Poems and Songs

Overview

About five hundred pages, collecting the poems and songs of Robert Burns, a tenant farmer’s son from Ayrshire in southwest Scotland, from the Kilmarnock edition of 1786, which made him instantly famous across Scotland and, soon after, in Edinburgh’s literary establishment, through the songs he continued writing and, crucially, collecting and reworking from older folk tradition for James Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum until his death in 1796 at thirty-seven. Burns wrote most of his major poems in Scots, the language of Lowland Scotland, at a moment when educated Scottish opinion increasingly regarded Scots as a provincial dialect to be abandoned in favor of standard English, and his commitment to writing in it, sustaining and elevating a literary tradition many of his own contemporaries were actively letting die, is a significant part of why he became, and remains, Scotland’s national poet rather than a regional curiosity absorbed into the broader English literary tradition.

Burns’s life was short and financially precarious throughout, farming unsuccessfully, working later as an excise officer, and dying young probably of rheumatic heart disease worsened by a lifetime of hard physical labor. His posthumous reputation, cultivated deliberately by early biographers and by the Burns Supper tradition that continues to this day on his birthday, January 25th, sometimes obscures the range and technical sophistication of the actual poetry, which moves comfortably between broad comedy, savage satire, tender lyric and direct political assertion, often within a single poem.

What happens

Tam o’ Shanter. Burns’s most celebrated narrative poem, a mock-heroic comic tale of a farmer, Tam, who lingers too long drinking at an inn while his wife waits furiously at home, and rides home late through a storm past the haunted kirk of Alloway, where he stumbles on a witches’ dance presided over by the devil himself. Tam, drunk and incautious, shouts out in appreciation of one dancing witch’s short shift, and the whole demonic company gives chase, Tam escaping only by reaching the crown of the bridge over the river Doon, since witches, folk tradition holds, cannot cross running water, though not before the pursuing witch Cutty Sark tears off his mare’s tail. The poem moves with remarkable control between broad comedy, genuine narrative suspense and a closing moral about the dangers of drink and delay, delivered with a wink that keeps the poem from ever becoming a simple temperance tract.

Holy Willie’s Prayer. One of the sharpest satires in the language, a dramatic monologue delivered entirely in the voice of Holy Willie, a self-righteous Calvinist elder convinced of his own election and eager to condemn his neighbors’ sins while excusing, through elaborate theological reasoning, his own considerable lust and hypocrisy. The poem never steps outside Willie’s own voice to comment; his prayer, meant as an act of pious self-justification addressed to God, becomes, entirely through his own unwitting words, a complete and devastating self-portrait of religious hypocrisy, a technique Browning would develop further in the dramatic monologue a generation later.

To a Mouse and To a Louse. Two short poems addressed directly to small creatures Burns encounters, a field mouse whose nest his plow has just destroyed, a louse spotted crawling on a fashionable lady’s bonnet in church, each turning from close, sympathetic observation of the creature itself toward a broader reflection, the famous best-laid schemes of mice and men going oft awry in the first, and the equally famous wish that some power would give us the gift to see ourselves as others see us in the second, both showing Burns’s characteristic movement from the immediate and particular to a universal, plainly stated observation.

The Cotter’s Saturday Night. A more formal, elevated poem describing an evening in a poor rural family’s cottage, worship, simple food, familial affection, presenting the dignity and piety of ordinary rural life as a genuine and considerable moral achievement, in a register more sentimental and less satirical than much of Burns’s other work.

A Man’s a Man for A’ That. A direct, unadorned assertion of human equality against rank, title and inherited wealth, arguing that honest poverty carries no genuine shame and that rank is merely the guinea’s stamp while the man himself is the gold beneath it, a poem that became, and remains, an anthem for egalitarian and reformist movements well beyond Scotland, sung at events ranging from labor rallies to the opening of the modern Scottish Parliament.

Scots Wha Hae. Imagined as Robert the Bruce’s address to his army before the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, a short, driving call to arms for national liberty that Burns wrote with clear awareness of its resonance for his own political moment, in the years immediately following the French Revolution.

The songs. Alongside the longer poems, Burns wrote and, extensively, collected and reworked older Scots folk songs for James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum and later for George Thomson’s collections, contributing new words to existing tunes and substantially rewriting traditional material into its now-familiar form. Auld Lang Syne, sung around the world at midnight on New Year’s Eve by people who could not name its author, is the most famous example, itself an adaptation and improvement of earlier folk verses. A Red Red Rose, one of the most direct and enduring love lyrics in English, and Ae Fond Kiss, a wry, genuinely moving farewell to a lover the speaker knows he must leave, both show Burns working at the height of his powers in the compressed, musical form of the song.

How to read it

Read with a glossary of Scots vocabulary close at hand, and do not be discouraged by the initial unfamiliarity of the language. Most editions, including Carol McGuirk’s widely used Penguin selection, provide one, and the dialect, once its basic patterns become familiar, is considerably more accessible than it first appears, closer to English with systematic sound and vocabulary shifts than to a genuinely foreign language.

Read Tam o’ Shanter aloud if you can; its narrative momentum and comic timing depend substantially on the sound and rhythm of the verse, and reading it silently loses much of its effect.

Read Holy Willie’s Prayer as an early and remarkably sophisticated example of a technique, unwitting self-exposure through a speaker’s own words, that later poets would develop into the full dramatic monologue form, and notice how completely Burns commits to staying inside Willie’s own voice and logic without ever stepping outside to comment directly.

Distinguish the satirical and comic poems from the songs as you read, since they operate by different methods and reward different kinds of attention: the satires depend on close, ironic reading of a speaker’s own words, while the songs work through the accumulated, musical simplicity of direct statement.

Read A Man’s a Man for A’ That and Scots Wha Hae together as Burns’s most directly political poems, written in the charged atmosphere following the French Revolution, and consider what it meant for a working farmer, writing in a language increasingly dismissed as provincial by the educated classes, to assert human equality and national liberty in exactly this form and this voice.

Questions it raises

• Does writing consistently in Scots, at a moment when the language was increasingly treated as provincial by educated opinion, make Burns’s poetry more or less accessible and durable than writing in standard English would have?
• What makes Holy Willie’s Prayer work as satire? Is it more effective for staying entirely inside the hypocrite’s own voice than a poem that stepped outside to comment directly would be?
• How does A Man’s a Man for A’ That’s directness compare to more indirect or ironic ways of making the same argument about human equality? Does the plainness strengthen or limit its persuasive power?
• Why have Burns’s songs, particularly Auld Lang Syne, achieved a kind of anonymous, universal circulation that his more formally ambitious poems have not?
• Burns extensively reworked older folk material into his most famous songs. What does this practice suggest about authorship, originality and the relationship between individual genius and collective tradition?
• Tam o’ Shanter moves between broad comedy and real menace within a single poem. Does this tonal range strengthen the poem, or does it risk undercutting either the comedy or the genuine sense of danger?