My grandsir was there and my father who’s dead, It happened one Sunday on closing the book And drinking a cup with a neighbor of ours, My father asked grandsir to tell us a tale Of Koliivshchina, how there they had fought, How Zaliznyak, Gonta had punished the Poles. His aged old eyes flamed afresh as the stars, His words came out fluently, youthful, and strong; How they finished the Poles, and how Smila was burned. The neighbors in fear and in sorrow were dumb And I in my youth more than once set to weeping In grief for the sexton. But no one did notice How wept the young child in the still of the cabin. Thanks, grandsir, for all that you kept in your head, The glory that once was the pride of the Kozaks, Now I to my grandchildren tell the same tale. (I. 2421ff) In the preface the poet speaks in the same mood, bewailing the invariable tendency of the day to treat Ukrainian themes as a source of gaiety and merriment while “Ukraina’s weeping.” To him a country and a culture that had produced such warriors as the bards had sung of was not something to be mocked and treated as of small esteem. The hetmans and the atamans of the past were worthy of a better fate and a better regard among following generations. There is nothing mild about the poem. The convulsion of the Koliivshchina had been too terrible for that. It was a tale of savage massacres, one of those wild outbursts which was a war to the bitter end and where the oppressed, once they had taken up arms, could look only for victory or death. Yet the best passages in the poem are not the battle scenes--in one sense Shevchenko slurs over them--nor are they the pictures of devastation and of slaughter, but rather the preludes to the action, the gathering of the clans, the blessing of the weapons, scenes of the country which was so soon to be overwhelmed with bloodshed, and apostrophes to those leaders who had carved out for themselves a place in legend and in folklore and whose most patriotic efforts had met only with failure and disaster. The prologue and the epilogue show us the enthusiasm of the poet and his spirit. Shevchenko was not bloodthirsty. He was not a military man. Yet as he looked out at the world, he could not fail to see the difference between the past centuries, when the Kozak hetmans moved in the most aristocratic circles of Poland and matched wits and swords with the Polish magnates and the present time when the poor serfs were denied the least human rights.