II.

The barrels are brought from Noraway,
Well seasoned with plenty of Noraway pitch;
All dried and split for that jubilee day,
The day of the holocaust of a witch. 
The prickers are chosen—­hang-daddy and brother—­
And fixed were the fees of their work of love;
To prick an old woman who was a mother,
And felt still the yearnings of motherly love
For she had a son, a noble young fellow,
Who sailed in a ship of his own the sea,
And who was away on the distant billow
For a cargo of wine to this bonnie Dundee. 
Some said she was bonnie when she was a lassie,
Ah! fair the young blossom upon the young tree;
But winter will come, and summer will pass aye,
And youth is not always to you or to me. 
A true loving daughter, with God to fear,
A dutiful wife, and a mother dear;
With a heart to feel and a bosom to sigh,
She had tears to weep, she had tears to dry.

III.

All was joyful—­all delectation,
In creatures who prayed to their Maker each morn,
That there was to be a grand incremation
Of a poor fellow-creature, old, weary, and worn. 
All pity is drowned in a wild devotion,
A grim savage joy within every breast;
The streets are all in a buzzing commotion,
Expectant of this worse than cannibal feast. 
From the provost down to the gaberlunzie,
From fat Mess John to half-fed Bill,
From hoary grand-dad to larking loonie,
From silken-clad dame to scullion Nell;
The oldest, the youngest, the richest, the poorest,
The milky-breasted, the barren, the yeld,
The hardest, the softest, the blithest, the dourest,
Are all by the same wild passion impelled. 
If her skin it is wrinkled—­ah, God forefend her! 
The wild lapping flame will soon make it shrink;
If her eyes are dim and rheumy and tender,
The adder-tongued flames will soon make her wink. 
If brown now her breasts—­once globes of beauty! 
The roasting will char them into a black heap;
If trembling her limbs, the prickers’ loved duty
Will be to compel her to dance and to leap. 
The harlequin Man has doffed his jacket,
No pity to feel—­he has none to give;
The Bible has said it, and so thou must take it,
“Thou shalt not allow a witch to live.”

IV.

On the long red sands of old Dundee,
Out at the hem of the ebbing sea,
They have fixed a long pole deep in the sand,
And around it have piled with deftly hand
The rosined staves of the Noraway wood,
Four feet high and four feet broad,
To burn, amidst flames of burning pitch,
So rare a chimera yclept a witch—­
Born of a fancy wild and camstary,
Like ghost or ghoul, brownie or fairy. 
The prickers are there, each with long-pronged fork,
Yearning and yape for their hellish work,