the poem as it comes to a head.

“A Red, Red Rose” is inspired by the songs of the Scottish countryside. Burns, in fact, is considered to be the “collector” of the song rather than its original author. He is said to have heard the song in the country, referring to the verse itself as “simple and wild.” Burns is widely recognized for his ability to turn traditional and folk works into curated pieces—“A Red, Red Rose” follows this pattern, too. As Scotland’s national poet, Burns was engaged with preserving and showcasing Scottish culture. This influenced his works and was the idea behind The Scots Musical Museum, the collection Burns contributed to that featured “A Red, Red Rose.”

“A Red, Red Rose” is composed of four quatrains, each consisting of alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines. In each stanza, the first and third lines contain four stressed syllables, or beats, while the second and fourth lines have three stressed syllables. Quatrains structured this way are known as ballad stanzas. The ballad is an ancient form of verse designed for singing or recitation, dating back to times when most poetry was spoken rather than written. Typically, ballads address folk themes significant to common people, such as love, bravery, mystery, and the supernatural. While ballads are often rich in musical qualities like rhythm and repetition, they tend to express ideas and emotions in overly dramatic yet straightforward terms.

The primary meter of the ballad stanza is iambic, meaning the poem’s lines are composed of two-syllable units called iambs, where the first syllable is unstressed and the second is stressed. For instance, consider the following line from the poem with the stresses indicated:

That’s sweet / ly play’d / in tune.

This pattern is most consistently found in the trimeter lines of the poem, which often complete the thoughts initiated in the preceding line. The regularity of this rhythm provides the poem with a balanced feel that enhances its musical quality.

Robert Burns is frequently regarded as an author ahead of his era, who often utilized common language to connect with everyday people just before this approach gained widespread popularity during the Age of Romanticism. When Burns released “A Red, Red Rose” in 1794, the Age of Enlightenment was nearing its conclusion. Like all historical periods, there is no precise way to mark the beginning or end of the Enlightenment—historians cannot pinpoint an exact moment when people globally adopted or abandoned a set of beliefs. However, the term is useful for understanding the general mood of the era.

Starting in the 1500s, scientists and philosophers began to believe it was possible to comprehend how the universe functions by establishing laws and principles. They shifted from the religious explanations provided by the church to scientific explanations grounded in reason. Today, it is taken for granted that scientific inquiry should be based on reason, but in the sixteenth century, nearly two hundred years before Burns’s time, this idea was revolutionary, bold, and somewhat dangerous. The theory that Earth orbits the sun, first proposed by Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543 and later supported by Galileo, faced opposition from the powerful Catholic Church, which sentenced Galileo to life imprisonment for suggesting that God did not place humans at the center of the universe.

A pivotal advancement that propelled Enlightenment thinking was Isaac Newton's 1684 Laws of Motion. This included the theory of Universal Gravity, which could explain events and physical phenomena as clearly as attributing them to God's divine will. By the 1700s, writers and philosophers began to expand on the notion that reason could elucidate the workings of the physical universe. Since rational theory proved effective in explaining the physical world, they concluded that political and social interactions could also be understood through scientific principles.

During the early Enlightenment, writers, primarily in France, faced social persecution for publishing ideas that challenged the established authorities. One prominent figure of the time was Voltaire, a versatile writer whose essays, plays, novels, and poems argued that neither the church nor the monarchy possessed special knowledge that ordinary individuals could not attain. Another significant thinker was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who published his philosophical work The Social Contract in 1762. This work advocated for the will of the people over the previously accepted "divine rights" of the monarchy. Voltaire spent eleven months in the Bastille for his writings, and Rousseau was exiled from France. However, later thinkers, heavily influenced by these French philosophers, profoundly impacted society's self-conception. An example is the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose 1781 book Critique of Pure Reason argued that moral choices must apply universally, thereby integrating the Enlightenment's emphasis on logic into every decision a person makes.

One significant outcome of the Age of Enlightenment was the American Revolution. The thinkers who drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776 believed in the novel idea that people could govern themselves as effectively as monarchs. The United States was founded on rationalist principles derived from the Enlightenment. Following the War of Independence, the French Revolution occurred from 1789 to 1799. While the American Revolution established a new state based on democratic principles, the French Revolution restructured an old, established state, transferring power from the aristocracy to the common people, trusting their ability to follow reason.

Coinciding with the Age of Enlightenment is another era that emphasized the importance of common people over the elite: literary historians refer to this period as the Age of Romanticism. Similar to the Enlightenment, thinkers of the Romantic Age believed that one did not need to belong to a privileged class to fully experience or understand the world. However, the key distinction was that Romantic writers emphasized emotion rather than reason. Unlike Enlightenment thinkers who sought new equations to measure and control the world, Romantic writers were more interested in experiencing nature rather than understanding it. As a result, Romanticism embraced the possibility of an inexplicable, supernatural world. Writers in this movement were captivated by the mysteries of the exotic and the allure of romance.

Due to this emphasis on experience, Romantic poets moved even further away from the idea of elitism compared to the Enlightenment. They not only rejected the notion that individuals from higher social classes were particularly knowledgeable but also denied that educated people understood the world better than uneducated people, who felt experiences more deeply. Society was seen as a corrupting force against humanity’s natural goodness, so social success was viewed as a further detachment from nature. Historians typically mark the beginning of the Romantic period in literature with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798. However, as “A Red, Red Rose” illustrates, the Romantics' belief in simple, common, and accessible language was an idea present even before the movement fully emerged.

Scotland’s Burns Country: The Life and Landscape of Robert Burns. Video cassette. Lewiston, NY: Lapwing Productions, 1994.

Love Songs of Robert Burns. Video cassette. Phoenix, AZ: ELM Productions, 1991.

The Complete Songs of Robert Burns. Audio compact disc. Nashville, TN: Honest/Linn Records, 1996.

Redpath, Jean. The Songs of Robert Burns. Five audio cassettes. North Ferrisburg, VT: Philo, 1985.

Love Songs of Robert Burns. Audio cassette. Ocean City, NJ: Musical Heritage Society, 1991.

Sources

Crawford, Thomas, Burns: A Study of the Poems and Songs, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1960.

Daiches, David, “The Identity of Burns,” in Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature: Essays in Honor of Alan Dugald McKillop, edited by Carroll Camden, The University of Chicago Press, 1963, pp. 323–40.

Fitzhugh, Robert, Robert Burns, The Man and the Poet: A Round, Unvarnished Account, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1970.

Smith, Iain Crichton, “The Lyrics of Robert Burns,” in The Art of Robert Burns, edited by R. S. Jack and Andrew Noble, Vision Press, 1982, pp. 22–35.

Snyder, Franklyn Bliss, Robert Burns: His Personality, His Reputation and His Art, 1936, reprinted by Kennikat Press, 1970.

Further Reading

Hill, John C., The Love Songs and Heroines of Robert Burns, London: J.M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1961. Hill’s book provides a deep understanding of Burns as a person and his perspective on romance, illustrated through poems he wrote for specific women, along with biographical details.

Kinsley, James, ed., The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, volumes I—III, Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1960. This extensive collection encompasses all of Burns's writings spread across three volumes, each exceeding 1,500 pages, with thorough explanations and references for each piece.

Rogers, Charles, Book of Robert Burns: Genealogical and Historical Memoirs of the Poet, His Associates and Those Celebrated in His Writing, AMS Press, 1988. This academic work offers an in-depth look into the poet’s life and his influences.

Smith, Ian Crichton, “The Lyrics of Robert Burns,” in The Art of Robert Burns, edited by R. D. S. Jack and Andrew Noble, Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Press, 1982. Smith explores this poem, originally a song, along with many of Burns’s other notable songs.

Sprott, Gavin, Robert Burns: Pride and Passion: The Life, Times and Legacy, New York: Seven Hills Book Distributors, 1996. This comprehensive examination of Burns’s career provides readers and students with valuable insights into who Burns was and why his work remains relevant today.