The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. / With a New Life of the Poet, and Notices, Critical and Biographical by Allan Cunningham

by Robert Burns; Allan Cunningham

TO MARY CAMPBELL.

[“In my very early years,” says Burns to Thomson “when I was thinking of going to the West Indies, I took the following farewell of a dear girl. You must know that all my earlier love-songs were the breathings of ardent passion, and though it might have been easy in after times to have given them a polish, yet that polish, to me, would have defaced the legend of my heart, so faithfully inscribed on them. Their uncouth simplicity was, as they say of wines, their race.” The heroine of this early composition was Highland Mary.]

I.

Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary,
And leave old Scotia’s shore?
Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary,
Across th’ Atlantic’s roar?

II.

O sweet grows the lime and the orange,
And the apple on the pine;
But a’ the charms o’ the Indies
Can never equal thine.

III.

I hae sworn by the Heavens to my Mary,
I hae sworn by the Heavens to be true;
And sae may the Heavens forget me
When I forget my vow!

IV.

O plight me your faith, my Mary,
And plight me your lily white hand;
O plight me your faith, my Mary,
Before I leave Scotia’s strand.