Makar Mondays: Mary Morrison by Robert Burns
Channel: Saint Andrew's Society of San Francisco
Date: 2021-03-01

This week on Makar Mondays, Willie Hardie gives us a rendition of “Mary Morrison” written by Robert Burns

It is possible that Burns brief infatuation for Alison Begbie was responsible for this, the finest of his early songs, written prior to The Kilmarnock Volume but not included and in fact was sent to Thomson on 20th March 1793. In the first stanza of Mary Morison, all the preoccupations of his early years, his hatred of money, his conviction that sexual love can make the poor man superior to the rich are fused into poetic unity. Her smiles and glances make the miser's treasure poor, and were he to win her he would be able to endure the dust and toil ( the stoure ) of a slave's life. This was written when Burns was contemplating emigration to Jamaica. The Ayrshire ploughman has been transmuted into something rich and strange, a cross between the Helot of ancient times and a negro slave on one of the West Indian plantations, an effect secured by the combination of 'weary slave' with 'sun to sun', the labour is not simply day labour, but labour performed in the heat of a most un-Scottish summer.


Film Produced and Edited by Alex J Sinclair