[BITList] Two new Burns poems discovered alongside 'rude' letters

[Michael Feltham]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "guardian.co.uk" <noreply at guardian.co.uk>
Date: 15 December 2008 20:37:39 GMT
To: mj.feltham at madasafish.com
Subject: [From: Mike Feltham] Two new Burns poems discovered alongside  
'rude' letters

Mike Feltham spotted this on the guardian.co.uk site and thought you  
should see it.

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Note from Mike Feltham:

Any Takers ?
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To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site,  
go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/dec/15/robert-burns-letters-discovered

Two new Burns poems discovered alongside 'rude' letters
Alison Flood
Monday December 15 2008
guardian.co.uk


His love might have been like a red red rose, but it turns out that  
Robert Burns may also have been suffering from a rather nasty STD,  
according to a collection of explicit writing apparently by Scotland's  
national bard, due to go on sale in January 2009.

The poems and letters, which cast a different light on the man known  
for his romantic verse including "Ae fond kiss and then we sever",  
reportedly see Burns refer to his children as "bastards", and complain  
about not being able to ride his horse due to a sexually transmitted  
disease.

Their owner, who wishes to remain anonymous, found them in his  
mother's home a decade ago, but decided to wait until the 250th  
anniversary of Burns's birth next month before putting them up for  
sale. The collection, which runs to 25 pages, is made up of letters  
Burns sent to his friend, the Edinburgh lawyer Robert Ainslie, between  
1787 and 1789, as well as two poems.

The Burns biographer Patrick Scott Hogg was asked by a member of his  
local Burns society to take a look at the letters for the owner. "I  
expected to be highly sceptical," said Hogg. "I went thinking it was a  
sort of joke."

But after holding the papers, which he described as "ancient, falling  
apart", up to the light, he saw a watermark indicating they were  
copied in 1794. He then showed them to Burns specialists and  
manuscript experts to authenticate the writing, and later transcribed  
them. "It was like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle," he said.

Burns writes in the letters about his relationships with two women,  
and describes a miserable journey to Glasgow in a sonnet:

I lately made a journey to Glasgow
O had I stayed and said my prayers at hame
Curst be that night as annual it returns
That led astray the luckless poet B
May thickening fogs by sickly east winds driven
Foul cover Earth and blot the face of Heaven.

"It's a pretty reasonable sonnet about a journey to visit a woman,"  
said  Hogg. "Burns got drenched and wished he'd stayed at home."

The second poem is a paraphrase of one of the psalms. "It's not," Hogg  
admitted, "what you'd call a fantastic piece of poetry."

The owner is taking the collection to the National Library of Scotland  
later this week for further authentication, before putting them on  
sale next month. Though Hogg is hoping that they will not travel much  
further.

"I was hoping personally that they'd end up [in the National  
Library]," he said. "Anything to do with the national bard, I would  
prefer it to go to one of the national libraries."

Peter Westwood, a director of the Robert Burns World Federation and  
editor of The Burns Chronicle, acknowledged the authenticity of the  
letters, but said he was dismayed that the owner was making them  
public just before the poet's 250th anniversary. "Burns's letters to  
Ainslie were quite often very rude and not for public view," he said.  
"It's rather disappointing that whoever's organising this decided to  
bring them out when we're about to celebrate his 250th anniversary."

Interest in the Scottish bard is building towards a peak on Burns  
Night on 25 January, with five "rediscovered" Burns poems due to be  
published in a collection edited by the Burns scholar Robert Crawford  
next month.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008

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