Читать книгу The Complete Works - Robert Burns - Страница 50

[These verses the poet, in his common-place book, calls “Misgivings in the Hour of Despondency and Prospect of Death.” He elsewhere says they were composed when fainting-fits and other alarming symptoms of a pleurisy, or some other dangerous disorder, first put nature on the alarm.]

Why am I loth to leave this earthly scene?

How I so found it full of pleasing charms?

Some drops of joy with draughts of ill between:

Some gleams of sunshine ‘mid renewing storms:

Is it departing pangs my soul alarms? Or Death’s unlovely, dreary, dark abode? For guilt, for guilt, my terrors are in arms; I tremble to approach an angry God, And justly smart beneath his sin-avenging rod.

Fain would I say, “Forgive my foul offence!”

Fain promise never more to disobey;

But, should my Author health again dispense,

Again I might desert fair virtue’s way:

Again in folly’s path might go astray;

Again exalt the brute and sink the man;

Then how should I for heavenly mercy pray,

Who act so counter heavenly mercy’s plan?

Who sin so oft have mourn’d, yet to temptation ran?

O Thou, great Governor of all below!

If I may dare a lifted eye to Thee,

Thy nod can make the tempest cease to blow,

Or still the tumult of the raging sea:

With that controlling pow’r assist ev’n me

Those headlong furious passions to confine;

For all unfit I feel my pow’rs to be,

To rule their torrent in th’ allowed line;

O, aid me with Thy help, Omnipotence Divine!