Lapas attēli
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Poems Written in 1817

Continued

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Which rends our Mother's bosom - Priestly Pest!

Masked Resurrection of a buried Form!

II.

Thy country's curse is on thee! Justice sold, Truth trampled, Nature's landmarks overthrown,

And heaps of fraud-accumulated gold,

Plead, loud as thunder, at Destruction's throne.

III.

And, whilst that sure slow Angel which aye stands

Watching the beck of Mutability

Delays to execute her high commands,

And, though a nation weeps, spares thine

and thee,

IV.

O let a father's curse be on thy soul,

And let a daughter's hope be on thy tomb;

Be both, on thy gray head, a leaden cowl

To weigh thee down to thine approaching doom!

V.

I curse thee by a parent's outraged love,

By hopes long cherished and too lately lost,

By gentle feelings thou couldst never prove,

By griefs which thy stern nature never crost;

VI.

By those infantine smiles of happy light,

Which were a fire within a stranger's hearth, Quenched even when kindled, in untimely night, Hiding the promise of a lovely birth;

VII.

By those unpractised accents of young speech, Which he who is a father thought to frame To gentlest lore, such as the wisest teachThou strike the lyre of mind! O grief and shame!

VIII.

By all the happy see in children's growthThat undeveloped flower of budding

years

Sweetness and sadness interwoven both,

Source of the sweetest hopes and saddest fears

IX.

By all the days under an hireling's care,

Of dull constraint and bitter heaviness,—

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