the closing tomb!
15 Happy ye sons of Busy-life,
Who, equal to the bustling strife,
No other view regard!
Ev’n when the wishèd end’s denied,
Yet while the busy means are plied,
20 They bring their own reward:
Whilst I, a hope-abandoned wight,
Unfitted with an aim,
Meet ev’ry sad returning night
And joyless morn the same.
25 You, bustling and justling,
Forget each grief and pain;
I, listless yet restless,
Find ev’ry prospect vain.
How blest the Solitary’s lot,
30 Who, all-forgetting, all-forgot,
Within his humble cell —
The cavern, wild with tangling roots —
Sits o’er his newly-gather’d fruits,
Beside his crystal well!
35 Or haply to his ev’ning thought,
By unfrequented stream,
The ways of men are distant brought,
A faint-collected dream:
While praising, and raising
40 His thoughts to Heav’n on high,
As wand’ring, meand’ring,
He views the solemn sky.
Than I, no lonely Hermit plac’d
Where never human footstep trac’d,
45 Less fit to play the part;
The lucky moment to improve,
And just to stop, and just to move,
With self-respecting art:
But ah! those pleasures, Loves, and Joys,
50 Which I too keenly taste,
The Solitary can despise,
Can want and yet be blest!
He needs not, he heeds not
Or human love or hate;
55 Whilst I here, must cry here
At perfidy ingrate!
O enviable early days,
When dancing thoughtless Pleasure’s maze,
To Care, to Guilt unknown!
60 How ill exchang’d for riper times,
To feel the follies or the crimes
Of others, or my own!
Ye tiny elves that guiltless sport,
Like linnets in the bush,
65 Ye little know the ills ye court,
When Manhood is your wish!
The losses, the crosses
That active man engage;
The fears all, the tears all
70 Of dim declining Age!
While this poem can be dated to the time of his estrangement from Jean Armour (see The Lament), it is also symptomatic of the bouts of depression, which, as their external causes increased, plagued his adult life. With masochistic logic he defines himself as a chronically displaced person with neither the