Today is Burns' Day and it struck me that on a message board devoted to the refined and lofty-minded Oxford don, a visit from a coarse, worldly, roughcut diamond like Burns would be a good idea.Robert Burns wrote:O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
I was brought up to revere Burns. I memorized his poems because Grandpa would give me a dollar if I could recite one - and when I was a kid a dollar was a lot of money. (Sorry, codgerette gland kicking in there . . .) Although my paternal grandparents were Scotch (my grandpa never said Scottish), they didn't talk like Burns wrote, or not every much. So Grandpa would explain what all the odd words meant, and some of that knowledge has stuck with me.
But what has stuck with me a lot more is the story of Burns' short and tragic life. He was known as the Ayrshire Ploughman,and when I was a kid I used to think that just meant he, you know, ploughed fields riding a plough behind a team of horses. Now I know what a ploughman had to do in his day, and why he was stooped and crippled from those years of hard labour, and how it killed him young. A hard life, and the "best medical care" of his era.
He enjoyed great success in the salons of Edinburgh, which city was quite the centre for intellectual fire in the late 18th century. He was very handsome, and witty, and able to hold his own in "society". But he was never comfortable with it all, and knew he was often regarded "by his betters" as a trained pig, amazing for being able to do anything clever at all. He was famous for womanizing, too, although his womanizing was not so extensive as people might imagine nowadays. In the strict and puritanical Scotland of his time, his love affairs were terrible scandals and he was censured and lectured and humiliated over them. Still, his love poems are still lovely, and have been made into beautiful songs that I heard all my growing up years.
At any rate, what I was thinking about when I started this thread was a sign I saw on a church yesterday, "What others think of you is none of your business". Now, these church signs often baffle me, they might as well be written in Sanskrit for all I get out of them, they are messages from a world I never entered. This sign puzzled me more than common and I made up my mind to see what Halofirians thought of it.
On the one hand, this church sign says, "What others think of you is none of your business" and Robert Burns says, "O wad some power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us".
Burns' line is from "To a Louse", which is his own "take off" on his immortal "To a Mouse", one of my very favourite poems. "Wee, sleekit cow'rin' tim'rous beastie" it starts, and my little girl's heart just broke for the poor wee thing. It ends with:
Which breaks my heart now.Still thou are blest, compared wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!
To A Louse is different, not so sentimental nor philosophical, but it's just as good as poetry, in the end.
I don't know that I want Some Power to gie me the giftie of knowing what others think of me, but I'm not so sure that it's none of my business. What say you?
