Why this Robert Burns classic is a masterpiece

Nanny and her friends are not happy to hear that. Tam has to flee on horseback with a crowd of witches chasing after them while shouting “eerie shrieks and hollers.” Fortunately for him, the witch cannot cross running water and the River Doune is nearby. Tam manages to run across the bridge to safety, but her horse Maggie is not so lucky. Nanny grabbed her tail just before she set foot on the Brig O Doune, and spoiler alert, she was left with “almost a stump.”

Rude jokes and gruesome images

Carruthers calls the work “a fairly conventional ghost story plot”, but the way Burns tells his story means that “there is no other poem like it in Scottish literature”. Tam O’Shanter is “incredibly rich, very visual, very carefully crafted and very well-paced,” McKay told the BBC. “There’s so much here. The way Burns absorbed and assimilated the landscape and folklore of Ayrshire, where he was born, and Dumfriesshire, where he wrote, and from his intense interest in the supernatural to the various comments he made about the complexities of human relationships and gender, it’s all so fascinating.”

Some of the lines are in Scottish, and some are in English. There are some dirty jokes and some chilling and creepy depictions. Here is a tribute to the joys of getting drunk with friends in a cozy pub. “Blessed may the king be, but Tam was glorious. / Sickness and life are triumphs!” and there are heartbreaking philosophical musings on how temporary those joys are: “But joy is like a poppy that spreads / You catch the flower, and it scatters.” At times, the narrator addresses Tam himself, saying, “Oh, Tam, you were so wise, you took your wife Kate’s advice!” Sometimes it speaks to another character or reader/listener. Irvine says the poem is “performance-friendly” and one of the reasons it has become a Burns Supper staple.

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In fact, there’s not much that Burns hasn’t done with Tam O’Shanter. And he does everything in rhyming iambic tetrameter. “He’s showing off,” Irvine said. “He’s doing one thing and he’s saying, ‘Look, this can also be another thing.'” In the first volume of his poems, he does that between one poem and the next. He employs a variety of poetic genres, switches from Scots to English, and borrows from all kinds of different traditions, both what we now think of as folk traditions and the literary traditions of England and Scotland. It’s a clever representation of all the different things he can do. And in Tam O’Shanter, he expresses all of this in one poem. ”