Explore "Ode on the Departed Regency Bill" by Robert Burns on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
(March, 1789)
Daughter of Chaos' doting years, / Nurse of ten thousand hopes and fears, / Whether thy airy, insubstantial shade / (The rights of sepulture now duly paid) / Spread abroad its hideous form / On the roaring civil storm, / Deafening din and warring rage / Factions wild with factions wage; / Or under-ground, deep-sunk, profound, / Among the demons of the earth, / With groans that make the mountains shake, / Thou mourn thy ill-starr'd, blighted birth; / Or in the uncreated Void, / Where seeds of future being fight, / With lessen'd step thou wander wide, / To greet thy Mother-Ancient Night. / And as each jarring, monster-mass is past, / Fond recollect what once thou wast: / In manner due, beneath this sacred oak, / Hear, Spirit, hear! thy presence I invoke! / By a Monarch's heaven-struck fate, / By a disunited State, / By a generous Prince's wrongs. / By a Senate's strife of tongues, / By a Premier's sullen pride, / Louring on the changing tide; / By dread Thurlow's powers to awe / Rhetoric, blasphemy and law; / By the turbulent ocean- / A Nation's commotion, / By the harlot-caresses / Of borough addresses, / By days few and evil, / (Thy portion, poor devil! ) / By Power, Wealth, and Show, / (The Gods by men adored,) / By nameless Poverty, / (Their hell abhorred,) / By all they hope, by all they fear, / Hear! and appear!