Songs and lyrics of Robert Burns

Chapter 61: MACPHERSON’S FAREWELL

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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.

MACPHERSON’S FAREWELL

Farewell, ye dungeons dark and strong,

The wretch’s destinie:

Macpherson’s time will not be long

On yonder gallows tree.

Sae rantingly, sae wantonly,

Sae dauntingly gaed he;

He played a spring and danced it round,

Below the gallows tree.

Oh, what is death but parting breath?

On mony a bloody plain

I’ve dared his face, and in this place

I scorn him yet again!

Untie these bands from off my hands,

And bring to me my sword,

And there’s no a man in all Scotland,

But I’ll brave him at a word.

I’ve lived a life of sturt and strife;

I die by treacherie:

It burns my heart I must depart

And not avengèd be.

Now farewell light, thou sunshine bright,

And all beneath the sky!

May coward shame distain his name,

The wretch that dares not die!

Sae rantingly, sae wantonly,

Sae dauntingly gaed he;

He played a spring and danced it round,

Below the gallows tree.