About This Book
A collected selection of the poet's songs and shorter lyrics presents his explorations of love, nature, rural Scottish life, patriotism, and social observation, often rendered in Scots dialect and intended for musical performance. The volume groups brief pieces alongside several longer poems, supplies a glossary of dialect terms and an index of first lines, and includes illustrative plates. Many lyrics evoke landscapes, domestic scenes, and communal gatherings, balancing tenderness and satire while varying tone from celebratory to elegiac. The arrangement favors lyrical vitality rather than strict chronology, offering readers both popular airs and more extended narrative poems within a single accessible anthology.
Again rejoicing nature sees
Her robe assume its vernal hues,
Her leafy locks wave in the breeze,
All freshly steep’d in morning dews.
And maun I still on Menie doat,
And bear the scorn that’s in her e’e?
For it’s jet, jet black, an’ it’s like a hawk,
An’ it winna let a body be!
In vain to me the cowslips blaw,
In vain to me the violets spring;
In vain to me, in glen or shaw,
The mavis and the lintwhite sing.
The merry ploughboy cheers his team,
Wi’ joy the tentie seedsman stalks,
But life to me’s a weary dream,
A dream of ane that never wauks.
The wanton coot the water skims,
Amang the reeds the ducklings cry,
The stately swan majestic swims,
And every thing is blest but I.
The shepherd steeks his faulding slap,
And owre the moorlands whistles shrill,
Wi’ wild, unequal, wand’ring step
I meet him on the dewy hill.
And when the lark, ’tween light and dark,
Blythe waukens by the daisy’s side,
And mounts and sings on flittering wings,
A woe-worn ghaist I hameward glide.
Come, Winter, with thine angry howl,
And raging bend the naked tree;
Thy gloom will soothe my cheerless soul,
When Nature all is sad like me!
And maun I still on Menie doat,
And bear the scorn that’s in her e’e?
For it’s jet, jet black, an’ it’s like a hawk,
An’ it winna let a body be!