Tam O’Shanter: A Poem by Robert Burns
One of Burns’s longer poems, but a highly entertaining one
Robert Burns (1759–96) is best known for his short poems in lowland Scots dialect, many of which were written during the years 1785 and 1786 and published in Kilmarnock in 1786 as “Poems Chiefly in the Scottish dialect”, the volume generally being known as “the Kilmarnock edition”. However, he later composed and edited many songs and ballads, some in dialect and others not, that are generally less well known although they do include some that are very well known indeed, such as “Auld Lang Syne” and “Scots Wha Hae”. One of these later poems is “Tam o’ Shanter” which, at 228 lines, is one of the longest poems Burns ever wrote.
Burns was keen that the antiquarian Francis Grose should include a drawing of Alloway Auld Kirk in his new book of “Antiquities of Scotland”, because the church, which was already a ruin in Burns’s time, was close to his childhood home and was where his father was buried in the churchyard. Grose replied that he would be happy to include the drawing as long as Burns wrote a poem to accompany it. The result, which was published in Grose’s book in 1791, but had been written in 1790, was “Tam o’ Shanter”. It was later reprinted in the Edinburgh Herald and the Edinburgh Magazine.
