Robert Burns Explained

When you live in an idyllic agrarian society, populated largely by comely shepherds and shepherdesses, and your words for cattle, sheep, and meadows all rhyme, it's practically impossible not to be a poet.

Yesterday I had KUT on in the car, and on Eklektikos, John Aielli played a favorite Scottish song of mine. The singer had redone the lyrics slightly and altered the overall meaning. As she performed it, it's about a young woman who fell in love and married and moved away, and now longs, homesick, for the life she left behind. It's beautifully plaintive and wistful.

O the broom, the bonny bonny broom,
The broom o' the Cowdenknowes,
Fain would I be in my ain country,
Tending my father's yowes.

We got back to the house halfway through the song, but sat to listen to the rest of it, and on the last verse, sitting next to my dad in the car, I found my eyes brimming over. For what, I don't know. My ain country is currently under several feet of snow, and anyway I never lived there. And my dad doesn't even own sheep. I'd have no idea how to herd them if he did.

I guess nobody ever said poetry had to make sense.