Poems and Songs of Robert Burns

The collected poems and songs of Scotland's national poet, gathered in one volume and running to well over five hundred pieces — among them Tam o' Shanter, riding home drunk past Alloway kirk and losing his mare's tail to the witches; To a Mouse, turned up in her nest by the plough in November; To a Louse, observed on a lady's bonnet in church; Holy Willie's Prayer, in which a parish elder thanks God for damning his neighbours; The Cotter's Saturday Night; The Twa Dogs; Address to the Deil; and the songs that outgrew their author altogether, Auld Lang Syne, A Red, Red Rose and Ae Fond Kiss among them.

Robert Burns published his first collection at Kilmarnock in 1786, at twenty-seven and on the point of emigrating to Jamaica; its success kept him in Scotland. He spent much of the decade left to him collecting, mending and writing Scots songs for James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum and George Thomson's Select Collection, largely without payment, which is why so much of his best-known work first appeared as words to existing tunes rather than as poems in a book.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the poems and songs complete.