=Discussion.= 1. Where did the poet find “the trailing spring flower”? 2. Have you found it? Where? When? 3. What beautiful thought came to the poet while he bent over the arbutus? 4. Have you known lowly lives that made the earth happier by their presence? 5. The poet _found_ the lowly flower that lends “sweetness to the ungenial day”; can we find the lowly person who “makes the earth happier”? 6. What does Nature teach through the lowly trailing arbutus? 7. What other selections by this author have you read?
bitter East, 60, 2 glad surprise, 60, 9 clogged, and pent, 60, 14 ungenial day, 60, 17
Wee, modest, crimson-tippèd flow’r, Thou’s met me in an evil hour; For I maun[1] I crush amang the stoure[2] Thy slender stem. To spare thee now is past my pow’r, Thou bonnie[3] gem.
Alas! it’s no thy neebor sweet, The bonnie Lark, companion meet, Bending thee ’mang the dewy weet,[4] Wi’ speckl’d breast! When upward-springing, blythe, to greet The purpling east.
Cauld blew the bitter-biting north Upon thy early, humble birth; Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth Amid the storm, Scarce rear’d above the parent-earth Thy tender form.
The flaunting flow’rs our gardens yield, High shelt’ring woods and wa’s[5] maun shield. But thou, beneath the random bield[6] O’ clod or stane, Adorns the histie[7] stibble[8]-field, Unseen, alane.
There, in thy scanty mantle clad, Thy snawie bosom sunward spread, Thou lifts thy unassuming head In humble guise; But now the share uptears thy bed, And low thou lies!
Such is the fate of simple Bard, On life’s rough ocean luckless starr’d! Unskillful he to note the card[9] Of prudent lore, Till billows rage, and gales blow hard, And whelm him o’er!
Such fate to suffering worth is giv’n, Who long with wants and woes has striv’n, By human pride or cunning driv’n To mis’ry’s brink, Till wrench’d of ev’ry stay but Heav’n, He, ruin’d, sink!
Ev’n thou who mourn’st the Daisy’s fate, That fate is thine—no distant date; Stern Ruin’s plowshare drives, elate, Full on thy bloom, Till crush’d beneath the furrow’s weight Shall be thy doom!
=Biography.= Robert Burns (1759-1796) was a Scottish poet, whose home was near Ayr, in Scotland. His life was short and filled with poverty and hardship, but he saw beauty in the common things of life and had a heart full of sympathy. He wrote this poem at a time when he was in great trouble. His farm was turning out badly, the soil was sour and wet, his crops were failures, and he saw nothing but ruin before him. Burns’s tenderness and sympathy are shown in the feeling expressed in this poem at crushing the flower.