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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 11, Issue 10 (January 1, 1937)

The Friend of the Landless Men

page 15

The Friend of the Landless Men.

There was the reverse side of the Highland clearances, the New Zealand settlement reform, that inspired the grieving yet triumphant pibroch note in “The Burial of Sir John McKenzie.” This is the greatest of Jessie Mackay's poems in a New Zealand setting. It tells how the Minister of Lands, who had been a Ross-shire shepherd, went to his grave, lamented by the young nation:—

“The clan went on with the pipes before
All the way, all the way;
A wider clan than ever he knew
Followed him home that dowie day.
And who were they of the wider clan?
The landless man and the no man's man
The man that lacked and the man unlearned,
The man that lived but as he earned;
And the clan went mourning all the way.”