Poems and Songs of Robert Burns

Summary

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. His career as a poet began with Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, printed at Kilmarnock in 1786, which included The Twa Dogs, The Holy Fair, Address to the Deil, The Cotter's Saturday Night, To a Mouse, To a Louse and To a Mountain Daisy. The Edinburgh edition of 1787 added Address to a Haggis and other pieces. Later came Tam o' Shanter (1791) and the hundreds of songs he wrote or repaired for The Scots Musical Museum and George Thomson's Select Scottish Airs, including Auld Lang Syne, John Anderson, My Jo, Ae Fond Kiss, A Red, Red Rose, Scots Wha Hae and A Man's a Man for A' That. Burns writes in a mixture of Scots and English. His Scots poems are full of farm life, animals, kirk and market, and his songs range from love lyrics to drinking songs and patriotic anthems. He also wrote prayers and psalm paraphrases from times of illness, and sharp satires on self-righteous piety in the strict Calvinist party of the Kirk, above all Holy Willie's Prayer. The volume is not a children's book. It includes bawdy and drinking pieces, verses about Burns's own children born outside marriage, and The Jolly Beggars, a cantata of vagrants. Teachers should choose from it, beginning with the widely taught poems listed above, which are also in the library as separate works. Read in selection, it shows a poet of great tenderness, humour and moral seriousness who was also a sinner, and whom Christian readers can honour honestly, as Carlyle tried to do.

Top Lessons

• Reading a whole poet

  A chronological collection shows a writer growing and changing. Students can watch Burns move from farm verse to national song.

• Satire and sincerity

  Holy Willie's Prayer mocks a self-righteous elder who prays for his neighbours' ruin, while The Cotter's Saturday Night honours real piety. Burns attacks false religion more than faith itself.

• Honouring a flawed poet

  Burns's life included drink and sexual sin, and some poems reflect it. The collection asks how to receive great art from a fallen man.

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