Inspiring bold John Barleycorn!
What dangers thou canst make us scorn!
Wi' tippeny, we fear nae evil;
Wi' usquabae, we'll face the devil!--

The 25th has come again, the bard's birthday. In years past, when I was still working and relatively prosperous, I used to host Burn's Nights that filled the house with cheer and clinking glasses. Tonight it's just me but it's non the less sincere as I avail myself of the excuse to imbibe a decent malt and revisit my favourites from his works. Burns Night was long ago hijacked by the White Heather Club/Walter Scott reinvention of Scottishness, coothie, twee, tourist nonsense full of tartan and over sentimentalised orchestral arrangements of his songs, unconnected and stripped of meaning, the occasion has been co-opted by the upper classes who use it as a costume party, the very people Burns despised and skewered with his words, the only piece of his writing in attendance "The Address to the Haggis" rendered as a quaint comic turn. I've been reading Burns since I was 14 and the older I get the more I like him and the more I get out of his poetry. My favourite piece, as I've posted before on blip, has got to be "Is there for honest poverty (A man's a man for a' that)" http://allpoetry.com/A-Man%27s-A-Man-For-A%27-That his great egalitarian anthem but there's so much more; from heartfelt explorations of the plight of humanity such as that contained in "To a mouse..." (http://www.robertburns.org/works/75.shtml) , usually reduced to the mockery of its opening line "Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie" beloved of scottish accent imitators the world over, to biting satire of self righteous hypocrisy such as "Holy Willie'sPrayer" (http://www.robertburns.org/works/58.shtml), and so much more besides. If you've been put off by the pageantry and nonsense that obscures the actual man I'd reccomend you take another look at him.
I shall close with a letter from the man himself to a hostile reviewer who had criticised him for his grammar and use of "obscure" Scottish words:

Ellisland, 1791.

Dear Sir:

Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed; thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice; thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory; thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity; thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender; thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology; thou antipode of grammar; thou executioner of construction; thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded; thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense; thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom; thou persecutor of syllabication; thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.

R.B.