WHEN I think of the weary nights and days Of poor, hard-working folk, always I see, with his head on his bosom bowed, The luckless shoemaker, Sandy Macleod. Jeering school-boys used to say His chimney would never be raked away By the moon, and you by a jest so rough May know that his cabin was low enough. Nothing throve with him; his colt and cow Got their living, he did n't know how, -- Yokes on their scraggy necks swinging about, Beating and bruising them year in and out. Out at the elbow he used to go, -- Alas for him that he did not know The way to make poverty regal, -- not he, If such way under the sun there be. Sundays all day in the door he sat, A string of withered-up crape on his hat, The crown half fallen against his head, And half sewed in with a shoemaker's thread. Sometimes with his hard and toil-worn hand He would smooth and straighten th' faded band, Thinking perhaps of a little mound Black with nettles the long year round. Blacksmith and carpenter, both were poor, And there was the school-master who, to be sure, Had seen rough weather, but after all When they met Sandy he went to the wall. His wife was a lady, they used to say, Repenting at leisure her wedding day, And that she was come of a race too proud E'er to have mated with Sandy Macleod! So fretting she sat from December to June, While Sandy, poor soul, to a funeral tune Would beat out his hard, heavy leather, until He set himself up, and got strength to be still. It was not the full moon that made it so light In the poor little dwelling of Sandy one night, It was not the candles all shining around, -- Ah, no! 't was the light of the day he had found. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE TEMPTRESS by JAMES WELDON JOHNSON ROAST LEVIATHAN by LOUIS UNTERMEYER DEATH'S JEST-BOOK: SIBYLLA'S DIRGE by THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES GOD'S GARDEN by RICHARD EUGENE BURTON THE FACTORY; 'TIS AN ACCURSED THING! by LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON |