A Song for Spring The flowery Spring leads sunny Summer, The yellow Autumn presses near; Then in his turn comes gloomy Winter, Till smiling Spring again appear. Thus seasons dancing, life advancing, Old Time and Nature their changes tell; But never ranging, still unchanging, And I adore my bonie Bell. Bonie Bell by Robert Burns Tune: Bonie Bell --------- To learn more about how Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, is still honoured in his homeland and in such as the Ukraine --- go to: http://www.rbwf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/RBWF-Newsletter-March2014.pdf (1759-1796) Robert Burns was born in Ayrshire, next door to Lanarkshire, and died in Dumfriesshire. The three counties (or shires) abut one another. Many of the old buildings Burns would stay at in the core of old Glasgow are probably long since demolished in the Saltmarket, Glassford St., and the Trongate. I was very lucky to grow up in Glasgow before the ‘demolition boys’ wrecked the joint. I remember some of the old buildings which helped to give Glasgow the reputation as being the finest Victorian city in the U.K. Of course, Burns would have stayed in Glasgow long before Victorian architecture, some of whose buildings were still standing before the 1960s. http://www.robertburns.plus.com/BurnsGlasgow.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Maclehose One of Robert Burns’s loves was Agnes (Nancy) McLehose, but this may have been a platonic relationship as she was married to a not so nice person. They may just have been ‘unconsumated soulmates.’ :::Incidentally, Mrs. McLehose was a Glasgow girl. She was born Nancy Craig in the Salt Market, Glasgow in 1759 (the same year as Burns). She was the daughter of Andrew Craig, a Glasgow surgeon. One of her letters to Burns takes advantage of one of his Glasgow visits PS: Will you take the trouble to pick up a small parcel left for me at Dunlop and Wilson, the Booksellers of Trongate, Glasgow, and bring it with you on the fly? It was the same Nancy McLehose who, in 1791, inspired the immortal love song of parting, Ae Fond Kiss, and for that she herself is immortal.::: Sir Walter Scott thought that 'Ae Fond Kiss' contained the 'essence of a thousand love tales'. :::Clarinda died in 1841, aged 83, some 45 years after Robert Burns. But there was one final poignant part to this romantic tale. In 1821 the 56 year old Jean Armour met a number of the Bard’s friends including ‘pretty Nancy.’ Jean said “I well remember the visit by Agnes McLehose, we had tea together and talked at length about our families, it was most evident that she had a fondness for Robert.” The two ladies are said to have got on very well as they swapped tales of the man, ‘wha should hae had twa wives.’::: “Ae” can mean one, single, or the last. Sometimes the title of the song is written as Yea Fond Kiss (yea, more than that). There are many different melodies to the words. My favourite is the one my niece played on the violin at my brother’s funeral as it was his favourite. It is incredible to think that Burns’s influence is still felt well over 200 years on. The Ayrshire/Dumfriesshire/Lanarkshire speech patterns can still be heard with many words used in Burns’s time still used. It is a credit to the Robert Burns Federation that they still sponsor such as poetry contests, not only in Scotland but in foreign countries. Russia/Ukraine are very actively involved and send contestants to participate each year. :::When one considers that the Scots tongue was arrested in its development in the sixteenth century, lost caste in the seventeenth, and was relegated to the position of a despised and exhausted patois by the self-appointed intellegentsia of Scotland in the eighteenth, one can appreciate more fully the achievement of Burns in bringing out to the full its half-hidden strength and resources and in restoring it to an honoured place among the poetic languages of the world. Would that our generation could do half as well, or even thought that it was worth doing.::: http://www.robertburns.org.uk/scots_tongue.htm