Name/TitleThe Women of the Poets - Burns
MakerBurns, Robert
Maker RolePoet
About this objectSmall booklet titled 'The Women of the Poets: A Selection from BURNS in Praise of WOMAN.' The booklet includes a colour plate captioned 'Mary', followed by these verses:
- My Love is Like a Red Rose
- Prayer for Mary
- To Mary in Heaven
- Epitaph on the Poet's Daughter
- The Posie
- On Cessnock Banks
- Elegy on the Late Miss Burnett
- The Highland Lassie
- Mary Morison
- My Nannie O
- O Mally's Meek, Mally's Sweet
- Answer to Verses Addressed to the Poet
- She's Fair and Fause
- Young Peggy
- On Seeing Miss Fontenelle
- To a Young Lady, Miss Jessy Leward, Dumfries
- Phyllis the Fair
- Peggy's Charms
- My Chloris
- To Miss Logan, with Beatties's Poems
- Verses to a Young Lady (Miss Graham, of Fintry)
Fully digitised (34 pages)
Medium and MaterialsOrganic, paper
MeasurementsH: 154 x W: 90 mm
Date Madec.1910
Period1910s-1920s
Place MadeEngland, London
PublisherSimpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co Ltd
Publication Datec.1910
Publication PlaceEngland, London
Series TitleThe Women of the Poets
Subject and Association Descriptionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Burns:
Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796), also known familiarly as Rabbie Burns, was a Scottish poet and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is in a "light Scots dialect" of English, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these writings his political or civil commentary is often at its bluntest.
Love affairs
His first child, Elizabeth "Bess" Burns, was born to his mother's servant, Elizabeth Paton, while he was embarking on a relationship with Jean Armour, who became pregnant with twins in March 1786. Burns signed a paper attesting his marriage to Jean, but her father "was in the greatest distress, and fainted away". To avoid disgrace, her parents sent her to live with her uncle in Paisley. Although Armour's father initially forbade it, they were married in 1788. Armour bore him nine children, three of whom survived infancy.
Burns had encountered financial difficulties due to his lack of success as a farmer. In order to make enough money to support a family, he accepted a job offer from Patrick Douglas, an absentee landowner who lived in Cumnock, to work on his sugar plantations near Port Antonio, Jamaica. Douglas' plantations were managed by his brother Charles, and the job offer, which had a salary of £30 per annum, entailed working in Jamaica as a "book-keeper", whose duties included serving as an assistant overseer to the Black slaves on the plantations (Burns himself described the position as being "a poor Negro driver"). The position, which was for a single man, would entail Burns living on a plantation in rustic conditions, as it was unlikely a book keeper would be housed in the plantation's great house. Apologists have argued in Burns' defence that in 1786, the Scottish abolitionist movement was just beginning to be broadly active. Burns's authorship of "The Slave's Lament", a 1792 poem argued as an example of his abolitionist views, is disputed. His name is absent from any abolitionist petition written in Scotland during the period, and according to academic Lisa Williams, Burns "is strangely silent on the question of chattel slavery compared to other contemporary poets. Perhaps this was due to his government position, severe limitations on free speech at the time or his association with beneficiaries of the slave trade system".
Around the same time, Burns fell in love with a woman named Mary Campbell, whom he had seen in church while he was still living in Tarbolton. She was born near Dunoon and had lived in Campbeltown before moving to work in Ayrshire. He dedicated the poems "The Highland Lassie O", "Highland Mary", and "To Mary in Heaven" to her. His song "Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary, And leave auld Scotia's shore?" suggests that they planned to emigrate to Jamaica together. Their relationship has been the subject of much conjecture, and it has been suggested that on 14 May 1786 they exchanged Bibles and plighted their troth over the Water of Fail in a traditional form of marriage. Soon afterwards Mary Campbell left her work in Ayrshire, went to the seaport of Greenock, and sailed home to her parents in Campbeltown. In October 1786, Mary and her father sailed from Campbeltown to visit her brother in Greenock. Her brother fell ill with typhus, which she also caught while nursing him. She died of typhus on 20 or 21 October 1786 and was buried there.
Subject and Association Keywordspoetry & verse
Subject and Association Keywordsfemale relationships
Subject and Association Keywordsslavery, slave trade
Named CollectionGlasgow Women's Library
Object TypeBooklet
Object numberGWL-2016-132
Copyright LicenceAll rights reserved