John Harris

John Harris Poems

John Harris Biography

John Harris (1820–1884) was a Cornish poet. Harris was born and raised in a two-bedroom cottage on the slopes of Bolenowe Carn, a small hamlet near Camborne, Cornwall, in England. At age twelve, he was sent to work at Dolcoath mine where he combined a life of painful labour with the production of poetry celebrating his native landscape around Carn Brea and the scenic splendours of Land's End and the Lizard. He could not afford pen and paper, so he improvised and used blackberry juice for ink and grocery bags for paper. In the 1840s, he married Jane Rule, with whom he had two sons and two daughters. When his second-born daughter, Lucretia, died during Christmas 1855, he produced a moving eulogy. After this a friend found him a more congenial occupation as a Bible-reader or travelling comforter at Falmouth, where he spent the second half of his life. During this period he produced his most important work, the loco-descriptive poem A Story of Carn Brea (1863). He died in 1884 having requested that he should be buried at Treslothan Chapel, near the village of Troon. There has been some revival of interest in his work, and recently, the book The Cornish Poet was brought out by the John Harris Society, containing his collected works.)

The Best Poem Of John Harris

The Fall of Slavery

Musing by a mossy fountain,
In the blossom month of May,
Saw I coming down a mountain
An old man whose locks were grey;
And the flowery valleys echoed,
As he sang his earnest lay.

'Prayer is heard, the chain is riven,
Shout it over land and sea;
Slavery from earth is driven,
And the manacled are free;
Brotherhood in all the nations;
What a glorious Jubilee!

'God has answered, fall before Him,
Laud His majesty and might;
On thy knees, O earth, adore Him:
Now the black is as the white;
Hallelujah! hallelujah!
Every bondsman free as light.

'Whip and scourge, and fetter broken,
Far away in darkness hurled;
This a grand and glorious token,
When millennium fills the world.
Hallelujah! O'er the nations
Freedom's snowy flag unfurled.

'God has answered! Glory, glory!
O'er the green earth let it speed;
Sun and stars take up the story,
Nevermore a slave shall bleed;
Shout deliverance for the freeman,
Send him succour in his need.

Glory be to God the Giver.
Slavery now shall brand no more;
From the fountain to the river
Freedom breathes on every shore.
Hellelujah! Hallelujah!
Brotherhood the wide world o'er.'

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