Robert Burns

On Glenriddell’s Fox Breaking His Chain

Thou, Liberty, thou art my theme;
Not such as idle poets dream,
Who trick thee up a heathen goddess
That a fantastic cap and rod has:
Such stale conceits are poor and silly:
I paint thee out a highland filly,
A sturdy, stubborn, handsome dapple,
As sleek’s a mouse, as round’s an apple;
Who when thou pleasest can do wonders;
But, when thy luckless rider blunders,
Or if thy fancy should demur there,
Wilt break thy neck ere thou go further.

These things premised, I sing a Fox,
Was caught among his native rocks,
And to a dirty kennel chained, –
How he his liberty regained.

Glenriddell, whig without a stain,
A whig in principle and grain,
Couldst thou enslave a free-born creature,
A native denizen of Nature?
How couldst thou with a heart so good
(A better ne’er was sluiced with blood!)
Nail a poor devil to a tree
That ne’er did harm to thine or thee?

The staunchest whig, Glenriddell was
Quite frantic in his country’s cause;
And oft was Reynard’s prison passing,
And with his brother-whigs canvassing
The rights of men, the powers of women,
With all the dignity of freemen.

Sir Reynard daily heard debates
Of princes’, kings’, and Nations’ fates,
With many rueful bloody stories
Of tyrants, Jacobites, and tories:
From liberty how angels fell,
And now are galley-slaves in hell;
How Nimrod first the trade began
Of binding slavery’s chain on man;
How fell Semiramis (God damn her!)
Did first with sacrilegious hammer
(All ills till then were trivial matters)
For man dethroned forge ‘hen-peck’ fetters;
How Xerxes, that abandoned tory,
Thought cutting throats was reaping glory,
Until the stubborn whigs of Sparta
Taught him great Nature’s Magna Charta;
How mighty Rome her fiat hurled
Resistless o’er a bowing world,
And, kinder than they did desire,
Polished mankind with sword and fire;
With much, too tedious to relate,
Of ancient and of modern date,
But ending still how Billy Pitt,
Unlucky boy! with wicked wit,
Has gagged old Britain, drained her coffer,
As butchers bind and bleed a heifer.

Thus wily Reynard by degrees,
In kennel listening at his ease,
Sucked in a mighty stock of knowledge,
As much as some folk at a College;
Knew Britain’s rights and constitution,
Her aggrandisement, diminution;
How fortune wrought us good from evil:
Let no man then despise the Devil,
As who should say ‘I ne’er can need him,’ –
Since we to scoundrels owe our freedom.

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