On New Year’s Eve, this was the verse of the hour, along with a glass of bubbly. It’s a tradition that makes Scots puff out their chests with pride for their own poet and song collector, Robert Burns.
The Scots celebrate their bard beginning on New Year’s Eve and continuing until Jan. 25, his birthday, when loyalists toast the haggis at thousands of Burns Night celebrations worldwide. They never tire of telling you that Burns has been translated into more languages than any poet writing in
English, including a lad named William Shakespeare from that country to the south.
Romantic and revolutionary, Burns knew what it was to bend to the plow from sunup to sundown. He was a fierce nationalist during the Scottish Enlightenment and a supporter of the French Revolution who foresaw greater liberty for oppressed people everywhere.
A Burns quest in Scotland leads first to the whitewashed cottage in Alloway, Ayrshire, where the poet was born on Jan. 25, 1759, to a tenant farmer and his semiliterate wife. He was the eldest of seven children.
His father, William Burness, with the original family spelling, scrambled to finish the little home before his wife Agnes Broun Burness gave birth. The re-creation of his “Auld Cley Biggin” is now the centerpiece of the Burns National Heritage Park.
William was a stern Calvinist who insisted that his sons, Robert and Gilbert two years younger, would be educated – around their chores. Gilbert recalled, “For several years butcher’s meat was a stranger in the house, while all the members of the family exerted themselves to the utmost of their strength, and rather beyond. … My brother … at 15 was the principal labourer.”
Scholars believe the strain caused rheumatic fever and endocarditis, a heart condition that eventually claimed Burns at 37. Art historians detect a stoop from his years at the plow.
Yet Burns’ labor inspired some of his most beloved poems, such as “To a Mouse, On Turning Her Up in Her Nest, With the Plough.”
Agnes, who could read her Bible but not write, carried the Scottish oral tradition in her head, instilling in Robert a passion for his native tunes.
Other passions soon arose, beginning with his mother’s domestic helper, Betty Paton, who bore Robert a daughter in 1785. His mother took the baby in.
“That might sound strange to us now, but it wasn’t that unusual then,” says guide Ken Hanley. “He wasn’t the scoundrel many people make him out to be. He had an eye for the ladies, but it’s where he got a lot of his inspiration.”
In the Burns museum, curator Elinor Clark dotes on her favorite keepsakes. “I especially like his writing compendium,” a pocket case with pen knife, ink bottle and quills.
The collections also includes Burns’ walking stick, razor and shaving mirror, snuff horn, his father’s watch, a pistol he used as a tax collector and a macabre piece – a plaster cast of his skull. The day before Burns’ widow was interred in their mausoleum, devotees cast his head.
Up the street, his parents’ graves lie before the ruined Auld Kirk. The ghostly shell stars in Burns’ “Tam o’ Shanter,” as the spot where a drunken Tam spies witches and warlocks dancing with wicked abandon.
 |
A red sandstone monument to Robert Burns in Kay Park, Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, as it looked before a fire seriously damaged it in November. The poet’s work was first published in Kilmarnock in 1786. |
“Coffins stood round, like open presses/That shaw’d the dead in their last dresses.”
The poem comes to life in film at the Tam o’ Shanter Experience.
Burns met his model for Tam, Douglas Graham, in the next village, Kirkoswald. The home of Tam’s friend, cobbler Souter Johnnie, is a National Trust for Scotland site, and the graveyard is peopled with names immortalized in Burns’ work, including Graham (Tam) himself.
In 1784, Burns’ father died bankrupt, and Robert moved the family to Mossgiel farm. It was more back-breaking work, but Burns found time to meet 19-year-old Jean Armour. By 1786, she was carrying his twins, and Burns gave her a marriage contract.
But Jean’s father was having none of it; again, Robert’s mother took in the babies.
Bedeviled by debt, Burns resolved to immigrate as a bookkeeper to a Jamaican sugar plantation. It was only to cobble together his passage that he published his “Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect,” under the shortened name of Burns, in Kilmarnock on July 31, 1786.
Perhaps no one was more surprised than the bard himself when the 612 copies sold out within a month, when the working folk of the Lowlands embraced him as their own, and when the cognoscenti of Edinburgh clamored for this “heaven-taught ploughman” poet.
 |
A sign marks the cottage where Burns was born. |
Soon, society couldn’t get enough of the poet who wrote in Old Scots, yet spoke French and the King’s English in their drawing rooms.
Printer William Creech wanted to publish Burns’ poems in an Edinburgh edition, so the poet added 22 pieces, little knowing that it would take him two years of legal wrangling to collect the fee. This was essentially the only money he ever made from his poems.
Burns also met James Johnson, and spent the rest of his life helping gather songs for Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum.
But there always was time for love for the man who wrote:
“Green grow the rashes, O,
The Sweetest hours that e’er I spend,
Are spent amang the lasses, O.”
Burns fathered several more illegitimate children before and after his marriage to Jean Armour in 1788.
In Edinburgh, the Writers’ Museum at the Lady Stair’s House, a 1622 townhouse in James Close, holds Burns’ first editions and writing desk, as well as a lock of Jean’s hair and her white kid gloves.
At St. Giles, the High Kirk of Edinburgh, the Burns Society of Scotland dedicated a stained-glass window to their hero in 1985. Docent Bill Cameron, whose father recited Burns, points out the shaky signature in the glass. “It’s from the last letter Burns ever wrote, when he was asking Gilbert to look after his wife and children.
“The Burns Society says he was a humanist. He wasn’t, he was a red-hot communist!” the docent says with a hearty laugh.
After years of hard-scrabble farming, Burns trained as that most odious of visitors, the tax man.
To collect, he rode 200 miles a week. Burns’ turbulent life was settling down just as his health was giving out. Headaches and depression, his lifelong companions, worsened, and his energy waned so that he could barely hold a pen.
His doctor’s prescription? Go to the frigid sea, drink saltwater and wade in chest-high water every day. Burns sighed his last within three weeks, on July 21, 1796, the same day Jean bore their ninth child, Maxwell.
His widow lived on for 34 years, and their home is open, with Burns’ sword-stick, Masonic apron and signature scratched in the study window. The long-suffering woman, who once said, “Our Robbie should ha had twa wives,” is buried beside her husband in St. Michael’s churchyard.
But why end the celebration of a boisterous life on a sad note? Better to have a pint at The Globe Inn, Burns’ favorite “howff,” and toast “The Immortal Memory.”
Betsa Marsh, author of “The Eccentric Traveler: A World of Curious Adventures,” is a Lowell Thomas Award winner from the Society of American Travel Writers. She lives in Cincinnati.
The details
RECOMMENDED LODGING
In Ayrshire:
Glenapp Castle, Ballantrae, Girvan; 011-44-1465-831212; A restored Scottish baronial mansion with 17 rooms. Doubles from approximately $664, including dinner and breakfast.
Culzean Castle and Country Park, Maybole; 011-44-1655-884455; The six Eisenhower Apartments, given to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower for his lifetime use but still used by his relatives, are open to travelers when no Eisenhowers are booked at the castle, a National Trust for Scotland property. Doubles from approximately $455.
Westin Turnberry Resort, Ayrshire; 011-44-1655-331000; The century-old resort has a cozy spa and the windswept golf course rated No. 17 in the world by Golf magazine. Doubles from approximately $400.
Brig o’Doon House Hotel, Alloway; 011-44-1292-442466; This photogenic pub, right on the River Doon near the famous Brig o’ Doon bridge, was said to be one of Burns’ favorites. Doubles from approximately $218, including breakfast.
In and around Edinburgh:
Sheraton Grand Hotel & Spa, 1 Festival Square, Edinburgh; 011-44-131-2299131; Some rooms have views of Edinburgh Castle. Doubles from approximately $260.
Borthwick Castle Hotel, North Middleton, Midlothian; 011-44-1875-820514; Book the Mary, Queen of Scots bedroom in this 1430 twin-towered castle. She and her third husband had a brief respite at Borthwick before they were separated forever, with Mary climbing out a window dressed as a page boy. Twelve miles south of Edinburgh. Doubles from approximately $273.
Dumfries:
Cavens House Hotel, Kirkbean, Dumfries; 011-44-1387-880234; Doubles from approximately $210, including full Scottish breakfast.
Torbay Lodge Guest House, 31 Lovers Walk, Dumfries; 011-44-1387-253922; Doubles from approximately $45 per person, including breakfast.
MORE INFORMATION
Burns National Heritage Park,
