Читать книгу The Journey Home - Fiona Hood-Stewart, Fiona Hood-Stewart - Страница 5

Mourn, hapless Caledonia, mourn

Thy banished peace, thy laurels torn.

Thy sons, for valor long renowned,

Lie slaughtered on their native ground;

Thy hospitable roofs no more

Invite the stranger to the door;

In smoky ruins sunk they lie,

The monuments of cruelty.

The wretched owner sees, afar,

His all become the prey of war;

Bethinks him of his babes and wife,

Then smites his breast, and curses life.

Thy swains are famished on the rocks,

Where once they fed their wanton flocks:

Thy ravished virgins shriek in vain;

Thy infants perish on the plain.

What boots it, then, in every clime,

Through the wide spreading waste of time,

Thy martial glory, crowned with praise,

Still shone with undiminished blaze?

Thy towering spirit now is broke,

Thy neck is bended to the yoke:

What foreign arms could never quell,

By civil rage and rancor fell.

The rural pipe and merry lay

No more shall cheer the happy day:

No social scenes of gay delight

Beguile the dreary winter night:

No strains, but those of sorrow, flow,

And nought be heard but sounds of woe,

While the pale phantoms of the slain

Glide nightly o’er the silent plain.

O baneful cause, oh, fatal morn,

Accursed to ages yet unborn.

The sons against their fathers stood;

The parent shed his children’s blood.

Yet, when the rage of battle ceased,

The victor’s soul was not appeased:

The naked and forlorn must feel

Devouring flames, and murdering steel.

The pious mother doomed to death,

Forsaken, wanders o’er the heath,

The bleak wind whistles round her head,

Her helpless orphans cry for bread,

Bereft of shelter, food, and friend,

She views the shades of night descend,

And, stretched beneath the inclement skies,

Weeps o’er her tender babes, and dies.

Whilst the warm blood bedews my veins,

And unimpaired remembrance reigns,

Resentment of my country’s fate

Within my filial breast shall beat;

And, spite of her insulting foe,

My sympathizing verse shall flow,

“Mourn, hapless Caledonia, mourn

Thy banished peace, thy laurels torn.”

—Tobias Smollett, 1746

This poem was written by the poet and satirist Tobias Smollett shortly after the Battle of Culloden, and expresses Scottish rage at the treatment of the vanquished Jacobites.