The Life Of Robert Burns
The Early Years
The birth of Robert Burns
Robert Burns was born into a family split by poverty. After a run of disasters Robert Burness, Burns's grandfather lost the family farm - Clochanhi, and was left with nothing to support him but the charity of his sons.
They scattered in all directions, as Gilbert - the future brother of Robert Burns said:
"..each of us going off his several way in search of adventures, and scarcely knowing whither he went. My father undertook to act as gardener and shaped his course to Edinburgh, where he wrought hard when he could get work, passing through a variety of difficulties".
Burn's father went on to settle in Ayrshire where he obtained a holding of seven and a half acres at Alloway, and on it he built a two-roomed cottage out of clay and thatch.
Burn's father on the what appears to be a hasty completion of his cottage went on to take a bride, Agnes Broun, daughter of a tenant farmer in the neighbourhood. Agnes was 12 years younger than Robert. In their new home Agnes gave birth to their son Robert on 25 January 1759.
Agnes would sing folk-songs to young Robert, and read extracts from the Bible, although able to read his mother was unable to write. Robert writes of his mother:
"In my infant and boyish days I owed much to an old maid of my mothers's, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery. This cultivated the latest seeds of Poesy."
Burns's father was extremely religious and intellectual, writing a Manual of Religious Belief in which the child questions his parent.
Robert and Agnes had three more children; The other children were Gilbert (1760-1827), Agnes (b1762), Arabella (b1764), John (1769-86), William (d1790) and Isabella (married name Begg).
Robert starts school under the tuition of John Murdoch
Robert received a conventional education from the age of six, walking the mile long journey to the little school of Alloway with his younger brother Gilbert. His father took an active role in his children's education, going as far as interviewing for a new teacher, John Murdoch.
So Robert received quite a different education from his conventional intellectual father to his mother who introduced him to the enchanted world of giants and brownies and such like.
The teacher John Murdoch says of young Burns at this time:
"My pupil Robert Burns was between six and seven years of age; his preceptor about eighteen. Robert and his younger brother Gilbert had been grounded a little in English before they were put under my care. They both made rapid progress in reading, and a tolerable progress in writing … Robert and Gilbert were generally at the upper end of the class, even when ranged with boys by far their seniors." Although Mr Murdoch acknowledged the brothers ability he went onto say:
Gilbert always appeared to me to possess a more lively imagination, and to be more of a wit than Robert. I attempted to teach them a little church music. Here they were left behind by all the rest of the school. Robert's ear, in particular, was remarkably dull, and his voice untenable. It was long before I could get them to distinguish one tune from another."
Passion for the written word
The joy of reading began early for Robert as he remembers:
"The two first books I ever read in private, and which gave me more pleasure than any two books I ever read again, were The Life of Hannibal and The History of Sir William Wallace. Hannibal gave my young ideas such a turn that I used to strut in raptures up and down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe, and wish myself tall enough that I might be a soldier; while the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice into my veins which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest."
Mount Oliphant and life in poverty
While the two boys attended the school at Alloway, their father was making a living as a market Gardner. But like his father before him he was determined to exchange his occupation as a gardener for the status of tenant farmer, with equally catastrophic results. In 1765 he offered to lease a seventy acre farm two miles from Alloway called Mount Oliphant. But the soil was poor, something that his father overlooked, his sons bore the brunt of this mistake because their father was no longer young and was in bad health. As Gilbert recalled:
"We lived sparingly. For several years butcher's meat was a stranger in the house, while all members of the family exerted themselves to the utmost of their strength, and rather beyond it, in the labours of the farm. My brother at the age of thirteen assisted in threshing the crop of corn, and at fifteen was the principle labourer on the farm, for we had no hired servant, male or female. The anguish of mind we felt at our tender years, under these straits and difficulties, was very great."
It could have been the strain put on his heart during these times that caused the condition endocarditis which ended up killing him and we lost Scotland's greatest poet
Stirrings of First Love
When Robert was fourteen, he worked the harvest beside a girl called Nelly Kirkpatrick, of this he writes how he wondered:
"why my pulse beat such a furious ratann when I looked over her hand, to pick out the nettle-stings and thistles. Among her other love-inspiring qualifications, she sung sweetly; and 'twas her favourite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme".
And she is remembered in Roberts earliest surviving verses.
A bonny lass I will confess
Is pleasant to the e'e,
But without some better qualities
She's no a lass for me
But Nelly's looks looks are blythe and sweet,
And what is best of a',
Her reputation is compleat,
And flair without a flaw.
From O once I lov'd
