1759 Burns is the only author in the English language to have an annual revel – or booze-up – dedicated to him by name. Not that he is the only toper to be found in the annals of literature. One could, as plausibly, have a Ben Jonson Night (after a particularly heavy evening, one of the ‘Tribe of Ben’ would be assigned to take their chief home in a wheelbarrow); a Dylan Thomas Night (Thomas came up with the drinker’s favourite epigram: ‘An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do’); or an Ernest Hemingway Night (Hemingway it was who uttered the drinker’s favourite maxim: ‘A man does not exist until he is drunk’).
Burns Night (commonly known as ‘Burns Supper’ by those who celebrate it) takes place only three weeks after that other massive Scottish drinking session, Hogmanay. 25 January is Burns’ birthday. The first celebratory events, in his native Ayrshire, took place on his death-day – 21 July. But so long are the Scottish summer days, and so demanding work in the briefly arable fields, that July pushed the nocturnal conviviality uncomfortably far into the night. It was switched to midwinter.
Hogmanay is an ‘open’ revel. In the cities of Scotland (as all over the world, where the Christian calendar rules) there are street parties. All shutters are lifted. In Scotland, every door is opened for the ‘first footing’ by some dark-haired stranger. One of the more comical cultural spectacles of the first minutes of the New Year is watching non- Scots (and, indeed, many natives) bellowing out Burns’ most famous anthem, with no more idea of what
And we’ll take a right guid willie-waught,
For auld lang syne.
means than if the poet had written in Sanskrit. Willie-waught?
Burns Supper, by contrast, is a closed or ‘club’ event – restricted to knowledgeable members (particularly Scots of the diaspora, who form nostalgic Caledonian societies), and highly ritualised. It is also, in Scotland, a Lowland, not a Highland event – and most enthusiastically commemorated in Burns’ western region.
A haggis soaked in whisky is piped in ceremonially and apostrophised, in mock reverence, as the company stands:
Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o’ the puddin-race!
Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o’ a grace
As lang’s my arm.
Toasts are drunk – loyally to the monarch (the Lowlands, contrary to what is vulgarly believed by non-Scots, did not join those bare-arsed Celts in their mad 1715 and 1745 rebellions against the Crown) and lasciviously to the ‘Lassies’. Burns was as famous a wencher as he was a carouser. Wheelbarrows are normally called around one o’clock on the 26th.
As a British writer (in addition to his dialect poetry he wrote verse in the King’s English – without much applause) Burns is the most famous ‘peasant poet’ in the language. But what is his language? ‘Lallans’ [lowland Scots dialect]. Poets of a radical persuasion (notably Hugh MacDiarmid) – who have co-opted Burns as a fellow Anglophobic republican – have made attempts to restore Scottish poetry to the pure, Burnsian fount of the native tongue and have failed. As devolution, and possible independence, reshapes the country’s destiny Lallans may yet assert itself as the lingua Caledonia.