Robert Burns

1759-1796

Robert Burns is Scotland's greatest poet. He is more than that; he is the great national hero of the Scottish people. All over Scotland one finds monuments and other memorials created in his honour.

Burns was born at Alloway in south-western Scotland, in 1759. His father, a tenant farmer, who had built with his own hands the clay cottage in which the poet was born, was an intelligent man of admirable character, but never successfulin his calling. Burns had a few years of schooling, during which he read all the stray books on which he could lay his hands and acquired a fair reading knowledge of French. But when he was a lad of fifteen, he was already doing the full work of a farm labourer. One must never forget that Burns was a peasant, though a very extraordinary one. Until he was 28 he had never travelled more than ten miles from his birthplace. His poems and songs were written in the first instance for his friends and neighbours in rural Scotland. Discouraged by the hardships and poverty of his life, he decided to immigrate to Jamaica. To raise money for his voyage, he published in 1786, at the nearby town of Kilmarnock, a collection of his poems. It cleared him 20 pounds, and made a small sensation. This edition exhausted, he decided to print another, this time at Edinburgh, where the fame of his Kilmarnock volume has already spread.

Later Burns went himself to Edinburgh. The Edinburgh edition of 1787 brought him in life hundred pounds. His Edinburgh (Heads got him an appointment in the excise service, where he was to measure beer barrels and prevent smuggling. [27] He took a farm at El (island near Dumfries, and combined farming with his duties as exciseman. There, and later at the town of Dumfries, he lived for the 10 years composing in his leisure time the songs which are the most popular part of his work. For them he refused to receive any remuneration, they were done for old Scotland's sake, as a patriotic service of love. These years were not happy. His duties in the excise did not interest him; his outspoken sympathy with the cause of the French Revolution prevented rapid advancement. The old poverty was closing in about him. In 1796 he died, a disappointed man, only 37 years old, and Scotland lost her most famous poet.

His poetry deals almost exclusively with his own day and his own immediate surroundings. He has a keen eye for some of the beauties of natural scenery-flowing streams, trees waving in the wind, nature in motion.

There is a little description of natural scenery for its own sake; nature is but a pleasant background for the daily life of man. Burns' theme was "the sentiments and manners he felt and saw in himself and his rustic compeers around him". These he portrays clear insight and vivid realism, even to the most sordid details.

The "Jolly Beggars" is in some way Burns' masterpiece. The poet once entered in his commonplace book the observation "that every man, even the worst, has something good about him". In this poem he has taken humanity at its lowest pitch of wretched squalor, and chosen for his setting a disreputable and dirty tavern. He has concealed nothing, and had made no apologies; but he has found in his beggars gaiety and courage, which is not mere bravado. It was written in 1785, but was not published till after the poet's death.

A lot of Burn's poems were successfully translated into Russian and Ukrainian by V. Mayakovsky, S.Marshak, I. Kozlov, N. Kostomarov, T. Shevchenko, P. Grabovsky, I. Franko, E. Bagritsky, T.Shchepkina-Kupernik.