Poems and Songs of Robert Burns

About the book

This gathering of Burns's poems and songs is arranged through successive years, allowing familiar lyrics to stand beside occasional pieces, epistles, satires, and experiments. Rural work and local society provide much of its material, but the range extends through desire, friendship, religious dispute, inequality, political feeling, and the vulnerability of living creatures. Scots and English contribute different resources to a voice that can be intimate, mocking, defiant, or tender. Song forms make repetition and musical movement important even when the words are read silently. Rather than reducing Burns to a handful of celebrated pieces, the collection lets readers encounter changes of occasion and audience. Its variety shows how an apparently local remark can open into a larger judgment about dignity, shared feeling, or the pretensions of rank.

• Fellowship
• Social equality
• Love and rural life

Why read it

For the range behind the familiar songs, including the sharp social observer and the poet attentive to ordinary vulnerability.

Chronologically arranged poems and songs · Scots and English text