Poet of the Day

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Re: Poet of the Day

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I'm not talking about c&ping it to another place, just using the cursor to highlight it in the thread.
Children are like Slinkys - not much use for anything, but it always brings a smile to your face when you throw them down the stairs. Chinchilla
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Glasgow

Post by SRD »

Sing, poet, 'tis a merry world;
That cottage smoke is rolled and curled
In sport, that every moss
Is happy, every inch of soil: -
Before me runs a road of toil
With my grave cut across.
Sing, trailing showers and breezy downs -
I know the tragic hearts of towns.

City! I am true son of thine;
Ne'er dwelt I where great mornings shine
Around the bleating pens;
Ne'er by the rivulets I strayed,
And ne'er upon my childhood weighed
The silence of the glens.
Instead of shores where ocean beats
I hear the ebb and flow of streets.

Black Labor draws his weary waves
Into their secret moaning caves;
But, with the morning light,
That sea again will overflow
With a long, weary sound of woe,
Again to faint in night.
Wave am I in that sea of woes,
Which, night and morning, ebbs and flows.

I dwelt within a gloomy court,
Wherein did never sunbeam sport;
Yet there my heart was stirred -
My very blood did dance and thrill,
When on my narrow window-sill
Spring lighted like a bird.
Poor flowers! I watched them pine for weeks,
With leaves as pale as human cheeks.

Afar, one summer, I was borne;
Through golden vapors of the morn
I heard the hills of sheep:
I trod with a wild ecstasy
The bright fringe of the living sea:
And on a ruined keep
I sat, and watched an endless plain
Blacken beneath the gloom of rain.

Oh, fair the lightly-sprinkled waste,
O'er which a laughing shower has raced!
Oh, fair the April shoots!
Oh, fair the woods on summer days,
While a blue hyacinthine haze
Is dreaming round the roots!
In thee, O city! I discern
Another beaity, sad and strern.

Draw thy fierce streams of blinding ore,
Smite on a thousand anvils, roar
Down the harbor-bars;
Smoulder in smoky sunsets, flare
On rainy nights; with street and square
Lie empty to the stars.
From terrace proud to alley base
I know thee as my mother's face.

When sunset bathes thee in his gold,
In wreaths of bronze thy sides are rolled,
They smoke is dusky fire;
And, from the glory round thee poured,
A sunbeam like an angel's sword
Shivers upon a spire.
Thus have I watched thee, Terror! Dream!
While the blue night crept up the stream.

The wild train plunges in the hills,
He shrieks across the midnight rills;
Streams through the shifting glare,
The roar and flap of foundry fires,
That shake with light the sleeping shires;
And on the moorlands bare
He sees afar a crown of light
Hang o'er thee in the hollow night.

And through thy heart as through a dream,
Flows on that black disdainful stream;
All scornfully it flows,
Between the huddled gloom of masts,
Silent as pines unvexed by blasts -
'Tween lamps in streaming rows,
O wondrous sight! O stream of dread!
O long, dark river of the dead!

Afar, the banner of the year
Unfurls: but dimly prisoned here,
Tis only when I greet
A dropt rose lying in my way,
A butterfly that flutters gay
Athwart the noisy street,
I know the happy Summer smiles
Around thy suburbs, miles on miles.

'Twere neither pæan now, nor dirge,
The flash and thunder of the surge
On flat sands wide and bare;
No haunting joy or anguish dwells
In the green light of sunny dells,
Or in the starry air.
Alike to me the desert flower,
The rainbow laughing o'er the shower

While o'er thy walls the darkness sails,
I lean against the churchyard rails;
Up in the midnight towers
The belfried spire, the street is dead,
I hear in silence overhead
The clang of iron hours:
It moves me not - I know her tomb
Is yonder in the shapeless gloom.

All raptures of this mortal breath,
Solemnities of life and death,
Dwell in thy noise alone:
Of me thou hast become a part -
Some kindred with my human heart
Lives in thy streets of stone;
For we have been familiar more
Than galley-slave and weary oar.

The beech is dipped in wine; the shower
Is burnished; on the swinging flower
The latest bee doth sit.
The low sun stares through dust of gold.
And o'er the darkened heath and wold
The large ghost-moth doth flit.
In every orchard Autumn stands,
With apples in his golden hands.

But all these sights and sounds are strange;
Then wherefore from thee shoud I range?
Thou hast my kith and kin;
My childhood, youth, and manhood brave;
Thou hast that unforgotten grave
Within thy central din.
A sacredness of love and death
Dwells in thy noise and smoky breath.

Alexander Smith b 31st December 1830

Alexander Smith was a Scottish poet, and labelled as one of the Spasmodic School.
wiki wrote:He was born in a thatched house in Kilmarnock, in the Scottish Lowlands south-west of Glasgow, the first of several children. His father, John Smith, was a Lowlander who worked as a designer of lace, calico prints, paisley patterns, and muslins. His mother Christina Murray Smith was of Highland extraction and, together with a Highland servant girl, first introduced him to Gaelic songs and Scottish legends.

Being too poor to send him to college, his parents placed him in a linen factory in Glasgow to follow his father's trade of a pattern designer.

His early poems appeared in the Glasgow Citizen, in whose editor, James Hedderwick, he found a friend. A Life Drama and other Poems (1853) was a work of promise, ran through several editions, and gained Smith the appointment of secretary to Edinburgh University in 1854.

As a poet he was one of the leading representatives of what was called the "Spasmodic" School, now fallen into oblivion. Smith, P. J. Bailey and Sydney Dobell were satirized by W. E. Aytoun in 1854 in Firmilian: a Spasmodic Tragedy.

In the same year Sydney Dobell came to Edinburgh, and an acquaintanceship at once sprang up between the two, which resulted in their collaboration in a book of War Sonnets (1855), inspired by the Crimean War. He also published City Poems (1857) and Edwin of Northumbria Edwin of Deira (1861), a Northumbrian epic poem.

Although his early work A Life Drama was highly praised, his poetry was later less well thought of and he was ridiculed as being a Spasmodic. Smith turned his attention to prose, and published Dreamthorp: Essays written in the Country (1863) and A Summer in Skye (1865). He wrote two novels, Miss Dona M'Quarrie (18??), and his last work Alfred Hagart's Household (1866) which ran first through Good Words.

He died in Wardie, near Edinburgh.
A long poem today, there'll be plenty of time to read it tonight. My only excuses are that the poet is Scottish, the subject is Scottish and one doesn't hear of the Spasmodic school very often.
Children are like Slinkys - not much use for anything, but it always brings a smile to your face when you throw them down the stairs. Chinchilla
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Say not the Struggle Naught availeth

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Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke conceal'd,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!

Arthur Hugh Clough b 1st January 1819
wiki wrote:Arthur Hugh Clough was an English poet, the brother of suffragist Anne Clough (who ended up as principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, and assisted ground-breaking nurse Florence Nightingale).
www.poemhunter.com wrote:Arthur Hugh Clough's father was a Liverpool cotton merchant who emigrated with his family to America. In 1828 Clough was sent back to England to be educated. He attended Rugby school where he began a lifelong friendship with the headmaster's son, the future poet and critic Matthew Arnold. After Rugby he went to Oxford, and eventually became a fellow of Oriel College.

At this time Oxford dons were required to subscribe to the Thirty Nine Articles detailing the beliefs of the Church of England. Clough's religious doubts meant that he felt unable to do this, and he resigned his fellowship in 1848, the same year he published The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich. Following his resignation he became Head of University Hall, London, for a short while, and also lectured in America, before eventually taking up a post as an examiner for the Department of Education.

Clough's religious difficulties were part of his general dislike of the established political and religious establishment of his day. He hated the Victorian capitalist system, and regarded himself as a republican. His sensitivity to the limitations imposed by class barriers provides a recurrent theme in his poetry.

Although Clough's beliefs (or lack of them) prevented his professional career from developing, his poetic achievement is considerable. As well as Matthew Arnold, he counted literary figures such as Ruskin and Carlyle among his friends, and his marriage to Blanche Smith in 1854 brought him much happiness. He contracted Malaria on a visit to Italy in 1861 and died in Florence. Ten years later Arnold composed an elegy for him, entitled 'Thyrsis'.
Something optimistic for the new year.
Children are like Slinkys - not much use for anything, but it always brings a smile to your face when you throw them down the stairs. Chinchilla
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Excerpts from "Kensington Gardens"

Post by SRD »

SPEKE

THE children play
at hide and seek
about the monument
to Speke.
And why should the dead
explorer mind
who has nothing to seek
and nothing to find?

QUEEN VICTORIA

Queen Victoria's
statue is
the work of her
daughter Beatrice.
The shape's all wrong
and the crown don't fit,
But -- bless her old heart! --
she was proud of it.

TAIL-PIECE

"Out! All out!"
Harsh echoes blow
from far. With wandering steps
and slow
once again their
garden leave
little Adam,
little Eve.

Humbert Wolfe b 5th January 1885
wiki wrote:Humbert Wolfe CB CBE was an Italian-born English poet, man of letters and civil servant, from a Jewish family background, his father being a German Jew (Martin Wolff) and his mother an Italian Jew (Consuela, née Terraccini).

He was one of the most popular authors of the 1920s. He is now remembered for his epigram:

You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.
But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to.

He was also a translator of Heinrich Heine, Edmond Fleg (1874-1963) and Eugene Heltai. A Christian convert, he remained very aware of his Jewish heritage.

His career was in the Civil Service, beginning in the Board of Trade and then in the Ministry of Labour. By 1940 he had a position of high responsibility. His work was recognised with a CBE and then a CB.

Wolfe's verses have been set to music by a number of composers, including Gustav Holst in his 12 Humbert Wolfe Settings, Op. 48 (1929).

He had a long-term affair with the novelist Pamela Frankau, while remaining married.

He died on his 55th birthday.
He wrote some excellent war poetry too.
Children are like Slinkys - not much use for anything, but it always brings a smile to your face when you throw them down the stairs. Chinchilla
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Re: Poet of the Day

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I liked those.
Yes this is the real "Little John" (or it could be "colin")
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High Summer on the Mountains

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High summer on the mountains
And on the clover leas,
And on the local sidings,
And on the rhubarb leaves.

Brass bands in all the valleys
Blaring defiant tunes,
Crowds, acclaiming carnival,
Prize pigs and wooded spoons

Dust on shabby hedgerows
Behind the colliery wall,
Dust on rail and girder
And tram and prop and all.

High summer on the slag heaps
And on polluted streams,
And old men in the morning
Telling the town their dreams.

Idris Davies b 6th January 1905
Welsh Biography Online wrote:DAVIES , IDRIS ( 1905 - 1953 ), miner, schoolmaster and poet ; b. 6 Jan. 1905 at 16 Field Street , Rhymney, Mon. , the Welsh -speaking son of colliery winderman Evan Davies and his wife Elizabeth Ann .

After leaving the local school at the age of fourteen, for the next seven years he worked underground as a miner in the nearby Abertysswg and Rhymney Mardy Pits . After an accident in which he lost a finger at the coalface, and active participation in the General Strike of 1926 , he became unemployed and spent the next four years following what he used to call ‘the long and lonely self-tuition game’ . He then entered Loughborough Training College and Nottingham University to qualify as a teacher , and eight years later gained the University of London diploma in history. Between 1932 and 1947 he taught in London County Council primary schools and in schools evacuated from wartime London to Pytchley (Northants.) , Meesden (Herts.) , Treherbert (Glam.) and Llandysul (Cards.) . In 1947 he returned to his native Rhymney Valley to teach in a junior school at Cwmsyfiog , to read, broadcast , lecture and write until his death from cancer at 7 Victoria Road , Rhymney on Easter Monday, 6 Apr. 1953 . He was buried in Rhymney Public Cemetery .

During his lifetime four volumes of his poetry were published: Gwalia Deserta ( 1938 ), written at Rhymney ; The Angry Summer: a poem of 1926 ( 1943 ), which he wrote in three months at Meesden ; Tonypandy and other poems ( 1945 ), which he wrote during the short stay at Treherbert ; and Selected Poems ( 1953 ), chosen by T. S. Eliot , who thought that the poems of Idris Davies had a claim to permanence as ‘the best poetic document I know about a particular epoch in a particular place’ . His work in both English and Welsh reflected the idealism and protest of a people during a time of great economic, social and religious change; in particular the inception, growth and decay of the old iron and coal town of Rhymney, Mon.

After his death over two hundred of his manuscript poems and a short verse-play, together with the typescripts of his comprehensive wartime diaries, were deposited at the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth . Later, more of his unpublished poems and most of his prose — an unfinished novel, essays, lecture notes and some of his letters — were found. Some of this later material appeared posthumously in The Collected Poems of Idris Davies ( 1972 ); Idris Davies ( 1972 ), and Argo Record No. ZPL.1181: Idris Davies ( 1972 ).

His knowledge of poetry was immense, but he climbed on no bandwagon. He became the archetypal poet of the mining valleys of south Wales during the first half of the twentieth century.
A fine descriptive poem with a little sting in the tail, of course he is best known for the ballad Pete Seeger set to music and made famous by several rock/folk bands:

Bells of Rhymney

Oh what will you give me
Say the sad bells of Rhymney
Is there hope for the future,
Cry the bells of Merthyr
Who made the mine owner
Say the black bells of Rhondda
And robbed the miner
Cry the grim bells of Blaina

They will plunder willy-nilly
Cry the bells of Caerphilly
They have fangs , they have teeth
Say the loud bells of Neathe
Even God is uneasy
Say the moist bells of Swansea
And what will you give me
Say the sad bells of Rhymney

Put the vandals in court
Say the bells of Newport
All would be well if, if, if
Cry the green bells of Cardiff
Why so worried, sisters, why
Sang the silver bells of Wye
And what will you give me
Say the sad bells of Rhymney
Children are like Slinkys - not much use for anything, but it always brings a smile to your face when you throw them down the stairs. Chinchilla
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Re: Poet of the Day

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Brass bands in all the valleys
Blaring defiant tunes,
Crowds, acclaiming carnival,
Prize pigs and wooded spoons

Dust on shabby hedgerows
Behind the colliery wall,
Dust on rail and girder
And tram and prop and all.

High summer on the slag heaps
And on polluted streams,
And old men in the morning
Telling the town their dreams.
You've just reminded me. One of my dreams was about going along on a bus and seeing loads of people going along the road with herds of tiny black pigs.
Yes this is the real "Little John" (or it could be "colin")
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A melancholy lay

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Three turkeys fair their last have breathed,
And now this world forever leaved;
Their father and their mother too,
They sigh and weep as well as you.
Indeed the rats their bones have crunched,
Into eternity they're launched.
A direful death indeed they had,
As would drive any parent mad:
But she was more than usual calm,
She did not give a single damn.

Marjory Fleming b 15th January
wiki wrote:Marjorie Fleming (15 January 1803 – 19 December 1811) was a child writer and poet, born in Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland. She died of meningitis at the age of 8. Her complete written work is held by the National Library of Scotland. After spending some time in Edinburgh under the tutelage of her beloved cousin Isa Keith, Fleming returned to Kirkcaldy, where she contracted measles which later developed into the meningitis that killed her.

She is best remembered for a diary which she kept for the last eighteen months of her life. For fifty years following her death the diary remained unpublished, although she was rumoured to be the favorite poet of Sir Walter Scott. Fleming was allegedly related to Scott distantly on her mother's side. The two never referred to each other in their journals and the relationship was suggested by her 1863 editor Dr. John Brown.

Her diary was first published in 1858 by H. B. Farnie and was a great hit with Victorians. It was subsequently re-edited by Dr. Brown in 1863 and Lachlan Macbean in 1904 and 1928. However, these were severely truncated and re-worked versions of Fleming's diary, due to the nature of Fleming's writing style which used language seen in Victorian times as inappropriate for an eight-year-old to use, or indeed to be used at all in polite company. As a result, Fleming's writings were extensively edited during the Victorian and subsequent Edwardian periods and a complete and accurate edition was not published until 1935, over a century after Marjorie Fleming's death.

"Marjorie" is the spelling popularized by her later editors. "Marjory" is the spelling used by the Fleming family.
So bad it's damn near good, writing long before the great McGonagall - could she have been his muse?
Children are like Slinkys - not much use for anything, but it always brings a smile to your face when you throw them down the stairs. Chinchilla
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Re: Poet of the Day

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Interesting rhyme - calm and damn.
Yes this is the real "Little John" (or it could be "colin")
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Re: Poet of the Day

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Say it with a North British dialect.
Children are like Slinkys - not much use for anything, but it always brings a smile to your face when you throw them down the stairs. Chinchilla
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A Domestic Tragedy

Post by SRD »

Clorinda met me on the way
As I came from the train;
Her face was anything but gay,
In fact, suggested pain.
"Oh hubby, hubby dear!" she cried,
"I've awful news to tell. . . ."
"What is it, darling?" I replied;
"Your mother -- is she well?"

"Oh no! oh no! it is not that,
It's something else," she wailed,
My heart was beating pit-a-pat,
My ruddy visage paled.
Like lightning flash in heaven's dome
The fear within me woke:
"Don't say," I cried, "our little home
Has all gone up in smoke!"

She shook her head. Oh, swift I clasped
And held her to my breast;
"The children! Tell me quick," I gasped,
"Believe me, it is best."
Then, then she spoke; 'mid sobs I caught
These words of woe divine:
"It's coo-coo-cook has gone and bought
A new hat just like mine."

Robert William Service b 16th January 1874
wiki wrote:Robert William Service was a poet and writer, sometimes referred to as "the Bard of the Yukon". He is best-known for his writings on the Canadian North, including the poems "The Shooting of Dan McGrew", "The Spell of the Yukon", and "The Cremation of Sam McGee". His writing was so expressive that his readers took him for a hard-bitten old Klondike prospector, not the later-arriving bank clerk he actually was.

Service was born into a Scottish family while they were living in Preston, England. He was schooled in Scotland, attending Hillhead High School in Glasgow. He moved to Canada at the age of 21, quitting his job working in a Glasgow bank, and travelled to Vancouver Island, British Columbia with his Buffalo Bill outfit and dreams of becoming a cowboy. He drifted around western North America, taking and quitting a series of jobs. Hired by the Canadian Bank of Commerce for eight years, he worked in a number of its branches before being posted to the branch in Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory in 1904, six years after the Klondike Gold Rush. Inspired by the vast beauty of the Yukon wilderness, Service began writing poetry about the things he saw. Conversations with locals led him to write about things he had not seen, many of which had not actually happened, as well. He did not set foot in Dawson City until 1908, arriving in the Klondike ten years after the Gold Rush, but his renown as a writer was already established.

Service married Germaine Bougeoin, a Parisian, and they purchased a summer home in the Brittany region of France. Thirteen years younger, she lived 31 years following Service's death, dying at age 102 in 1989. At the outbreak of World War II, Service was present during the German invasion of Poland. He fled the country, returning to North America. He remained in Hollywood until the war's end. He then returned to his home in Brittany, where he lived until his death in 1958, though he wintered in Monte Carlo and the French Riviera.
A short poem as his great works are rather long. I think his work is highly entertaining and not for nothing is he known as the Kipling of the Klondike.
Children are like Slinkys - not much use for anything, but it always brings a smile to your face when you throw them down the stairs. Chinchilla
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Re: Poet of the Day

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See, that's the thing about hats.
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A Pleasant Invective Against Printing

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The Press is too much with us, small and great:
We are undone of chatter and on dit,
Report, retort, rejoinder, repartee,
Mole-hill and mare's nest, fiction up-to-date,
Babble of booklets, bicker of debate,
Aspect of A., and attitude of B.—
A waste of words that drive us like a sea,
Mere derelict of Ourselves, and helpless freight!

"O for a lodge in some vast wilderness!"
Some region unapproachable of Print,
Where never cablegram could gain access,
And telephones were not, nor any hint
Of tidings new or old, but Man might pipe
His soul to Nature,— careless of the Type!

Henry Austin Dobson b 18th January 1840

Henry Austin Dobson (January 18, 1840 – September 2, 1921), commonly Austin Dobson, was an English poet and essayist.
poemhunter.com wrote:His official career was uneventful, but as a poet and biographer he was distinguished. Those who study his work are struck by its maturity. It was about 1864 that he turned his attention to writing original prose and verse, and some of his earliest work was his best. It was not until 1868 that the appearance of St Paul's, a magazine edited by Anthony Trollope, gave Harry Dobson an opportunity and an audience; and during the next six years he contributed some of his favourite poems, including "Tu Quoque," "A Gentleman of the Old School," "A Dialogue from Plato," and "Une Marquise." Many of his poems in their original form were illustrated—some, indeed, were written to support illustrations.

After 1885 Dobson was engaged mainly in critical and biographical prose, by which he added considerably to the general knowledge of his favourite 18th century. His biographies of Henry Fielding (1883), Thomas Bewick (1884), Richard Steele (1886), Oliver Goldsmith (1888), Horace Walpole (1890) and William Hogarth (1879-1891-1897-1902-1907) are studies marked alike by assiduous research, sympathetic presentation and sound criticism. In Four Frenchwomen (1890), in the three series of Eighteenth-Century Vignettes (1892-1894-1896), and in The Paladin of Philanthropy (1899), which contain unquestionably his most delicate prose work, the accurate detail of each study is relieved by a charm of expression which could only be attained by a poet. In 1901 he collected his hitherto unpublished poems in a volume entitled Carmina Votiva.

In 2005 the Industrial/Nu metal band, Industrial Frost, recorded a song called Before Sedan . The lyrics were a Dobson Poem of the same Name, a poem depicting mourning for casualties in the English-French war, and the absurdity involved with war death tolls.
I like his work, it has a simplicity and an elegance that make it engaging and, although he can be a little twee (he was a Victorian after all) there is a humour in it and sometimes a sting in the tail. A fine example to budding poets and a pleasant way to while away a few minutes.
Children are like Slinkys - not much use for anything, but it always brings a smile to your face when you throw them down the stairs. Chinchilla
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Robert Bruce's March To Bannockburn

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Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to Victorie!

Now's the day, and now's the hour;
See the front o' battle lour;
See approach proud Edward's power-
Chains and Slaverie!

Wha will be a traitor knave?
Wha can fill a coward's grave?
Wha sae base as be a Slave?
Let him turn and flee!

Wha, for Scotland's King and Law,
Freedom's sword will strongly draw,
Free-man stand, or Free-man fa',
Let him on wi' me!

By Oppression's woes and pains!
By your Sons in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free!

Lay the proud Usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty's in every blow!-
Let us Do or Die!

Robert Burns b 25th January 1759
wiki wrote:Robert Burns (also known as Rabbie Burns, Scotland's favourite son, the Ploughman Poet, Robden of Solway Firth, the Bard of Ayrshire and in Scotland as simply The Bard) was a Scottish poet and a lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is also in English and a "light" Scots dialect, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these his political or civil commentary is often at its most blunt.
Who else could I have chosen for today? I like his songs the best but they make poor reading so I thought I'd go for something with a swing to it.
Children are like Slinkys - not much use for anything, but it always brings a smile to your face when you throw them down the stairs. Chinchilla
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Re: Poet of the Day

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Dont know why you had to pick a Burns poem. Today of all days.
Yes this is the real "Little John" (or it could be "colin")
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