Robert Burns · CatalogRobert BurnsRobert Burns · CatalogRobert Burns (1759-1796) was born in a clay cottage at Alloway in Ayrshire, the son of a struggling tenant farmer, and worked the land himself as a young man.
Robert Burns (1759-1796) was born in a clay cottage at Alloway in Ayrshire, the son of a struggling tenant farmer, and worked the land himself as a young man. His Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock, 1786) made him famous almost overnight. He later farmed at Ellisland, served as an excise officer at Dumfries, and spent his last years collecting and rewriting hundreds of Scottish songs. He died at Dumfries at thirty-seven and is honoured as Scotland's national poet.
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“The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, The Man’s the gowd for a’ that.”
To a Mouse, subtitled On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, November 1785, is one of the short poems in Scots that Robert Burns wrote while farming Mossgiel with his brother Gilbert. It appeared in the Kilmarnock volume of 1786.
Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, the Gutenberg edition attached here, gathers in chronological order the poems and songs of Scotland's national poet from his teenage verses of the 1770s to the songs he was still writing in the months before his death in 1796. It is the best single place to read Burns in full.
The Cotter's Saturday Night, inscribed to Burns's friend and patron Robert Aiken of Ayr, is a portrait of a poor Scottish farm labourer's family at the end of the working week. It opens with an epigraph from Thomas Gray's Elegy asking the great not to mock the short and simple annals of the poor.
To a Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church, is a comic companion to To a Mouse, printed in the same Kilmarnock volume of 1786. The speaker sits in church behind a fine young lady named Jenny, who is wearing a fashionable gauze-and-lace bonnet of the kind called a Lunardi, after the balloonist whose ascents in Scotland were the rage.
To a Mountain Daisy by Robert Burns (1786–1794) is presented here as a complete poem for reading aloud and memorization. The hosted edition preserves stanza spacing for recitation practice.
Auld Lang Syne is the song Burns sent in 1788 to James Johnson for The Scots Musical Museum, a collection of Scottish songs to which he contributed hundreds of texts. He told friends he had taken it down from an old man's singing, and some lines do echo older songs, but the stanzas as we know them are largely his.
John Anderson, My Jo is a short song of two stanzas that Burns wrote for The Scots Musical Museum, published in 1790. An older song by this name existed and was coarse; Burns kept its tune and its opening phrase and wrote an entirely new, tender text in the voice of an old wife speaking to her old husband.
Tam o' Shanter: A Tale is Burns's longest narrative poem and the one he himself thought his best. He wrote it in 1790 for the antiquary Francis Grose, who wanted a witch story to go with his drawing of the ruined church at Alloway in his Antiquities of Scotland.
Scots Wha Hae, titled in Burns's editions Robert Bruce's March to Bannockburn, is a war song that Burns wrote in 1793 and sent to George Thomson for his Select Scottish Airs. Burns imagined it as the address of King Robert the Bruce to his army before the battle of Bannockburn in June 1314, when the Scots defeated the much larger English army of Edward II and secured Scotland's independence.
A Red, Red Rose, also called My Luve Is Like a Red, Red Rose, is a song of four short stanzas that Burns sent for publication in 1794; it appeared in Pietro Urbani's collection and in The Scots Musical Museum in 1796. Like many of Burns's songs, it was built from fragments of older folk lyrics, which he reshaped into a single, perfect lyric.
A Man's a Man for A' That, also known by its first line Is There for Honest Poverty, is a song Burns wrote in 1795 and sent to George Thomson. It is the fullest statement of his belief in the equal worth of human beings regardless of rank.