Scotland's National Poet, Robert Burns had a birthday just this last weekend. Well, he's dead, but you understand. Me and my friends, each year, celebrate Burns Night, a worldwide dinner party in honor of Burns.
I was asked to give The Immortal Memory, a portion of the evening in which one gives a brief overview of Burns' life and times. Here it is for your edification:Tonight we celebrate the life of Scotland’s favorite son, the Ploughman Poet, the Bard of Ayrshire, the National Poet of Scotland, the famed Scribe with Syphilis. He’s celebrated worldwide, Burns is and, talking about burning, he had that sensation when peeing, due to the syphilis.
Burns was born January 25th, 1759 in Ayr, Scotland. He was the eldest of seven children. There was Robert, Robbie, Rabbie, Roberta, Robesy, Bert, and Cripple Sam. His father was William, a self-educated tenant farmer. His mother was Victoria Tennant.
Burns, the syphilitic poet, as a youngster, worked on a 70-acre farm. He grew up in poverty and hardship, and the severe manual labor lefts its traces in a premature stoop, a weakened constitution, constipation, boils, piles, tuberculosis, Crohn’s Disease, diphtheria, wisteria, gall stones, a prehensile tail, scabies, rickets, rabies, mumps, a hunchback, dropsy, droopsy, and, well, the syphilis, acquired from various and copious amounts of copulations, including his favorite sexual position, something he called “Forking the Hay.”
With little formal schooling, his father taught all the children, even that stupid cripple one, reading, writing, arithmetic, math, geography, history, and wrote two books to help with their studies,
A Manual of Christian Belief and
Fun with Fiber, subtitled Poop Like You Mean It.
At the age of 15, Robert Burns was the principal laborer on the farm and was also the lead lute player for the Scottish Tenant Farmers Association thrash metal band, Flaxie and the Flax Gatherers.
It was at this time that Burns turned sissy and started writing sissy poems. Poetry is for sissies. Burns, what with the rickets and scabies and all, was made fun enough by the other farm laborers (Dell, Dill, Don, Doc, Spanky O’Hoolihan) that they felt making even more fun of him and his love of sissy poems would send him over the edge. Little did they know that he was already teetering on that edge because the syphilis was eating up his brain, big time.
His sissy image did not improve when, in 1779, he joined a country dancing school in Tarbolton, Scotland. He was a good dancer, even with the stunted leg and iron lung. He began writing more sissy poems and songs, courting Alison Begbie. He forked the hay with her and wanted to marry her. She rejected him, calling him a sissy and asked that he get his genital condition looked at.
Continuing farm life, and a brief ever exciting foray as flax dresser, Burns wrote poems and songs for a Commonplace Book in 1783 but mainly the poems were to get girls to sleep with him – that rascally syphilitic boy!
Indeed, Robert Burns’ love affairs were many. Jean Armour he was amorous with. The daughter of a stonemason, she was beautiful and well-regarded in the community for her unibrow. His mother’s servant, Elizabeth Paton, was also his lover, and gave him his first, of 4393 illegitimate bastard kids, named Elizabeth Bastardina Burns (1785-1817). Then this Armour lady married him and gave birth to nine more Burns kids – Bastard I, Bastard II, Bastard III, Bastie, Illegitimate Boy, Bratty, Snotnose, Runt, and Steve.
There were more women as Burns tried to get a patent for his mighty sperm. Thinking he could produce great sperm due to a regiment of cold soaks, beer drinking, hyperbolic sleep, and a masturbatory exercise he called “Picking the Mountain Daisy,” he bottled and sold his sperm from village to village. He made little money at this and his groin became strained to the point of him stooping at all times, even during Scotland's national anti-stooping campaign of 1786. Three surgeries later he was able to not stoop but he still had the syphilis and that must have sucked.
He had an affair with Mary Campbell. Poems were dedicated to her – “The Highland Lassie O, Highland Lassy,” and “To Mary in Heaven,” and “Mary, My Loins Are On Fire.” This was literal.
His first book of poetry, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, was published to great acclaim. “This sissy can write!” cheered the Edenborough Post. “For a self-taught syphilitic ploughman who sells his sperm from village to village, he’s a fine poet,” noted the Glasgow Gazette.
Published in 1786, the book included much of his best writings, including “The Twa Dogs,” “The Two Dogs,” “The Dog Duo,” “The Cutter’s Saturday Night,” “Address to the Deil,” and “Address To Those Who Don’t Know What the Hell a Deil Is.”
He got famous, Robert Burns did. Traveling aristocratic circles in Scotland’s capital, he was hailed as a brilliant man of letters. Women swooned, like Agnes McLehose and Jenny Clow, who born him, yes, another bastard.
Still a farmer, more prosperous now than ever before, he wrote “Tam O’ Shanter” in 1790. The first draft, “Tam O’Shatner” was utter crap. Asked then to write lyrics for The Melodies of Scotland he contributed over 100 songs. It is these contributions (other than his mighty sperm) in which his immortality lies – being one of the best lyric poets to ever live. He wrote, for example, “Beat It,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and most of the Ace of Base catalogue.
He also sought to collect and preserve Scottish folk songs, including the collection The Merry Muses of Caledonia, a collection of bawdy lyrics popular in Scottish music halls at the time. 80% of these songs, however, were about forking hay, and touting, via rhyme, his Magical Sperm Enhancement Elixir (trademark sign here) that he sold with his bottled sperm. As a free gift, he often included either free beef or one of his bastard kids.
Many of Burns’ most famous poems, by the way, are songs with music based on older songs. “Auld Lang Syne” (translation: Old Lungs of Mine, Filled with the Soot of Unfiltered Cigarettes) is set to the traditional tune of “Can Ye Labour Lea.” “A Red, Red Rose” (translation: a really red rose) is set to the tune of “Major Graham.”
His songs struck on many themes including republicanism, radicalism, the Bull Moose Party, patriotism, cheese, anticlericalism, class inequities, rickets, gender roles, bocce ball, sexual mores, poverty, goats, cultural identity, socialism, Scottish self-government, autoerotica, liberalism, and Moncheechees.
A Romantic poet, Burns influenced William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, all sorts of bastard kids, women tainted with STDs, tenant farmers, and stakeholders of his Magical Sperm Enhancement Elixir (trademark sign here).
He was a Freemason and became Deputy Master. He was also an Elk, Moose, an Eagle, a Shriner, an Odd Fellow, and started the International Helper of Peoples (IHOP).
He was well-regarded in Freemason circles in his later years. Masons who were not free pined to be so. Slave Masons, though not as highly regarded as Freemasons, have made many contributions to our world including inventing Velcro.
Robert Burns died, in 1795. The cause was bacterial endocarditis exacerbated by a streptococcal infection reaching his blood following a dental extraction (he refused the Castrato Procedure). He was 37 years old. On the day of his funeral, one of his bastard kids was born. Seriously.
He’s everyone now, Robert Burns. Actually, no, that’s not true. His syphilitic body is mouldering in a mausoleum in Dumfries. But he’s on stamps! And this year he’ll even be on a two pound coin. That’s a heavy coin and it will probably rip the seam off of many pant pockets and people will probably, when buying new pants, call him a bastard for ripping their old pants. It’s fitting, really.
