It’s St Patrick’s Day today, so what better time to add this wonderful poem by Seamus Heaney, Irish poet extraordinaire, to Meet At The Gate. Heaney wrote the poem in celebration of Robert Burns, who happens to enjoy his 250th birthday this year, and it’s the opening poem in Canongate’s A Night Out With Robert Burns. There’s always been a close association between Scotland and Ireland, and this poem sums that up perfectly. Enjoy.
A BIRL FOR BURNS by Seamus Heaney
From the start, Burns’ birl and rhythm,
That tongue the Ulster Scots brought wi’ them
And stick to still in County Antrim
Was in my ear.
From east of Bann it westered in
On the Derry air.
My neighbours toved and bummed and blowed,
They happed themselves until it thowed.
By slaps and stiles they thrawed and tholed
And snedded thrissles
And when the rigs were braked and hoed
They’d wet their whistles.
Old men and women getting crabbèd
Would hark like dogs who’d seen a rabbit,
Then straighten, stare and have a stab at
Standard habbie:
Custom never staled their habit
O’ quotin’ Rabbie.
Leg-lifting, heartsome, lightsome Burns!
He overflowed the well-wrought urns
Like buttermilk from slurping churns,
Rich and unruly,
Or dancers flying, doing turns
At some wild hooley.
For Rabbie’s free and Rabbie’s big.
His stanza may be tight and trig
But once he sets the sail and rig,
Away he goes
Like Tam-O-Shanter o’er the brig
Where no one follows.
And though his first tongue’s going, gone,
And word lists now get added on
And even words like stroan and thrawn
Have to be glossed,
In Burns’s rhymes they travel on
And won’t be lost.
