A year ago, the speaker was paraded through streets strewn with roses and myrtle, the city alight with flags and bells. He felt so adored he would have given the crowd the sun itself. Now, on that very anniversary, he's being led through rain to his execution. The same people who cheered him now pelt him with stones; his wrists are bound and his forehead bleeds. Only a few sickly onlookers wait at the scaffold for the show. The speaker’s voice is bitter but eerily steady—he understands the crowd’s fickle hunger: they wanted everything, and then asked, “what else?” His despair turns inward, then upward. He finds a strange, cold comfort in leaving his reckoning to God rather than the mob. The poem’s mood is a grim blend of irony and weary resignation, a stark, timeless portrait of how public love can rot into violence overnight.
The Patriot: An Old Story — Summary
It was roses, roses, all the way, With myrtle mixed in my path like mad; The house-roofs seemed to heave and sway, The church-spires flamed, such flags they had, A year ago on this very day.
The air broke into a mist with bells, The old walls rocked with the crowd and cries. Had I said, "Good folk, mere noise repels-- But give me your sun from yonder skies!" They had answered "And afterward, what else?"
Alack, it was I who leaped at the sun To give it my loving friends to keep! Naught man could do, have I left undone: And you see my harvest, what I reap This very day, now a year is run.
There's nobody on the house-tops now-- Just a palsied few at the windows set; For the best of the sight is, all allow, At the Shambles' Gate--or, better yet, By the very scaffold's foot, I trow.
I go in the rain, and, more than needs, A rope cuts both my wrists behind; And I think, by the feel, my forehead bleeds, For they fling, whoever has a mind, Stones at me for my year's misdeeds.
Thus I entered, and thus I go! In triumphs, people have dropped down dead, "Paid by the world, what dost thou owe Me? "--God might question; now instead, 'Tis God shall repay: I am safer so.