Classic Poem

On the occasion of a journey
I made to Kintail,
I saw delightful gentlemen,
kind and liberal;
one boor there was, at a wedding,
who gave me insult;
since he behaved so to me,
I will treat him in this wise.

There it was that Hugh began,
as an ill-tempered dog will do,
barking at the populace,
and bent on biting their heels;
a fit companion to the cur is he,
a bad companion others reckon him;
he is no company for bard or piper,
so unmannerly has he been bred.

Confess yourself that you are not a piper,
and give up the notion that you are a bard;
these are cheery fellows, both professions,
and they despise you, one and all;
a musician without melody or art,
we will expel him from our company,
as people cast out of the garden
a withered branch from off the vine.

If you see a bard or poet
or a minstrel,
and if one of them requires a lad
to bear a wallet—
follow that man steadfastly
that you may travel everywhere;
'twere a great purge to your country
if she disowned you, and you left her.

Or if you see a man that plays
pipe or harp,
the instrument of music you may
carry for him,
until the skin on your back
develops bare, pale patches,
as you see the saddle sores
on a gelding used for ploughing.

How could he compose a song,
lacking skill and native wit?
As he could not do it rightly
it would suit him better to keep silent;
his stammering speech, in part a stutter,
in part has much impediment;
in the splutter of talk he produces,
there lives no man who understands his Gaelic.

Scrounger at the head of tables
where you get drink without payment!
How can we reckon up the gluttons
unless young Hugh is of the number?
Your stomach was never at ease
till you filled it with the food of others;
great is the flood required to quench your thirst,
when you were noticed with your gullet parched.

Your bed is often in the midden pit,
or behind a dyke;
your head rests on a smooth dog-knoll—
'tis quite a good place;
the dogs go licking your whiskers
and biting off your lips and gums,
while your surly mouth gives foul caresses
to your very brothers.

Should you hear a pig grunting,
geese cackling or ducks quacking,
'twas even so that Hugh's bagpipe
Was wailing, mournful and depressing;
its throat, without lubricant, was wheezy,
nor can the reed be powerful,
while he is ever losing by the rear
the wind that ought to go into the bag.

There was a dog's shank in your wide mouth,
for a mouth-piece;
'tis an object fit to raise a plague—
the bone was putrid;
it made your breath foul and offensive,
if any beneath the sun came near you;
'tis better to be windward of you
than be stationed on your lee.

How can young Hugh supply to you
music for dancing,
when you could see a flow of spittle
from every ventage in the chanter?
'Tis a tale that is true I shall tell:
'tis this has left him now so lisping,
that, with scissors, they deprived him
of the tongue tip.

Hugh will blow the groaning bagpipe—
'tis most abhorrent;
it sounds like the buzzing of wasps
that drone on a heather hillock.
I came across the big-rumped piper
cadging from guests at a wedding,
in Kirkipoll, adjoining Tongue,
and there I left him.