Ruin’s wheel has driven o’er us,
Not a hope that dare attend,
The wide world is all before us—
But a world without a friend.
Not a hope that dare attend,
The wide world is all before us—
But a world without a friend.
Robert Burns, “Strathallan’s Lament,” 1787.
Of all the great sorrows that may attend a dispossession or defeat, perhaps the greatest is that it should go unmourned. Few examples in the annals of poetry come as close to capturing this particular sense of despair as Robert Burns’ “Strathallan’s Lament.” The poem recalls the efforts of forces in Britain, especially Scotland, to restore a Catholic British monarch, and later his descendants, to the throne of Great Britain after they had been deposed by Parliament during the ‘Glorious Revolution.’ The last gasp of these ‘Jacobite rebellions’ (1688—1746) took place at the Battle of Culloden in Scotland in 1746, where the army of ‘Bonnie’ Prince Charlie was conclusively routed. Although William Drummond, 4th Viscount Strathallan and one of Prince Charles’ leading warriors, died valiantly on the field, in his poem Burns imagines Strathallan surviving and finding refuge in a cave after the battle. Embattled by storms outside the cave and by the tempests within his own psyche, Strathallen is left alone with the anguish of a cause utterly vanquished and “without a friend” — and a defeat destined to be forever unmourned.
This powerful poem came to mind one evening recently as I pondered the loss of London, an ancient and pivotal capital of our people and our culture. Much worse than the events recalled by Burns, there have been no rebellions attempting to hold back this awful dispossession. The city was scene to no last stands; no immortal final words were uttered. “Ruin’s wheel” has driven over us too subtly for there to be any hint of the epic or the romantic in our creeping racial death. Across the broad spectrum of our movement, and its multiplying media platforms, there is indeed a great rage against our broader demographic decline. Yet accompanying this rage is a less articulated feeling — the feeling that unless we bring about a great awakening we shall all be like Strathallan in our own way; our cries struggling to reach beyond the cave our enemies have pushed us into. Meanwhile we are only too aware that the fate of London will be replicated at an ever-increasing pace and in disparate and formerly White enclaves over the next few decades. ...
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