Robert Burns got his name attached to most of the poems in “The Merry Muses of Caledonia”, a collection of poems in Scots dialect, mostly about fucking. The rest concern … farting.
The idea of “The Merry Muses” is a bit better than the reality, though, because the poems could only seem funny if you were heroically drunk, and they aren’t all that sexy, either. Here’s a slice of one of the best ones.
From: Haed I the Wyte She Bade Me
Robert Burns: partial to a ploughman’s funch. Less partial to female lust, though.
I pat six inches in her wame,
A quarter wadna fly’d her;
For ay the mair I ca’d it hame,
Her ports they grew the wider.
My tartan plaid, when it was dark,
Could I refuse to share it;
She lifted up her holland-sark,
An bad me fin’ the gair o’t:
Or how could I amang the garse,
But gie her hilt an hair o’t;
She clasped her hochs aboot my erse,
An ay she glowred for mair o’t.
(Robert Burns)
So Burns’s idea of a sex poem is a man complaining that some woman didn’t find his cock big enough and wasn’t ready to stop when he was. If it was just one poem, you could say it was characterisation, where you’re not meant to take the singer’s point of view, like in a Randy Newman song. Trouble is, they’re all like that. Except the ones about farting.
This is a Scotsman who doesn’t write poems about the wummin being too lusty for him. Mind you, he’s a painting.
It makes you wonder how Scots blokes got their romantic reputation. I know a woman who swears she will fuck any man who asks her nicely in a Scots accent.
Actually, that’s probably true of every woman I know, ach the noo. Sean Connery’s doing a lot of the carrying, I guess.
On the other hand, the Scots gave us the little kilt, essential wear for women pretending to be schoolgirls, and the tawse. And if you like welts and weeping (that’d be wauts and greetin’, if Burns wrote poems about that sort of thing), then the tawse is your implement.
I bought my tawse in Lochgelly. I’m a traditionalist, when I remember.
Firstly, it came as a great surprise to finally figure out what Burns was on about – not that I ever got that far in reading the man. Basically because I couldnt understand him. Had I known he was talking about cocks and hairy arses maybe I would have made more effort.
Secondly, I never would have imagined a Scotsman to have a reputation as a romantic, nor would I have ever fantasised about one – I am one of the few, I suppose, whom Sean Connery’s charm did not touch. So give me a Kiwi accent over a Scots accent, any day.
Accents are extremely useful seduction tools though – I had an American friend who cultivated a French accent in order to pick up girls and it worked every single time, and left more good looking candidates by the wayside.
It isn’t accents that one needs, it’s balls. I wonder what Bob would make of burns on balls? Unintelligible ouches, I should think…
Pretty well every woman I know wants to fuck some version of Sean Connery, Bond or white-beard, so it’s refreshing to hear from someone who doesn’t.
I read once that Connery had said in an interview that women needed a slap from time to time, and I’d assumed from this second-hand story that he’d meant that women liked a consensual smack across the rump. So I thought, well, that’s nice, he’s on our team. But it turns out that he was actually talking about a non-consensual back-of-the-hander across the face. So he’s a shitbag.
Occasionally people tell me my accent is “cute”, which can’t be right because of course I don’t have one. I do have balls, though no-one’s ever said they were cute. On the other hand, Kingsley Amis said that having testicles was like being chained to the village idiot. This is, in my experience, true.