Page 22 - Jan2023

Burns Supper, continued from page 21

For a country steeped in a very
conservative form of religion, the Scots
appear to have been amazingly tolerant
of Burns' long history of amours and
illegitimate children. Perhaps his
importance and thus thier embrace of
him despite his personal shortcomings
came from his having been viewed as a
man of the people.
Burns wrote using the Broad Scots
dialect, while incorporating political
and sociological observations into his
poetry. If you were a speaker of broad
Scots, the results were humorous and
unintelligble to those who were not.
This would seem to be in keeping with
the character often ascribed to the
Scots, ( likely by the English) that they
were as stubborn as rocks. ?To a
Louse? and ?To a Mouse? are two
examples of poems that were much
appreciated by readers of the time.
A Burns' Supper traditionally begins with
what is called the Selkirk Grace. While
mistakenly attributed to Burns it was
not written by him. In fact the blessing
was already known in the 17th century
as the Galloway Grace or the
Above: The Burns Monument was erected in 1830 in Edinburgh
Covenanters' Grace and was already
by Thomas Hamilton to commemorate the national poet.
decades old when Burns, in 1794,
Image by iStock Heartland-Arts
recited it at a dinner party for the Earl of
Selkirk, from which it now gets its name;
Burns still gets, incorrectly, the credit
for having written it.

The Grace is as follows:
Same hae meat and canna eat, and
some wad eat that want it; But we hae
meat and we can eat, sae let the Lord
be thankit.
The plaque at right that appears on the
wall of the rose garden at Burns' house
and museum in Dumfries continues to
give credence to his authorship of the
grace to visitors. 22