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Poems and Songs of Robert Burns

Chapter 224: Raving Winds Around Her Blowing
By Robert Burns
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About This Book

The collection assembles lyrical songs, narrative poems, satirical pieces, epistles, epitaphs, and fragments that shift between convivial drinking verses, tender laments, and comic storytelling. Many lyrics were shaped to traditional airs and preserve vernacular speech, while longer works portray rural labor, domestic scenes, and compassionate encounters with animals. Satire targets religious hypocrisy and social pretension, and several poems take a direct, personal tone of moral reflection or affectionate address. The selections alternate moods and forms, emphasizing melodic phrasing and a versatile technical range.

Raving Winds Around Her Blowing

Tune—“M’Grigor of Roro’s Lament.”

I composed these verses on Miss Isabella M’Leod of Raza, alluding to her feelings on the death of her sister, and the still more melancholy death of her sister’s husband, the late Earl of Loudoun, who shot himself out of sheer heart-break at some mortifications he suffered, owing to the deranged state of his finances.—R.B., 1971.

Raving winds around her blowing, Yellow leaves the woodlands strowing, By a river hoarsely roaring, Isabella stray’d deploring— “Farewell, hours that late did measure Sunshine days of joy and pleasure; Hail, thou gloomy night of sorrow, Cheerless night that knows no morrow! “O’er the past too fondly wandering, On the hopeless future pondering; Chilly grief my life-blood freezes, Fell despair my fancy seizes. “Life, thou soul of every blessing, Load to misery most distressing, Gladly how would I resign thee, And to dark oblivion join thee!”