Dear Editor:
While reading Robbie Burns’ poems in preparation for Robbie Burns Day on Jan. 25, I came across the poem A Prayer, Under the Pressure of violent Anguish, which fits our present moment even though it was written in 1781, 241 years ago.
Burns commented on the poem three years after writing it, “There was a certain period of my life that my spirit was broke by repeated losses and disasters … My body too was attacked by that most dreadful distemper, a confirmed melancholy: in this wretched state, the recollection of which makes me yet shudder, I hung my harp on the willow tree, except in some lucid intervals, in which I composed the following.”
Here is the poem (I have made one change to deal with some gendered language):
O Thou Great Being! what Thou art,
Surpasses me to know:
Yet sure I am, that known to Thee
Are all Thy works below.
Thy creature here before Thee stands,
All wretched and distrest;
Yet sure those ills that wring my soul
Obey Thy high behest.
Sure Thou, Almighty, canst not act
From cruelty or wrath!
O, free my weary eyes from tears,
Or close them fast in death!
But if I must afflicted be,
To suit some wise design;
Then [strengthen] my soul with firm resolves
To bear and not repine!
In this time of COVID and Omicron, we echo Burns’ prayer, that we would be strengthened to bear the burden and without anxiety and fear.
Peter Bush,
Fergus