The Influences of Robert Burns

farming

Few readers of Burns' poetry appreciate the rigours of the farming life to which Robert Burns was brought up. Farming in Ayrshire in the latter part of the eighteenth century involved an arduous and demanding routine.

Every detail of farm life can be seen in Burn's poetry, its reflection on farming life gives us a new awareness and context and meaning to what Burns wrote.

We are also given a new realisation of the almost miraculous nature of Burns' achievement. Amid the hard grind of the agricultural labour Burns was able to acquire a rich general education and to engage in a colourful social life. And, most of all, he was able to write his poems. We marvel at the way in which sheer genius broke through the harsh conditions he endured. Well-read, sensitive, perceptive, able to relish the sensitive.

Henry Mackenzie described Burns as a "Heaven-taught ploughman". But we must not forget that he was a working farmer for most of his life, and he acquired his book learning through sheer determination in the midst of arduous physical toil.

Robert Burns was a farmer. It was thus that he supported himself through most of his short life. The world from which he grew was that of the farms and villages of Lowland Scotland.

As a laddie Burns helped at his father's smallholding at Alloway (until 1766), and while still a youth, he was graduating to a man's work at Mount Oliphant, also near Ayr (1766-1777). At Lochlie near Tarbolton, he shared the work fully with his father William and brother Gilbert (1777-1784). On his father's death he moved to Mossgeil, near Mauchline, where he shared the tenancy with Gilbert (see fig 1.)

Figure 1.
Lochlea Farm
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