Epistle from Esopus to Maria by Robert Burns

From those drear solitudes and frowsy cells, / Where Infamy with sad Repentance dwells; / Where turnkeys make the jealous portal fast, / And deal from iron hands the spare repast; / Where truant 'prentices, yet young in sin, / Blush at the curious stranger peeping in; / Where strumpets, relics of the drunken roar, / Resolve to drink, nay, half, to whore, no more; / Where tiny thieves not destin'd yet to swing, / Beat hemp for others, riper for the string: / From these dire scenes my wretched lines I date, / To tell Maria her Esopus' fate.

"Alas! I feel I am no actor here! " / 'Tis real hangmen real scourges bear! / Prepare Maria, for a horrid tale / Will turn thy very rouge to deadly pale; / Will make thy hair, tho' erst from gipsy poll'd, / By barber woven, and by barber sold, / Though twisted smooth with Harry's nicest care, / Like hoary bristles to erect and stare. / The hero of the mimic scene, no more / I start in Hamlet, in Othello roar; / Or, haughty Chieftain, 'mid the din of arms / In Highland Bonnet, woo Malvina's charms; / While sans-culottes stoop up the mountain high, / And steal from me Maria's prying eye. / Blest Highland bonnet! once my proudest dress, / Now prouder still, Maria's temples press; / I see her wave thy towering plumes afar, / And call each coxcomb to the wordy war: / I see her face the first of Ireland's sons, / And even out-Irish his Hibernian bronze; / The crafty Colonel leaves the tartan'd lines, / For other wars, where he a hero shines: / The hopeful youth, in Scottish senate bred, / Who owns a Bushby's heart without the head, / Comes 'mid a string of coxcombs, to display / That veni, vidi, vici, is his way: / The shrinking Bard adown the alley skulks, / And dreads a meeting worse than Woolwich hulks: / Though there, his heresies in Church and State / Might well award him Muir and Palmer's fate: / Still she undaunted reels and rattles on, / And dares the public like a noontide sun. / What scandal called Maria's jaunty stagger / The ricket reeling of a crooked swagger? / Whose spleen (e'en worse than Burns' venom, when / He dips in gall unmix'd his eager pen, / And pours his vengeance in the burning line,)- / Who christen'd thus Maria's lyre-divine / The idiot strum of Vanity bemus'd, / And even the abuse of Poesy abus'd? - / Who called her verse a Parish Workhouse, made / For motley foundling Fancies, stolen or strayed?