Happy Rabbie Burns Day!
It’s the birthday of Robert Burns, born in Alloway, Scotland (1759). Today, he is Scotland’s national poet, although he started writing poetry to impress women. He later said, “My heart was completely tinder, and eternally lighted up by some Goddess or other.”
…writing poems about the daily struggles of ordinary people…
As he got older, he watched how hard his father struggled to make a living as a farmer, suffering through bad weather and bad seed. Some years, his father had almost nothing to show for an entire year of backbreaking effort, and he died when Burns was 25 years old.
So Burns began to branch out from love poems to writing poems about the daily struggles of ordinary people. He was inspired by the traditional Scottish folk ballades his mother had sung him as a child, and he wrote in Scottish dialect rather than formal English.
And those poems made his name when he published them in his collection Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, which came out on the last day in July 1786. Word spread that he had written in the language of common people about common people, and farmers and maids began to save up their money to buy copies.
Burns spent much of the rest of his life traveling around the countryside collecting and rewriting the lyrics of folk songs for an anthology called The Scots Musical Museum. Because he considered the songs to be the property of all people, he refused to be paid for his work, and even for some of the most famous songs attributed to him, such as “Auld Lang Syne,” he claimed only to have made corrections and additions.
Available by e-mail daily.
Start MSN Chat
