Hamilton A Burns-Style Triptych

ALEXANDER HAMILTON
A Burns-Style Triptych
Lyric · Narrative · Tragic Chorus
“The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley.”
— Robert Burns, To a Mouse
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The Man Behind the Verse
A short biographical foreword
Alexander Hamilton was born on the eleventh of January, 1755 (some say 1757), on the small Caribbean island of Nevis. His mother, Rachel Faucette, was unmarried at his birth; his father, James Hamilton, a wandering Scotsman of distant aristocratic stock, abandoned the family when Alexander was about ten. Rachel died of fever when he was about twelve, and the orphan boy was left, with his elder brother, to the indifference of relatives and the cold mercy of the colonial courts. He found work as a clerk at the trading firm of Beekman and Cruger on St. Croix, and there, before he was fifteen, he was effectively running a transatlantic shipping office — calculating exchange rates, managing cargo, dictating letters.
A hurricane struck St. Croix in 1772. Hamilton, then about seventeen, wrote a letter describing it that was so vivid, so morally charged, that the local clergy and merchants raised a fund to send him to North America to be educated. He never returned. He arrived in New Jersey, then New York, and entered King's College (now Columbia) on the very eve of the American Revolution. By twenty he was a pamphleteer for the patriot cause; by twenty-two, an artillery captain; by twenty-three, aide-de-camp to General George Washington — a position he held for four crucial years.
After the war, Hamilton studied law, married Elizabeth Schuyler — a woman of formidable character whose family was among the wealthiest in New York — and threw himself into the work of building a nation. He wrote fifty-one of the eighty-five Federalist Papers in defence of the new Constitution. As the first Secretary of the Treasury, he assumed the states' Revolutionary debts, founded the First Bank of the United States, established the Mint and the Customs Service, and laid down the financial architecture upon which the American republic still stands. He was, in essence, the principal author of the American economic system.
But he was also proud, restless, and quick to defend his honour. He quarrelled with Thomas Jefferson, with John Adams, and most fatefully with Aaron Burr, the sitting Vice-President of the United States. Their enmity was old and personal. In 1804, after Hamilton was reported to have spoken with contempt of Burr's character, Burr demanded satisfaction. They met at dawn on the eleventh of July, 1804, at Weehawken, New Jersey — on a narrow ledge above the Hudson, the same duelling ground where Hamilton's eldest son, Philip, had been mortally wounded three years earlier, defending his father's name.
Hamilton, by his own account, intended to throw away his shot. Burr did not. The ball struck Hamilton in the abdomen; he was rowed back across the river to a friend's house, where he lingered through the day in agony, surrounded by his wife and seven surviving children. He died the following afternoon at the age of forty-nine.
Eliza Hamilton outlived her husband by fifty years. Widowed at forty-seven, she devoted the rest of her life to gathering his papers, defending his memory, raising their children, founding the first private orphanage in New York City, and ensuring that the man who had built so much from nothing would not be forgotten. She died in 1854, in her ninety-seventh year. Without her, the historical Hamilton — and much of the moral architecture of the early Republic — would be all but lost to us.
It is this life — the orphan, the builder, the proud man, the fallen man, the man whose memory was kept alive by a woman's stubborn love — that the verses on the following pages take up, in the manner and metre of Robert Burns, the Scottish poet who, born only four years after Hamilton, sang of common dignity, restless ambition, and the quiet tragedies of pride.
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A Note on the Form
Standard habbie · the Burns stanza
Each of the three poems is written in the standard habbie, also known as the Burns stanza — a six-line form, rhyming AAABAB, in which the first, second, third, and fifth lines run in iambic tetrameter (eight syllables), and the fourth and sixth in iambic dimeter (four syllables). The short lines fall like a tied-off thread; they give the stanza its characteristic close. Burns did not invent the form, but he made it his own — in To a Mouse, Holy Willie's Prayer, Address to the Deil, and a hundred other songs. It is, in the Scottish tradition, the form of a man speaking to neighbours by the fire.
The Scots dialect throughout has been kept light enough for any English-speaking reader, but unmistakable in its texture: wee, bairn, kent, kirk, brae, lav'rock, gowd, prood, deid, ower, naething. A short glossary follows the poems.
The triptych moves through three registers, each appropriate to its part. The lyric tells the inner shape of Hamilton's life as a single arc — fire, rise, fall. The narrative tells the duel itself, slowly and almost cinematically, from the field to the deathbed. The tragic chorus stands back, like the chorus of an ancient drama, and offers commentary, judgement, and finally release. Together, they form an antique triad: pathos, mythos, and logos — feeling, story, and meaning.
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PART I
The Restless Flame
a lyric
I
There blew a wind that wadna lown,
That tore the cane an' tumbled doun
The puir wee shacks o' yon sea-toun
Whaur he was born;
The bairn had naething tae his goun,
Nor name, nor morn.
II
His mither dee'd. The kirk wad nane.
The faither flit, an' left him lane.
He sleepit on a counter-stane
In merchant's store;
But ay he kent, deep in the bane,
He'd come tae more.
III
For some are born tae plough an' sow,
An' some tae herd, an' some tae mow,
But some hae fire that maun outflow,
Come weal or wae —
An' he was sic; he weel did know
He couldna stay.
IV
He crossed the sea wi' borrowed gowd,
A laddie thin, a laddie prood;
He spak' sic words as turned the crood
An' wan their heed;
An' soon his name was kent fu' lood,
Frae need tae deed.
V
He shaped the coin, he framed the law,
He drew a realm frae winter's thaw,
He bound the broken, healed the raw,
Wi' steady han';
An' brick by brick he raised it a',
Whaur nocht had stan'.
VI
But heart's a beast that winna heel.
Ye canna rein it wi' the steel
O' reason's bit; it tak's its weel,
An' breks the rein;
An' pride, weel-fed, will turn an' deal
Its maister pain.
VII
Ae mornin' grey by Hudson tide,
Wi' mist that hung baith far an' wide,
He cam' wi' second, cam' wi' pride,
An' steady tread;
The shot rang oot — the morning sighed —
An' he was deid.
VIII
Sleep saft, ye flame that wadna bide,
Whase wark outlasts the turning tide;
The land ye built has spread fu' wide,
Frae sea tae sea —
An' bairns, that ken nor pomp nor pride,
Are blest by thee.

PART II
The Field at Weehawken
a narrative poem
I
There is a field abune the tide,
Whaur Hudson's grey waters glide;
The cliffs are steep, the path is wide,
The grass is cropped;
An' here, when honour wadna bide,
The men hae stopped.
II
Three years afore, his eldest son —
Phil, prood an' bricht, his shinin' one —
Lay deein' here whaur dews had run,
At twenty year;
The faither cam' when day was done,
An' held him here.
III
Now back he cam' the same auld brae,
The same grey river slippin' away,
The same dawn breakin', cauld an' grey,
Wi' nocht tae cheer;
But this time he himsel' maun lay
The body here.
IV
The other man cam' steady, slow,
A man brought doun, a man laid low —
He'd lost the chair, he'd lost the show,
He'd lost the day;
He'd ae thing left tae lay belaw —
A debt tae pay.
V
Nae lav'rock sang abune the brae,
Nae bell was rung, nae prayer that day;
Just twa men, an' atween them, lay
Mair than they'd mend;
An' twenty paces, twenty wae,
An' then the end.
VI
They paced. They turned. They aimed. They fired.
The smoke rose up. The crows retired.
Ae man stood firm. The other tired
An' fell aside.
The thing that honour had required
Lay satisfied.
VII
Some say he loosed it tae the sky,
He'd vowed afore he wadna try
Tae kill the man, but let it lie
Wi' Heaven's will;
The other didna stop tae sigh —
He aimed tae kill.
VIII
A boatman, watchin' frae the shore,
Set doun his oar an' grieved fu' sore;
He'd seen sic things a' times before,
In war an' peace;
Quo' he, “Anither man — nae more —
An' nae release.”
IX
They rowed him hame across the tide.
His Eliza waited by his side;
She kissed his brow whaur tears had dried
On weary skin;
He spak' o' her, an' syne he died,
An' day cam' in.
X
Sae mind, ye lads o' sudden flame,
Ye that wad guard a tender name:
The grave kens neither praise nor shame,
Nor wha was richt;
But love, that has nae use for blame,
Outlasts the nicht.

PART III
The Lament of the Chorus
a tragic poem in the antique manner
PROLOGUE
I
Come close, ye folk. Sit doun. Sit doun.
The peat is laigh; the wind is roun'.
We hae a tale, a weighty tune,
O' ane wha rose;
Wha clim'd ower high abune his toun,
An' kent its close.
II
The threid is gane; the threid is dune.
The wark o' fate is roundly spun.
We sing the tellin' here at noon
By winter fire —
For nane can tell whit fortune's tune
Will yet require.
STROPHE I  —  Of his birth
He cam' frae naething. Mark it weel.
Nae cradle carved, nae siller heel,
Nae faither's name upon the seal —
A bastard's lot;
Yet some are born wi' tongues o' steel,
An' he was wrought.
ANTISTROPHE I  —  Of his rise
The watchfu' skies, that ken our ways,
Move soft an' slow through unmarked days;
They lift a laddie, light a blaze
In secret nicht —
An' frae the dust an' tropic haze,
They strike a licht.
STROPHE II  —  Of his hubris
But here's the rub. We've seen it auld:
A man wha rises, prood an' bauld,
Forgets the kindly hands that hauld
Him up sae lang;
He thinks he made the verra mould,
An' steps alang.
ANTISTROPHE II  —  Of nemesis
Yet ower the prood, baith nicht an' day,
Auld powers walk a watchfu' way;
They mark the path, they watch the play,
They never sleep;
An' when the prood man gangs astray,
They strike him deep.
STROPHE III  —  Of the field
The mornin' cam'. The mist was thin.
The river slid wi' silver din.
Twa men cam' walkin' tae begin
The fated brae;
An' a' he'd built, an' a' he'd been,
Was wi' him tae.
ANTISTROPHE III  —  Of the fall
He raised the airm. He raised it wide.
He'd vowed afore he wadna guide
The shot tae kill; he'd let it slide
Tae Heaven's keep —
But fate, that walks the river-side,
Was waukin', deep.
EPODE  —  The Chorus departs
I
O thou wha builds wi' careful skill,
Wha bends the warld unto thy will —
The pride that drinks its measured fill
Comes back tae feed
Upon the hand that fed it still,
An' breks the heid.
II
For nae man's wit, nor mind sae keen,
Nor statesman's airt, nor sword's bricht sheen,
Can thraw the tide that flows atween
The man an' fate;
The grave is silent, cauld, an' clean —
An' winna wait.
III
Yet greet nae lang. The lad has gane.
The river slides, the cliffs remain.
A widow walks the dew-wet lane
Wi' bairns sma',
An' carries on, through joy an' pain,
For fifty year an' a'.
IV
She telt his story. She it was
That kept the flame, that kept the cause;
She gathered up his life — its laws,
Its loves, its strife;
The man had fa'en, but love, that draws
Frae deeper life,
V
Outlasts the powder, outlasts the pride,
Outlasts the cliffs by Hudson side,
Outlasts the schemes the prood had tried,
The names, the stane;
For love, wi' steady, patient stride,
Walks on its lane.
VI
Sae lay the laurel, lay the rue,
The thistle an' the heather true,
Upon the grund whaur he lies noo
In silent peace;
Sleep weel, dear lad, the lang nicht through —
An' she — release.
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A Literary Analysis
On the architecture, language, and meaning of the triptych
I.  The architecture of the triptych
The three poems are designed to be read in sequence, and they are designed to do three different things. The lyric, The Restless Flame, gives the inward shape of Hamilton's life — fire, rise, fall — in a single eight-stanza arc. It is the soul of the man, sung. The narrative, The Field at Weehawken, slows to the pace of a single morning: the duel, told almost in real time, from the cliffs above the Hudson to the deathbed across the river. It is the body of the man, broken. The chorus, The Lament of the Chorus, stands back from both, and judges. It is a Highland chorus speaking in the manner of Sophocles — strophe, antistrophe, epode — but at a kitchen fire, not on a stage.
Together they recapitulate the antique triad: pathos (feeling), mythos (story), logos (meaning). What the lyric feels and the narrative shows, the chorus thinks. This was the deliberate compositional intent, and it is what gives the triptych its shape: three frequencies of a single subject.
II.  The form: standard habbie
The form is the standard habbie — six lines, rhyming AAABAB, with iambic tetrameter in lines one, two, three, and five, and iambic dimeter in lines four and six. Burns did not invent it; he found it in older Scots verse and made it the unmistakable signature of his voice. The form has a peculiar virtue. The three long opening lines build a mood; the short fourth line cuts in and re-frames; the fifth line resumes the long line one last time; the short sixth closes like a snapped thread.
Used carelessly, this becomes a metronome. Used well, as in To a Mouse or Holy Willie's Prayer, the short lines become the place where the truth is told. Throughout this triptych the short lines have been used as Burns used them — as the place of judgement, of grief, of the unanswerable fact. “Whaur he was born; / Nor name, nor morn.” “In merchant's store; / He'd come tae more.” “He'd lost the day; / A debt tae pay.” Each short line either delivers a verdict or seals a wound.
III.  The metrical principle
Burns is not metrically smooth. The opening line of his most famous poem reads, “Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie” — that is a trochee, a heavy syllable, and a feminine ending, not an iamb in sight. To imitate Burns by writing perfect iambic tetrameter is to misunderstand him. The principle here, throughout all three poems, has been controlled irregularity: substitutions where they intensify meaning, regularity where the sense is calm.
Two examples should make this concrete. In the narrative, the duel itself is rendered in a line of four hammered monosyllabic verbs: “They paced. They turned. They aimed. They fired.” The metre breaks down because the action breaks down: the long, flowing iambic of the surrounding stanzas is replaced by a sequence of small detonations. Conversely, the lyric's third stanza — “For some are born tae plough an' sow, / An' some tae herd, an' some tae mow” — runs in deliberately level iambs, because the thought it carries is the calm moral premise from which the rest of the lyric departs. The metre serves the meaning, not the meaning the metre.
IV.  The use of Scots
Burns wrote in three registers: pure English (when addressing patrons or moralising), pure Scots (when speaking from the village), and — most often — a blended idiom where Scots provides the texture and English the spine. The triptych follows him in this. The vocabulary is restrained: wee, bairn, kent, kirk, brae, lav'rock, gowd, prood, deid, ower, naething, wadna, couldna, frae, tae. None of these would baffle a careful English-speaking reader, but their cumulative effect is to plant the poem unmistakably in the Burns tradition — the tradition of village conversation raised, by metre and by feeling, into song.
Crucially, the Scots is densest where the feeling is most local — in the chorus's prologue (“Come close, ye folk. Sit doun. Sit doun. / The peat is laigh; the wind is roun'”), in the orphan's biography (“His mither dee'd. The kirk wad nane. / The faither flit, an' left him lane”). It thins where the subject becomes more abstract, as in the antistrophes about fate and nemesis. This is exactly Burns's practice, and it gives the work its varied tonal palette.
V.  The three governing images
Three images run through all three poems and bind them together. The first is fire. The lyric opens with a wind that fans no flame, then introduces the inward fire that the seas cannot quench; the chorus echoes it (“They lift a laddie, light a blaze / In secret nicht”). Fire here is what cannot be inherited, only borne — Hamilton's defining quality, the thing that distinguished the Caribbean clerk from a million other clerks.
The second image is water — specifically the grey Hudson, which appears in all three poems. It is the element that carries Hamilton home to die in the lyric, the silent witness in the narrative (“The same grey river slippin' away”), and the indifferent landscape of the chorus's third strophe. Where fire is the inner principle, water is the outer one: the world that flows on regardless.
The third image is hands. Hamilton's hands build (“Wi' steady han'”, “brick by brick he raised it a'”); pride's hand is the hand he cannot rein; Eliza's hands gather up his papers (“She gathered up his life — its laws, / Its loves, its strife”). The triptych is in part a meditation on what hands do — make, grasp, hold, release.
VI.  The structural turn: Eliza
The most consequential decision in the triptych is the choice of who speaks last. The chorus does not end with a moral on Hamilton; it ends with Eliza — the widow who walks the dew-wet lane, who tells his story, who keeps the flame for fifty years. This is a structural turn rather than a sentimental one. It re-locates the meaning of the life from the man who lived it to the woman who preserved it. Without Eliza, Hamilton would be a footnote: his papers were scattered, his enemies long-lived and articulate, his reputation contested. She is the reason the historical Hamilton survives at all.
By giving her the closing voice, the triptych makes a quiet argument that Burns himself would have recognised: that the great public deeds of men are kept alive, in the end, by the patient private love of those who outlive them. This is the meaning of the Epode's final couplet — “Sleep weel, dear lad, the lang nicht through — / An' she — release.” The em-dash before “release” is deliberate. It is the only line in the triptych that refuses to complete itself, because Eliza's release (after fifty years of widowhood, after the death of her son and her husband on the same ground) cannot be paraphrased.
VII.  A note on what was refused
Three temptations were resisted in the writing. First, the temptation to use Greek names (Pallas, Hermes, Furies) in the tragic chorus: this would have made the chorus more obviously antique, but at the price of breaking the Scots fabric. The fates appear instead as “the watchfu' skies” and “auld powers”, which is what a Highland audience by a fire would actually call them.
Second, the temptation to romanticise the duel. Burr fired to kill; Hamilton, by all credible accounts, did not. But the chorus does not rescue Hamilton from his own pride. It frames him with it: the man who built the financial system of a nation died because he could not let an insult pass. This is the tragedy, in the antique sense, and it is told straight.
Third, the temptation of false roughness. There is a fashion for imitating Burns by introducing deliberate awkwardness — broken metres, jagged rhymes — to suggest authenticity. Burns's authenticity is not awkwardness; it is simplicity. His best lines are the ones that an old woman by a fire might have said. The triptych aims at that simplicity, and where it falls short, it falls short in the direction of dignity rather than artifice. This is the right direction in which to fall.
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A Short Scots Glossary
for the words that may be unfamiliar
abune   —   above
ae   —   one, single (e.g. ae mornin' = one morning)
ain   —   own
airt   —   art, skill
ane   —   one
atween   —   between
auld   —   old
baith   —   both
bairn   —   child
bane   —   bone
bauld   —   bold
belaw   —   below
bide   —   stay, endure
bonnie   —   beautiful, fair
brae   —   hillside, riverbank
bricht   —   bright
cam'   —   came
cauld   —   cold
clim'd   —   climbed
couldna / wadna / didna / winna   —   could not / would not / did not / will not
crood   —   crowd
dee'd   —   died
deid   —   dead
dune   —   done
fa'en   —   fallen
fa'   —   fall
frae   —   from
fu'   —   full, very
gane   —   gone
gangs   —   goes
gowd   —   gold
greet   —   weep
grund   —   ground
hae   —   have
hame   —   home
han'   —   hand
hauld   —   hold, held
heid   —   head
heel   —   obey, come to heel
ither   —   other
ken / kent   —   know / knew
kirk   —   church
lad / laddie   —   young man / boy
laigh   —   low
lang   —   long
lav'rock   —   skylark
lood   —   loud
loups   —   leaps
lown   —   calm, still
mair   —   more
mark it weel   —   note it well
maun   —   must
mither   —   mother
nae / naething   —   no, not / nothing
nicht   —   night
noo   —   now
o'   —   of
oot   —   out
ower   —   over, too
prood   —   proud
puir   —   poor
quo'   —   said, quoth
sae   —   so
saft   —   soft
sic   —   such
siller   —   silver
sma'   —   small
sneckit   —   latched, shut tight
spak'   —   spoke
stane   —   stone
syne   —   since, then, ago
tae   —   to
tak'   —   take
telt   —   told
thraw   —   twist, turn aside
threid   —   thread
toun   —   town
twa   —   two
unco   —   very, uncommonly
wae   —   woe, sorrow
wan   —   won
waukin'   —   watching, awake
weel   —   well
whase   —   whose
whaur   —   where
whit   —   what
yon   —   that, yonder


FINIS
Composed in the manner of Robert Burns · Standard habbie throughout