Inverness
Inverness, the tourists' lodestar
Scandinavian hikers' dream!
Where the mud-flats out to Beauly
Wetly in the wan sun gleam;
Nursing memories of Flodden,
Thinking sourly of Culloden,
Whisky-, rain-, or kirk-besodden
Scotsmen through your dark streets stream.
In a stony Sabbatarian
Nineteenth-century Gothic gloom,
Through the mists from down the Great Glen,
Sonsie lads and lasses loom—
Hairy tweeds and thick shoe-leather,
Faces toughened by the weather,
Bare knees roughened by the heather—
Wait their Calvinistic doom.
Through the crenellated portals
Of the old suspension bridge,
By the gas-works and the railway,
Up to Raigmore on the ridge—
Oh! The spirit of the Highlands!
Lone and dreary, warped and wry lands,
Most emphatically not my lands
As I swat the evening midge.
probably late 1950s
