“Breathes there the man?”
From “The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” Canto VI.
BREATHES there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart has ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand?
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim,
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.
About this poem
These lines open Canto VI of The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), the long narrative poem that made Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) famous.
The passage asks whether any man lives “with soul so dead” that he has never felt love for his “own, my native land.” Such a man, Scott says, whatever his wealth or titles, will die unremembered and unsung. The passage became one of the best-known patriotic poems in English and is still quoted, especially in Scotland, as an expression of love of homeland.