Keep Poems Alive is taking a holiday. This will be its last update until January 2017. I will leave you with a longish poem by James Beattie, a Scots writer 1735-1803 (so a rough contemporary of the Paisley poets featured here a few weeks back).  He is not very well known, especially outside Scotland. Like his contemporary William Drummond he was writing in the classical or Latinate English manner often called ‘flowery’, whereas politically the need was for writing in Scots. That is the reason for his obscurity. None the less he was a fine poet and this longer poem ending in an elegy is one of his finest pieces. Another substantial poem by him has recently been discovered in Sir Walter Scott’s library at Abbotsford House but it has not yet been published.

One reason for my taking a break is that I will be judging the Robert Tannahill…