Songs and lyrics of Robert Burns

Chapter 99: PEG-A-RAMSEY

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About This Book

A collected selection of the poet's songs and shorter lyrics presents his explorations of love, nature, rural Scottish life, patriotism, and social observation, often rendered in Scots dialect and intended for musical performance. The volume groups brief pieces alongside several longer poems, supplies a glossary of dialect terms and an index of first lines, and includes illustrative plates. Many lyrics evoke landscapes, domestic scenes, and communal gatherings, balancing tenderness and satire while varying tone from celebratory to elegiac. The arrangement favors lyrical vitality rather than strict chronology, offering readers both popular airs and more extended narrative poems within a single accessible anthology.

PEG-A-RAMSEY

Cauld is the e’enin’ blast

O’ Boreas o’er the pool,

And dawin’ it is dreary

When birks are bare at Yule.

O bitter blaws the e’enin’ blast

When bitter bites the frost,

And in the mirk and dreary drift

The hills and glens are lost.

Ne’er sae murky blew the night

That drifted o’er the hill,

But bonnie Peg-a-Ramsey

Gat grist to her mill.