The Quartering of Freedom: William Wallace’s Last Dawn
A poem
In London’s streets, the crowd gathers like crows,
their hunger for spectacle a tangible thing.
History, that fickle scribe, pauses — quill poised —
to witness the fall of a Highland king without a crown.
Wallace, once the scourge of England’s northern dreams,
now stripped bare of all but his name and his cause.
They could not strip him of those.
His body, a map of Scotland’s valleys and peaks,
bears witness to battles won and lost.
Each scar a story, each bruise a village saved or burned.
The executioner sees only flesh to be rent.
They say he roared his defiance to the end,
voice carrying over Thames-mist and time,
a battle cry that would echo in hearts yet unborn.
Freedom, he called it. The crowd heard only treason.
Iron shackles, wood scaffold, hemp rope:
the instruments of state sing their discordant song.
Wallace’s bones conduct this final symphony,
his silence louder than any plea.
They draw him by horse through streets slick with jeers,
quartered like a feast-day lamb, limbs a compass rose
pointing north, ever north, to the lands he fought to free:
His head, they say, was tarred and spiked on London Bridge.
empty eyes gazing towards a horizon, he’ll never see.
But legends do not die with the body.
In the misty glens and wind-swept moors,
around peat fires and in hushed taverns,
the story grows, a thistle breaking through stone.
Wallace becomes more than a man:
a whisper of resistance,
a dream of sovereignty,
the first raindrop of a storm to come.
I have attempted to capture Robin Coste Lewis’s style through the poem’s use of historical narrative, vivid imagery, and a contemplative tone that interweaves the personal with the political. I’ve employed free verse with varied line lengths and stanza structures, similar to Lewis’s work.
The poem blends historical fact with poetic interpretation, exploring themes of freedom, national identity, and the power of martyrdom, and also attempts to challenge traditional narratives by considering Wallace’s execution from multiple perspectives — the crowd, the executioner, and the legend that would grow from his death.
Like Lewis often does, this poem places a historical event within a broader context, connecting it to both its immediate impact and its long-term legacy, while the language aims to be both visceral and reflective, mixing concrete details with more abstract concepts.
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