O Mary at thy window be: It's Rabbie’s Birthday

      Today Robert Burns turns his two hundred and sixtieth year, yet for me his verse and songs still 'gleam sae fresh and fair'. Of all the great poets whose lines I've read and heard, Robert Burns is the one to whom I feel closest. He lets me into his house. That may be a conceit but it describes how he affects me.

      I marvel at his gift for satire, witheringly exercised in Holy Wullie’s Prayer. I wonder at his talent for comic gothic evidenced in rhymed tales like Tam o’ Shanter. I feel warmth and honesty from his pastoral of family life The Cotter’s Saturday Nicht. In Ode to a Mouse he lets me sit with him as he reflects on humankind’s relationship with other creatures of the natural world. I stand up straight with him at his proud sense of democracy, as he declares it in A Man's a Man for a' That.

   At different times according to my mood  different strands of Burns's work, (and I haven’t mentioned them all here), appeal to me. Today I am in thrall of his love songs and one I remember learning off by heart in about 1956 at primary school in Dundee was Mary Morison.
 I last sung this song (as best I could) on the Burns Night celebrations on January 25th, 2019, held at the Bay Horse Inn at the top of Totnes in Devon. It's a fine pub. Here are the lyrics to this song, in my view the finest of the bard's early compositions.

Mary Morison

By Robert Burns  

O Mary, at thy window be, 

         It is the wish'd, the trysted hour! 

Those smiles and glances let me see, 

         That makes the miser's treasure poor: 

How blythely wad I bide the stoure, 

         A weary slave frae sun to sun, 

Could I the rich reward secure, 

         The lovely Mary Morison. 

Yestreen when to the trembling string 

         The dance gaed thro' the lichted ha' 

To thee my fancy took its wing, 

         I sat, but neither heard nor saw: 

Tho' this was fair, and that was braw, 

         And yon the toast of a' the town, 

I sigh'd, and said amang them a', 

         "Ye are na Mary Morison." 

O Mary, canst thou wreck his peace, 

         Wha for thy sake wad gladly die? 

Or canst thou break that heart of his, 

         Whase only faut is loving thee? 

If love for love thou wilt na gie 

         At least be pity to me shown: 

A thocht ungentle canna be 

         The thocht o' Mary Morison. 

________

  

There have been many differing arrangements and performances of the song and here are two examples by Westport and by Kenneth Mackellar. Ludwig van Beethoven admired the words of the song and composed a new melody set to  Burn's lyric .

Quaintly this version of the song is included in an album of Irish songs for which Beethoven also wrote melodies.Fine as the great composer's air is, I prefer Mary Morison sung to its traditional tune of "Bide Ye Yet", a melody Burns loved. There is no indication of the identity of the composer.