Robert Burns

Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796), familiarly known as Rabbie Burns, was a Scottish poet and lyricist, and is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland. He lived in the later eighteenth century, writing in Scots, in a light Scots dialect of English, and in standard English. That range helped his work reach readers beyond Scotland, while keeping close to the speech, songs, and habits of Scottish life.

Burns was born in Alloway, Ayrshire, the eldest of seven children of William Burnes, a self-educated tenant farmer, and Agnes Broun, the daughter of a Kirkoswald tenant farmer. He grew up in poverty and hardship, first in the cottage built by his father and then at Mount Oliphant farm, where severe manual labour left marks on his health. His schooling was irregular, but rich in its own way: his father taught reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history, and John Murdoch taught him Latin, French, and mathematics.

By fifteen, Burns was the principal labourer at Mount Oliphant. The people around him soon found their way into his writing. Nelly Kilpatrick inspired his first attempt at poetry, “O, Once I Lov’d A Bonnie Lass,” and Peggy Thompson was the subject of two songs, “Now Westlin’ Winds” and “I Dream’d I Lay.” In Tarbolton he joined a country dancing school, helped form the Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club with his brother Gilbert, and was initiated into the Masonic lodge St David in 1781.

Farm life brought continuing strain. William Burnes moved the family from farm to farm without improving their circumstances, and after his death in 1784 Robert and Gilbert struggled to keep going before moving to Mossgiel Farm near Mauchline. Burns’s lack of success as a farmer brought financial difficulty, and he accepted a job offer connected to sugar plantations near Port Antonio, Jamaica, as a book-keeper whose duties included serving as an assistant overseer to enslaved Black workers. During these years he kept writing poems and songs, encouraged in part by his friend Richard Brown.

Burns is best known for poems and songs that remain part of public memory: “Auld Lang Syne” (1788), often sung at Hogmanay; “Scots Wha Hae” (1793), long used as an unofficial national anthem of Scotland; “To a Mouse” (1785); “To a Louse” (1786); “Tam o’ Shanter” (1790); “Ae Fond Kiss” (1791); “A Red, Red Rose” (1794); and “A Man’s a Man for A’ That” (1795). He also collected folk songs across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. After his death he was seen as a pioneer of the Romantic movement and became an inspiration to founders of both liberalism and socialism. His words still carry because they join song, speech, wit, hardship, affection, and blunt civil feeling in lines made to be remembered aloud.