In Focus - Discover Scotland: Experience the Best of Scotland - page 621

Writers
Robert Burns
Best remembered for penning the words of 'Auld Lang Syne' , Robert Burns (1759-96) is
Scotland's most famous poet and a popular hero whose birthday (25 January) is celebrated
as Burns Night by Scots around the world.
Burns was born in 1759 in Alloway to a poor family who scraped together a living by
gardening and farming. At school he soon showed an aptitude for literature and a fondness
for the folk song. He later began to write his own songs and satires. When the problems of
his arduous farming life were compounded by the threat of prosecution from the father of
Jean Armour, with whom he'd had an affair, he decided to emigrate to Jamaica. He gave up
his share of the family farm and published his poems to raise money for the journey.
The poems were so well reviewed in Edinburgh that Burns decided to remain in Scotland
and devote himself to writing. He went to Edinburgh in 1787 to publish a second edition,
but the financial rewards were not enough to live on and he had to take a job as an excise
man in Dumfriesshire. Though he worked well, he wasn't a taxman by nature, and de-
scribed his job as 'the execrable office of whip-person to the blood-hounds of justice'. He
contributed many songs to collections published by Johnson and Thomson in Edinburgh,
and a 3rd edition of his poems was published in 1793. To give an idea of the prodigious
writings of the man, Robert Burns composed more than 28,000 lines of verse over 22 years.
Burns died of rheumatic fever in Dumfries in 1796, aged 37.
Burns wrote in Lallans, the Scottish Lowland dialect of English that is not very access-
ible to the Sassenach (Englishman), or foreigner; perhaps this is part of his appeal. He was
also very much a man of the people, satirising the upper classes and the church for their hy-
pocrisy.
Many of the local landmarks mentioned in the verse-tale 'Tam o'Shanter' can still be
visited. Farmer Tam, riding home after a hard night's drinking in a pub in Ayr, sees witches
dancing in Alloway churchyard. He calls out to the one pretty witch, but is pursued by
them all and has to reach the other side of the River Doon to be safe. He just manages to
cross the Brig o'Doon, but his mare loses her tail to the witches.