[Here, Ashmead and Davison explore several features of Burns's love songs, noting the connection he establishes between music and emotion.]

Robert Burns' greatest songs rank with the finest in Europe, such as the best German lieder. Perhaps a fifth of Burns' 350 songs, including some of his best, were love songs written about particular women. Considering that so many of his songs originated in affairs of the heart, it is not surprising that in August 1783 Burns wrote in his commonplace book: 'There is certainly some connection between Love, and Music & Poetry'. This essay will analyse five love songs in order to sample the artistry of Burns and gain insight into his remarkable fusion of words, music and personal emotion.

Our first love song shows how the double tonic of the music reinforces the verbal dialogue of the words. Our second selection has a relatively simple text, almost never anthologised; yet, in combination with the music, it becomes one of the finest of Burns' love songs. The third song shows the use of alliterative phonesthemes that combine with the music to create an almost physical sense of love in a river landscape. The fourth song exemplifies Burns' gift for adapting dance tunes, in this case that specially Scottish dance, the strathspey, with its characteristic Scotch snap. Our final love song is one of Burns' most moving combinations of words and music.

Burns grew up on a Scottish farm, and many of his love songs concern rural courtship. A few of them, mindful of the cold rainy nights in Scotland, are about those comfort-loving lads who go to a young woman's house at midnight, asking for admission. For one such song, 'O let me in this ae night', we have discovered a forgotten but superior verbal text, not reprinted since its original appearance in 1792.

'O let me in this ae night' belongs to the sub-genre of midnight dialogue, which Burns knew well. The plot of the tame version, still in print in Burns anthologies [The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, edited by James Kinsley, 1968; The Songs of Robert Burns: Now First Printed with the Melodies for Which They Were written; A study in Tone-Poetry edited by James Chalmers Dick, 1903, reprinted in 1973] is simple enough. The young woman tells her lover she won't let him in even once, for the wildest wind is nothing compared to what a woman suffers from a faithless lover. The original bawdy version, however, was made of the stronger stuff that one expects of folklife songs; it concluded with a raucous stanza in which the passionate pair make love so strenuously that the bottom falls out of the bed, and the lassie's mother discovers them:

But ere a' was done, and a' was said,
Out fell the bottom of the bed;
The lassie lost her maidenhead,
And her mither heard the din, jo.

From 1793 to 1795 Burns had trouble over this song with the second of his two editors, George Thomson. We may guess that the sticking point was, as Burns phrased it in September 1794, 'would you have the denouement to be successful or otherwise? Should she "let him in," or not?' Burns himself had no objection to bawdy songs, as shown by his own collection, The Merry Muses of Caledonia. But as he states several times, it was not the custom to sing such songs before the ladies in late eighteenth-century Scotland. To attract a more general audience, Burns had to write the bland words now usually printed for this song.

In the version we rediscovered, and much prefer, the woman finally does let her lover into her chamber, though just this once, and on condition that 'ye mauna do't again, jo'! At the end, the man has a final joyful chorus after his successful admission—a kind of musical afterglow.

TITLE: 'O let me in this ae night'
FIRST LINE: O Lassie are ye sleepin yet,
TUNE: 'Will ye lend me your loom Lass'

[MAN'S CHORUS]

O let me in this ae night, this ae, ae night;
O let me in this ae night, and I'll no come back again, jo.

O Lassie are ye sleepin yet,
Or are ye waukin [waking] I wad [would] wit,

For love has bound me hand and fitt [foot],
And I wad fain be in, jo.

[MAN'S CHORUS]

The morn it is the term-day [a rent collection day],
I maun [must] awa, I canna stay
O pity me before I gae [go],
And rise and let me in, jo.

[MAN'S CHORUS]

The night it is baith [both] cauld [cold] and weet [wet];
The morn it will be snow and sleet,
My shoon are frozen to my fett
In standing here my lane [alone], jo.

[MAN'S CHORUS]

I am the laird o' Windy-wa's [lord of boasters].
I cam na [not] here without a cause,
And I hae gotten mony [many] fa's
In comin' thro' the plain, jo.

[MAN'S CHORUS]

My father's walking in the street,
My mither the chamber keys does keep,
My chamber-door does chirp & cheep,
I daur [dare] na let you in, jo.

[WOMAN'S CHORUS]

O gae your ways this ae night, this ae, ae night,
O gae your ways this ae night, for I daur na let you in, jo.

But I'll come stealing softly in,
And cannily [skilfully] mak little din;
My fittstep-tre [footstep tread] there's nane can ken
For the sughin [rushing] wind and raing, jo.

[MAN'S CHORUS]

Cast up the door unto the weet,
Cast off your shoon frae off your feet,
Syne [next] to my chamber ye may creep,
But ye mauna [must not] do't again, jo.

O leeze me [I'm pleased by] on this ae night, this ae, ae night!
The joys we've had this ae night, your chamber wa's within, jo!

At this point it may be helpful to provide a digression on the modal scales and the Scottish double tonic, which marked a major difference from the high art music of Burns' day. As in many Scots tunes, the modality in 'O let me in this ae night' is ambiguous: the six-note scale can be thought of as Phrygian/Aeolian (lacking the second degree) ending on the tonic, or as Aeolian/Dorian (lacking the sixth degree) ending on the dominant….

[It] is unclear which of two different notes is to be felt as the tonic, or note of greatest repose and finality. This ambiguity may be called the principle of the 'double tonic'. The term 'double tonic' is already in use to describe situations in which the two implied tonics are a whole tone apart. We are extending its definition to include the numerous cases where the two tonics are a minor third or … a perfect fourth apart.

Modal scales … are common in British folk music, in church chants and in Medieval and Renaissance music. Composers such as Haydn and Mozart, however, used only the major scale and a mixture of the two forms of minor known as the melodic and harmonic minor….

The use of other scales seemed archaic, rustic or eccentric to most eighteenth-century composers. In the arrangements of the modal tunes of Burns' repertory published in James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum and George Thomson's Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs, and in subsequent volumes throughout the nineteenth century, attempts were made to minimise the very modal twists that are now considered most interesting.

Burns chose tunes that used an amazing variety of scales: major, harmonic and melodic minor, Aeolian (natural minor), Mixolydian, Dorian and several so-called 'gapped' (six-tone or hexatonic, and five-tone or pentatonic) scales. It has often been observed that these gapped scales are common in the Scottish repertory. Even the tunes in seven-note scales often deemphasise one or two of the notes, using them only rarely, or as a kind of cosmetic adornment of a basically pentatonic or hexatonic substructure that shows through clearly. Many of the tunes are therefore full of leaps (intervals larger than a second), and some are not easy to sing, a difficulty frequently compounded by a wide vocal range of an octave plus a fifth or sixth.

Furthermore, a common characteristic of the Scots tune repertory is the delight in ambiguity of the key centre or tonic, described above as the 'double tonic'. The penchant for the double tonic leads to the frequent occurrence of endings that, compared to the norm in Western European folk and art song, seem oddly inconclusive. To the educated ear, the tune of 'O let me in this ae night' will appear to end on a note that may be heard as either the fifth degree of one scale or the first degree (tonic) of another.

The resulting ambiguity, the double-tonic effect, seems unusually appropriate for the back-and-forth dialogue of this song, especially in the more dramatic version that we have rediscovered. In the repertory of Burns songs, this suspenseful ambiguity of the tonic has a quality of wild independence; it is one of the special delights of such Scottish songs….

Our second love song, 'Jamie come try me', demonstrates Burns' unusual gift for characterising, and dramatising, the women of his songs. If one does no more than read the text, this song will not seem like much; no doubt that is why it is not included in the standard Burns anthologies. Once sung, however, it is transformed into an impressive work of art. An emotional ballad, it suppresses the narrative action that may have led to its passionate climax and concentrates on pure feeling.

Here the issue of structure is relevant. The form of almost all Burns' songs and dance tunes is strict: two (rarely three) balanced strains of four or eight measures each. The symmetrical tunes go well both with the orderly, balanced figures of British-Isles folk dance and with the common quatrain or octave (essentially two quatrains) of much European poetry. When danced, each musical strain repeats 'A A B B'. When sung, however, each strain is heard only once, 'A B', though with verbal lyrics of many stanzas the musical 'A B' will of course repeat as a unit. Because almost all Burns' songs use the music more than once through, they are categorised as 'strophic'.

When it comes to joining tunes and words, Burns' short type of metrically regular melody goes with the common folk verbal stanza, usually in tetrameter quatrain, often riming (verbally) 'a b c b' and fitting closely the musical 'A B' structure above. Countless hymns, ballads and other folklife songs are the prototypes for this basic word-music relationship. This poetic quatrain, some critics argue, is at the basis of all verbal or non-musical poetry. It is no accident, then, that Burns in his sung poetry, never, so far as we know, uses his favourite verbal poetic form, the habbie stanza, a non-quatrain form.

In 'Jamie come try me', the young woman narrator reveals her deepest longings, for one meaning of 'try' was to have sexual intercourse before marriage. Though [Thomas] Crawford sees her as 'just waiting to be asked' [in his Burns: A Study of The Poems and Songs, 1960], she is not really persuading her Jamie to 'try her'. Instead, she is expressing her inner longing for Jamie to take the action that she cannot. And much of the power of the song comes about as she both expresses and suppresses her desire.

The song is deeply emotional. In the introductory chorus the woman singer three times stresses the phrase 'try me' with a long half note on 'try' and a quarter note on 'me', concluding with the highest of the two dozen notes. The word 'me' is from the high end of the vowel frequency scale, so that the musical and verbal settings both reinforce the tension of the chorus. The number of accents in each line is unusually short—two or at most three—giving the song a breathless quality. And the song's wide range and wide musical leaps, even beyond the octave in the second line of the chorus, suggest a strong inner monologue, which proceeds not in a rational line but rather by rushes of emotion.

In the verses proper (the first stanza following the introductory chorus), the woman singer continues to the highest part of the song, rising from 'If thou should ask my love' to the higher note, here given to the 'de' of the word 'deny' in the phrase 'Could I deny thee?' The song is marked 'Very Slow' in Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, where the 'de' in 'deny' gets two eighth notes, and the second syllable in the word gets a half note. In fact, if sung in the full eighteenth-century style, it gets a strongly accented appoggiatura with its accompanying trill. Such a powerful concentration on a single word is hardly possible in a verbal reading, but it is remarkably moving when sung slowly and emotionally.

After a repeat of the chorus, the final stanza begins: 'If thou should kiss me, love, / Wha could espy thee?' The secretive word 'espy', like 'deny' in the parallel stanza, divides its syllables, again with a strong accent on its second syllable and a singing time that is far longer than anything possible in a verbal recitation. This song gives outer melodic expression to emotions usually reserved for the inner voice alone. As often in the finer songs of Burns, there is an ironic ambiguity, a hint that the emotion expressed here may find its ultimate expression only in song—except as the audience hears and becomes involved with this passionate melody.

What about Burns himself in love? Our third selection, 'Flow gently sweet Afton', is a well-known Burns song, strikingly effective in its association of words, music and subject. Folk tradition associates this song with Mary Campbell (1763-86), and Gilbert Burns, the poet's brother, thought 'Afton Water' was about her. It is known that by May 1786 Burns was in love with Mary Campbell—the 'Highland Mary' of many Burns legends. She was a tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed dairy maid. According to Burns' own note: 'My Highland lassie was a warm-hearted, charming young creature as ever blessed a man with generous love.'

Perhaps because Burns was contemplating going to Jamaica, these two lovers exchanged Bibles, and possibly also vows, at the banks of the Ayr on 14 May 1786 (the Bible Burns received from Mary still exists). Mary then went to the West Highlands, perhaps to prepare for their coming life together. After returning in October, however, she caught a malignant fever and died at Greenock on 20 October 1786. When her grave was opened in 1920, it contained the board of an infant's coffin. The hagiographers attribute this child to Burns and Mary Campbell, though that attribution seems debatable.

By early February 1789 Burns was expressing his pleasure in Scots songs that included 'the names and land-skip-features of rivers, lakes or woodlands.' But Burns was not in the habit of writing songs just about landscape; and so Mary dominates this country pastoral. Attempts to cast Highland Mary, in this and other songs, in the role of Beatrice to Burns' Dante have problems with the story that, even when going with Burns, Mary had an affair with one Montgomery. Burns perhaps knew that her morals were questionable but could not resist her. Whatever her character, he seems never to have recovered completely from this love affair; all his life he kept her in passionate memory. Writing to his confidante Mrs Dunlop on 13 December 1789, Burns said of the world to come, which he wished for but did not firmly believe in: 'There should I, with speechless agony of rapture, again recognise my lost, my ever dear MARY, whose bosom was fraught with Truth, Honor, Constancy, & Love.'

It is just possible that the melody of 'Flow gently sweet Afton' is Burns' own, for he contributed it to Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, and it has no source in a previous manuscript or publication. It is a good tune, and its replacement with the later, more familiar, but less interesting tune (composed by Alexander Hume) seems unwarranted. The original tune, with its shifting, almost floating modality, gives the song a strange, hypnotic quality. There is a brilliant stress on the phonestheme fl, associated in many English words with bird flight and with flying and floating motions generally. Although we must caution ourselves against familiar but perhaps overworked associations of music with streams (or on the other hand, with mountains!), here the verbal sounds strongly corroborate such an association. And the gentle rise and fall of the melody, less angular than many of the Scots tunes, goes well with so riverine a song.

Like the classical Arethusa, who changed into a fountain, Mary seems almost at one with the river in which she walks, or by which she sleeps. For in this song there is a shimmering union of musical modalities, of floating and chiming sounds, of the Afton river landscape and, above all, of Burns' haunting memory of his lost but forever beloved Mary.

TITLE: 'Flow gently sweet Afton'
FIRST LINE: Flow gently sweet Afton among thy green braes
TUNE: 'Afton Water'

Flow gently sweet Afton, among thy green braes [hills by a river],
Flow gently. I'll sing thee a song in thy praise;
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.

Thou stock dove whose echo resounds thro' the glen,
Ye wild whistling blackbirds in yon thorny den,
Thou green crested lapwing thy screaming forbear,
I charge you disturb not my slumbering Fair.

How lofty, sweet Afton, thy neighbouring hills,
Far mark'd with the courses of clear, winding rills;
There daily I wander as noon rises high,
My flocks and my Mary's sweet Cot [cottage] in my eye.

How pleasant thy banks and green vallies below,
Where wild in the woodlands the primroses blow [blossom];
There oft as mild ev'ning weeps over the lea [untilled fallow ground],
The sweet scented birk [birch] shades my Mary and me.

Thy crystal stream, Afton, how lovely it glides,
And winds by the cot where my Mary resides;
How wanton thy waters her snowy feet lave,
As gathering sweet flowerets she stems thy clear wave!

Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,
Flow gently, sweet River, the theme of my lays;
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream!

Our fourth love song is Burns' honeymoon strathspey, 'I love my Jean'. The story of Burns' involvement with, and eventual marriage to, Jean Armour (1767-1834) is too complex for more than a brief mention here. In 1785 he first met and fell in love with this woman, whom he later described as 'a certain clean-limb'd, handsome bewitching young Hussy.' Her father fainted upon hearing about their relationship. In April 1786, when Burns sent his proposals for his first book of poems to the printer, Jean Armour was pregnant. Though Jean and Robert therefore agreed to marry, in writing and by declaration, in a way that was legal in Scottish common law, Jean's father had their names cut out of the document and refused to accept Burns as a son-in-law. Feeling that Jean had deserted him, Burns soon turned to Highland Mary, with whom he exchanged vows.

In June 1786 the printer's copy of Burns' Poems was ready. Burns was carousing and even planning relocation in Jamaica. On 25 June 1786 he acknowledged to the kirk session his share in the affair with Jean Armour in order to obtain a certificate that he was single. On 9 July he had to appear in church to do a penance (the first of three) for fornication. He was spared the creepie chair, in which the sinner sat facing the congregation during a whole service. In 'Robert Burns' Answer' the unrepentant poet wrote of being publicly castigated, using the habbie stanza he favoured for his satires:

Sometime in the summer of 1787, between tours of Scotland, Burns, now based in Edinburgh, visited Jean Armour and got her pregnant again. When her family found out that she had not made Burns marry her, they forced her to leave their home. Jean was in desperate straits, but her time was soon to come. For Burns, meanwhile, it was a year of love, music and poetry. From the fall of 1787, Burns' connection with James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum came increasingly to dominate his poetical production. The first volume (1787)—perhaps partly edited by Burns, but with only two songs by him—had no special Scots flavour. But the second through the fifth volumes (1788-96) were in fact under the control of Burns and reflected his passion for Scottish songs.

On 4 December Burns met—by her arrangement—Mrs Agnes Craig M'Lehose (1759-1841), whom he called 'Clarinda'. From here on the stories of Clarinda and Jean necessarily intertwine. Clarinda had a fine figure and some education. An ingenious law agent, James M'Lehose, had tricked her into marriage at age seventeen, and she had quickly produced four children for him. His cruelty made her leave him, and after the death of her surgeon father she took a small flat in Edinburgh. Burns' usual tactic in a love affair, as his rather timid brother Gilbert later noted, was to press on, in a frank and ultimately physical approach. Even while this courtship was going on, Burns heard in December of Jean Armour's misfortunes and asked Willie Muir (of Tarbolton) to house her.

In the new year, however, Clarinda, who now called Burns 'Sylvander', was writing of their meeting on 12 January 1788: 'But though our enjoyment did not lead beyond the limits of virtue, yet to-day's reflections have not been altogether unmixed with regret'. She seems to have yielded somewhat more on their meeting of 23 January, for she wrote of it: 'My heart reproaches me of last night. If you wish Clarinda to regain her peace, determine against everything but what the strictest delicacy warrants'. And after their meeting on 26 January she wrote: 'Though I disapprove, I have not been unhappy about it.'

Perhaps because of the strain of coping with teasing Clarinda, Burns had an affair about this time with one Jenny Clow, a serving maid who gave him a son. While this episode was going on, his problems with Clarinda continued. In February 1788 one of Clarinda's closest associates, probably her uncle Lord Craig, wrote to Burns objecting to the damage he was doing to her reputation. Burns apologised. Shortly after, on 18 February, he left Edinburgh, and on 23 February he saw Jean again at Willie's Mill. That same day he wrote to Clarinda of poor Jean: 'Here was tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary fawning; there [with Clarinda], polished good sense, heaven-born genius, and the most generous, the most delicate, the most tender Passion.—I have done with her, and she with me.'

In late February 1788 Burns visited Ellisland (Dumfries) to see a farm offered to him for rent by Patrick Millar of Dalswinton. Once in the countryside, far from being done with Jean, Burns was seeing her again. On 3 March Jean bore Burns a second set of twins. On that day he wrote to Robert Ainslie about Jean:

I have reconciled her to her fate … I have reconciled her to her mother. I have taken her a room. I have taken her to my arms. I have given her a mahogany bed. I have given her a guinea, and I have f——d her till she rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory. But—as I always am on every occasion—I have been prudent and cautious to an astonishing degree; I swore her privately and solemnly never to attempt any claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should persuade her she had such a claim (which she has not) neither during my life, nor after my death.

Then he wrote that he had taken her to bed on some dry horse litter. Burns then returned briefly to Edinburgh and to Clarinda, still not linked definitely to Jean. Finally, he went back to settle at Ellisland, and in April he at last publicly married Jean. A year later, Clarinda, in a lost letter, called Burns a villain, but he refused to acquiesce in that name. His own analysis of his two kinds of love affairs, in a letter to George Thomson of November 1794, was phrased in terms of poetry:

Conjugal-love is a Passion which I deeply feel, & highly venerate; but some-how it does not make such a figure in Poesy as that other species of the Passion—

"Where Love is liberty & Nature law.—"

[Pope, Eloisa to Abelard, 1. 92]

Musically speaking, the first is an instrument of which the gamut is scanty & confined, but the tones inexpressibly sweet; while the last, has powers equal to all the intellectual Modulation of the Human Soul.—Still, I am a very Poet in my enthusiasm of the Passion.

There is perhaps one difference between Burns' love for Jean and his love for Clarinda that has not been previously regarded by biographers as having some weight in this decision. Jean had a splendid repertory of Scots folksongs and was a fine singer. Burns wrote of her to Peter Hill on 2 March 1790: 'My Good-wife too, has a charming "wood-note wild".' We have no such record of Clarinda, whose own poetry is a weak imitation of the worst in eighteenth-century English style.

The honeymoon strathspey Burns wrote for Jean shows his special genius for adapting instrumental dance tunes and remaking them into song tunes. Among his favourites were reel and jig dance tunes as well as the dance tune type peculiar to eighteenth-century Scotland (and perhaps invented then and there), the strathspey. It features the rhythmic pattern sometimes called the 'Scotch snap', which is almost an emblem of Scots music. This pattern … fits the rhythm not only of many Gaelic words but also of certain English words, such as 'little', where the stressed syllable is short and the unstressed syllable may be somewhat prolonged.

For Burns, the strathspey had a special nationalist charm, perhaps because as a youth he had been to a Scottish dancing school. In September 1794 he wrote to George Thomson: 'Many of our Strathspeys, ancient & modern, give me most exquisite enjoyment, where you & other judges would probably be shewing signs of disgust'. Craw-ford calls 'I love my Jean' 'the best of all the songs inspired by Jean Armour.' In it Jean is associated with flowers and all the bonny birds that sing. It lacks the tension of a number of Burns' love songs, and that fact may explain why in the end Jean Armour always won out over his other loves.

As so often in a Burns song of love, the major rhymes (in this instance in the second half of both octaves) cluster around the name of the beloved. Burns uses the long octave stanza and an even longer tune (by William Marshall, butler to the duke of Gordon) that accommodates sixteen lines. The tune then covers both stanzas of the song, when sung only once through. The tune has an 'A B C B' structure (each letter representing a quarter of the tune), and the parallel endings of its two halves correspond to the verbal endings of both Burns' stanzas, which rhyme the name of his beloved Jean.

Burns' words and music share a sense that the most effective locus for placement of the climax lies between half and three-quarters of the way through a stanza or tune. To be precise, the musical climax will lie in the third unit of a four-unit structure, or in the fifth or sixth unit of an eight-unit structure. The crucial verbal communication of a stanza will also occur most often at those points.

Musically, the most common expression of a climax will be a decisive rise to a higher register, often including the highest pitch of the tune. Verbally, especially in the rhyme words, there may sometimes be a preference for high frequency vowels. A higher musical pitch, along with higher frequency vowels, will make for greater effort in voice production, and therefore more tension and excitement in performance. ' I love my Jean' is an example of this climax placement within the octave structure.

The 'C' part of the tune (the third quarter) is, somewhat unusually, lower in pitch than the beginning of the 'A;' part, perhaps in correspondence with the text. For in the higher first octave, large landscape features appear, and in the lower second octave, there are small intimate features of nature—flowers and birdsongs. At the end, however, the surging climax of the 'B' part comes again as the poet rhapsodises over his Jean.

'It was during the honeymoon', wrote Burns. Was this dance perhaps a favourite of Jean and Robbie Burns? At any rate, in the song the Scotch snap of its swaying strathspey rhythm suggests the lover in 1788, walking or riding over the irregular, picturesque Scots landscape towards his distant love. After some two hundred years, the song still conveys something of his calm exuberance at that rite of passage. Jean, a fine singer, must have taken pleasure in this musical tribute from her often errant husband, who she once said should have had two wives.

Our final selection, 'Ae fond kiss', is a song as great in technique as in emotion. How Burns came to write this love song for Clarinda while married to Jean is a matter of some interest. In may 1788 Burns settled in Ellisland, where Jean joined him in December. Upon gaining a commission as an exciseman on 14 July 1788, he moved closer to his goal of relocating in Dumfries. His assignment to active duty with the excise did not come until 10 October 1789, however, and his actual move to Dumfries did not occur until November 1791. Throughout this period, Burns, now remarried for the third time, was far from inactive in his combination of love, music and poetry.

On 22 March 1791 Anne Park bore Burns' daughter Elizabeth at Dumfries. Anne Park was the niece of Mrs Hyslop, who managed the Globe Tavern, which still stands in Dumfries and still preserves the chair in which Robert Burns sat. Except for 'Yestreen I had a pint o' wine,' which sings of 'The gowden locks of Anna', we know little about her. With her usual tolerance, Jean took the illegitimate baby Elizabeth into the Burns household. On 31 March Jean herself gave birth to William Nicol (1791-1872), who later served as a colonel in India.

Clarinda and Sylvander somehow reconciled in the autumn of 1791. Clarinda knew about Jenny Clow, by whom Burns had a child while he was suitor to Clarinda and starting to think of Jean again. Perhaps that infidelity of late 1788 now brought them together, for in November 1791 Clarinda wrote Burns that Jenny Clow was dying and needed help: 'In circumstances so distressing, to whom can she so naturally look for aid as to the father of her child'. Somehow Clarinda and Sylvander arranged a meeting on 6 December 1791. We can only guess at the passion of this final reunion. On the 27th, then back in Dumfries, Burns sent Clarinda one of his greatest love songs, 'Ae fond kiss', written after their final meeting.

Here is an example of an apparently cheerful tune in a major, almost hexatonic mode (Ionian/Mixolydian) being used for a song of deep sadness. As Mozart and others knew, melodies in a major key, if performed slowly and in the right manner, may convey sorrow, as this song does. The many upward and downward leaps create a kind of keening or sobbing effect, and their large intervals express the sorrow of this final farewell.

Repeated measure-long or half-measure-long bits of melody give the tune an insistent, almost wailing monotony…. Running through the poem are two nucleus rhymes with similar emotional repetition: 'ae' (ae, nae, naething, sae—eight rhymes) and 'ever' (sever, for ever, never—nine rhymes). Figures and rhymes reinforce and play on and against each other.

Writing in her journal on 6 December 1831, the fortieth anniversary of her last farewell with Burns, Clarinda wrote: 'This day I can never forget. Parted with Burns, in the year 1791, never more to meet in this world. Oh, may we meet in Heaven!' She died ten years later at the age of eighty-three. Of Clarinda there remain a few tantalising letters, some inconsequential poems and an astonishingly beautiful silhouette portrait, cut in her youth by John Miers. For a time Burns wore this 'shade', as he called it, in a breast pin next to his heart. Walter Scott felt this song contained 'the essence of a thousand love tales'. The refrain—'Ae fond kiss, and then we sever! / Ae fareweel, Alas, forever!'—remains a tribute to the power and the passing of love.

TITLE: 'Ae fond kiss'
FIRST LINE: Ae fond kiss, and then we sever
TUNE: 'Rory Dall's Port'

Ae [one] fond kiss, and then we sever;
Ae farewell, and then forever!
Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans I'l wage thee.
Who shall say that Fortune grieves him
While the star of hope she leaves him?
Me, nae [no] cheerfu' twinkle lights me;
Dark despair around benights me.

I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy,
Naething could resist my Nancy:
But to see her was to love her;
Love but her, and love for ever.
Had we never lov'd sae [so] kindly,
Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
Never met—or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.

Fare thee weel, thou first and fairest!
Fare thee weel, thou best and dearest!
Thine be ilka [every] joy and treasure,
Peace, Enjoyment, Love and Pleasure!
Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;
Ae fareweel, Alas, forever!
Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans I'l wage thee.

In making a final comparison of the songs of Burns to the great German lieder, we can say that the practice of Burns, in matching his words to traditional music, was in general the opposite of the masters of lieder Whereas they usually composed music for the poetry of others, Burns took his folklife music as given, repeatedly sang and memorised it and gradually fitted his words to that music. Burns' songs, therefore, constitute a unique hybrid between folk song and art song, with many of the best features of both.

Though our five examples do not include the whole range of Burns' achievement in song, they do illustrate many of the most striking and significant features. Among them are the use of double tonic to reinforce a text; the transformation of apparently inconspicuous words through music; the conjunction of high frequency notes and high frequency vowel sounds to convey emotion; the reinforcement of key words by musical ornamentation; the linkage of musical leaps and verbal excitement; the utilisation of phonesthemes and music together to depict a pastoral landscape; the adaptation to song of an instrumental dance tune peculiar to Scotland (the strathspey); and, in our final song, an incandescent fusion of words and music.

These predominantly modal songs of Burns continually demonstrate a complex texture of irony and even melancholy, as in our second and fifth examples. They are far from the lighthearted folk songs from which they often derive. In the first Kilmarnock edition of 1786, Burns had included only four songs. At the end of his life, however, he revealed in a letter to George Thomson of 18 May 1796 that he had in mind a collection of all the songs he had written for both Johnson and Thomson: 'When your Publication is finished, I intend publishing a Collection, on a cheap plan, of all the songs I have written for you, the Museum, &c.—at least of all the songs of which I wish to be called the Author.—I do not propose this so much in the way of emolument, as to do justice to my Muse.' This passage suggests that late in life Burns believed that his muse involved both words and music. Our analysis of five love songs indicates that, as far as possible, criticism of the songs of Burns should always include both music and words. Furthermore, it should be recognised that the songs of Burns are at least as important as his verbal poetry as a means of obtaining insight into his darkly complex genius.