Burns, Robert

Although Robert Burns (1759–1796) is Scotland’s national poet, famous for such lyrics as “My luve is a like a red, red rose” and the globally institutional “Auld Lang Syne,” he wrote a considerable volume of bawdy lyrics, some published after his death under the title of The Merry Muses of Caledonia (1799/1800). This collection contains some surprising anticipations of modern obscenity. His “Ode to Spring” inverts hierarchy by starting earthily: When maukin bucks [male hares], at early f?ks,
In dewy glens are seen, sir;

before introducing mythological figures like Latona, who waits

Till his p-go [pego, i.e., penis] rise, then westward flies
To r-ger Madame Thetis.
(ll. 1-8)

“Libel Summons” describes a male lover who “Defrauds her wi’ a frig or dry-bob” (l. 22). (A dry-bob is defined by Burns’s friend Francis Grose ¹⁷⁸⁵ as “copulation without emis
sion.”) Many poems adopt the persona of a brazen chauvinist under titles such as “The Fornicator” and the scorned “Hen-peck’d Husband,” the “I” claiming that “I’d kiss her maids and kick the perverse b?h” (l. 10). “A Fragment” to the chorus of “Green grow the rushes O” jauntily recalls “I fairly fun [found] her c-ntie, O” (l. 16). The song “I’ll tell you a tale of a Wife” has eleven quatrains in which the last word (unprinted) rhymes with “runt” and “brunt.” Following the tradition of William Dunbar, Burns includes a sexually eager woman who frankly states that “Nine inch will please a lady,” continuing:

But for a koontrie c-nt like mine,
          In sooth, we’re nae sae gentle;
We’ll tak tway [two] thumb-bread to the nine,
          And that’s a sonsy pintle [handsome penis]
(“Come rede me, dame,” ll. 9-12)

Rightly regarded as the poet of the common man, Burns audaciously comments on the philandering of the European aristocracy in a poem named after its chorus, which runs “And why should na poor folk mowe mowe mowe.” Mow is a northern dialect and Scots word, now rare, meaning “copulate,” juxtaposed in the following couplet with a more modern formation:

Burns also wrote a quite lengthy poetic “Address to the Deil” [Devil] with a mocking tone, of how “Ye cam to Paradise incog” to “Eden’s bonie yard,” using a whole range of honorific titles, covered in the entry for Devil.