Jessie Brown: My sister loved to hear the Major read aloud; she had a great fondness for the poetry of Robert Burns, which always sounds better when spoken in Scotch. ~ Cranford (just the movie)
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Ye banks and braes and streams around
The castle of Montgomery,
Green be your woods and fair your flowers,
Your waters never drumlie!
There simmer first unfold her robes,
And there the langest tarry;
For there I took my last fareweel
O’ my sweet Highland Mary.
(from ‘Highland Mary’)
~
As I was sitting at my instrument last evening, trying to get used to my new contacts, my ever-roving thoughts went to the discussion of Robert Burns at ‘Senorita M’s’. Someone had been researching his life and work, and made discoveries that tended toward spoiling his poetry. The whole conversation reminded me of a passage from (who else?) Jane Austen that expresses my sentiments about this poet. In her unfinished novel Sanditon, her heroine, Charlotte Heywood, after listening to an enthused Romantic’s praise of Burns (he calls him, ‘A man who felt . . . all ardour and truth’), gives her succinct opinion of the bard of Scotland:
I have read several of Burns’ Poems with great delight, but I am not poetic enough to separate a Man’s Poetry entirely from his Character;–and poor Burns’s known Irregularities, greatly interrupt my enjoyment of his Lines.–I have difficulty in depending on the Truth of his feelings as a Lover. I have not faith in the sincerityof the affections of a Man of his Description. He felt and he wrote and he forgot. (Jane Austen, Sanditon, chapter seven. Spelling and punctuation are original.)
I first discovered Burns at eleven, in a big anthology I found in our well-stocked family library–a volume I remember with kindness, for in browsing it I developed a lifelong affection for poetry (and indeed the poets that delighted me as a little girl flipping through the anthology are still among my favourites–Burns, Scott, Tennyson, Longfellow, Stevenson . . .) At that time I was becoming obsessed with Scottish culture: reading of Wallace and Bruce and the Jacobite heroes and pestering family members about our Scotch heritage. In that most Scottish of poets my two manias converged (yes, I was an odd child). I memorised most of the dozen or so poems the anthology yielded; I named toy horses after them; and I used Scots words whether I knew what they meant or not. I was excited to recognise allusions to Burns in Little House and Anne of Green Gables.
Burns is the most anomalous of poets. He moves in a few pages from sweet, sentimental songs beloved by the Victorians to the most shocking vulgarities. As Charlotte Heywood observed, his love songs to his fiancee ‘Highland Mary’ and his wife Jean (favourite songs of the Ingalls girls), though lovely, lose something when you learn that they were only two among many romances.
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Of a’ the airts the wind can blaw,
I dearly like the west,
For there the bonie lassie lives,
The lassie I lo’e best;
There’s wild woods grow, and rivers row,
And mony a hill between;
But day and night my fancy’s flight
Is ever wi’ my Jean.
I see her in the dewy flowers,
I see her sweet and fair;
I hear her in the tunefu’ birds,
I hear her charm the air;
There’s not a bonie flower that springs
By fountain, shaw, or green,
There’s not a bonie bird that sings,
But minds me o’ my Jean.
(‘I Love My Jean’, quoted in full)
~
Yet despite all his faults, one still reads Burns ‘with great delight’. Perhaps it is his essential ‘Scottish-ness’. Many songs generally thought of as Scottish folk songs are actually Burns, such as ‘The Banks o’ Doon’ or ‘My Luve is Like a Red, Red Rose’. The poet is at his best in ‘The Cottar’s Saturday Night’, a description of the domestic enjoyments of a Scottish peasant family (too long to quote), or in ‘John Anderson, My Jo’, in which an old couple looks back on their life together. Both describe homely affections Burns may not have had much personal experience with, but he writes of them movingly.
~
John Anderson, my jo, John,
When we were first acquent,
Your locks were like the raven,
Your bonnie brow was brent;
But now your brow is bald, John,
Your locks are like the snow;
But blessings on your frosty pow,
John Anderson, my jo.
John Anderson, my jo, John,
We clamb the hill thegither;
And many a cantie day, John,
We’ve had wi’ ane anither:
Now we maun totter down, John,
And hand in hand we’ll go,
And sleep thegither at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo.
(quoted in full)
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As a Scottish patriotic song, ‘Bruce’s March to Bannockburn’ stands alongside ‘Scotland the Brave’:
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Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to victorie!
Now’s the day and now’s the hour,
See the front o’ battle lour;
See approach proud Edward’s power–
Chains and slaverie!
Wha will be a traitor knave?
Wha can fill a coward’s grave?
Wha sae base as be a slave?
Let him turn and flee!
Wha, for Scotland’s king and law,
Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,
Free-man stand or free-man fa’,
Let him follow me!
By oppression’s woes and pains,
By your sons in servile chains,
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free!
Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty’s in every blow!–
Let us do or die!
(quoted in full)
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Sadly, some of us are ‘not poetic enough to separate a man from his poetry’; but the poems and songs of Robert Burns remain among the best expressions of Scottish character.
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But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid plans o’ mice and men
Gang aft agley,
An’ leave us nought but grief and pain
For promised joy!
(from ‘To a Mouse’)
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November chill blaws loud wi’ angry sough;
The short’ning winter-day is near a close;
The miry beasts retreating frae his labour goes,
This night his weekly moil is at an end,
Collects his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes,
Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend,
And weary, o’er the moor, his course does hameward bend.
(from ‘The Cottar’s Saturday Night’)
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) I found something I thought worth sharing:
). It reminds me of the passage from Amy Carmichael’s Things As They Are that Daddy posted 
