O ye whose cheek the tear of pity stains,Draw near with pious rev’rence, and attend!Here lie the loving husband’s dear remains,The tender father, and the gen’rous friend;The pitying heart that felt for human woe,The dauntless heart that fear’d no human pride;The friend of man—to vice alone a foe;For “ev’n his failings lean’d to virtue’s side.”
Robert Burns · Epitaph on My Ever Honoured Father
Comfort & remembrance
“O ye whose cheek the tear of pity stains,”
- Author
- Robert Burns
- Work
- Epitaph on My Ever Honoured Father
- Found in
- Poems and Songs of Robert Burns
- Year
- 1786
- Length
- 62 words
- Source
- Project Gutenberg eBook #1279
Public domain. This passage is in the public domain. Robert Burns died in 1796, more than 70 years ago, and the work was first published in 1786. You can copy, print, read aloud or sell it without asking permission; a credit is kind but not required. The text is copied word for word from the Project Gutenberg edition linked here.
About this text. Burns wrote this after his father, William Burnes, died in 1784, and printed it in his first book (Kilmarnock, 1786); it is carved on his father’s gravestone at Alloway. The last line is quoted from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, as Burns noted himself.
Related passages
They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.I wept as I remember’d how often you and IHad tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.
Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
Who fed me from her gentle breast,And hushed me in her arms to rest,And on my cheek sweet kisses prest?My mother.When sleep forsook my open eye,Who was it sung sweet hushaby,And rocked me that I should not cry?My mother.Who sat and watched my infant headWhen sleeping on my cradle bed,And tears of sweet affection shed?My mother.
Hundreds of stars in the pretty sky;Hundreds of shells on the shore together;Hundreds of birds that go singing by;Hundreds of bees in the sunny weather.Hundreds of dewdrops to greet the dawn;Hundreds of lambs in the purple clover;Hundreds of butterflies on the lawn;But only one mother the wide world over.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.
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