Happy Rabbie Burns Day!
…his village thought he was odd because he always carried a book…
It’s the birthday of poet Robert Burns, born in Alloway, Scotland (1759). The son of a poor farmer, he followed his father’s example and spent the first half of his life engaged in the backbreaking labor of premodern farming. People in his village thought he was odd because he always carried a book, and they disapproved when they saw him reading as he drove his wagon slowly along the road. He got into trouble with the family of a girl named Jean Armour, who had become pregnant. He’d left another woman after she had become pregnant, but he loved Armour and didn’t want her to suffer the indignities of being an unwed mother. He eventually married her, against her father’s wishes.
Burns pursued a career as a poet and became known for his conversational poems about Scottish life in books like Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786). He and his wife had nine children, the last one born on the day of Burns’s funeral.
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I’m not very familiar with Robert Burns, thaough I should be…Being Scottish and so on…I’m going to read up on him.
He’s very much worth the read, but you may find the dialect hard to follow. Get a book that has lots of notes.