The clachan yill had made me canty,
I was na fou, but just had plenty:
I stacher’d whyles, but yet took tent ay
To free the ditches;
An’ hillocks, stanes, an’ bushes, kend ay
Frae ghaists an’ witches.
The rising moon began to glowr
The distant Cummock Hills out-owre:
To count her horns, wi’ a’ my pow’r
I set mysel;
But whether she had three or four,
I cou’d na tell.
I was come round about the hill,
And todlin down on Willie’s mill,
Setting my staff wi’ a’ my skill
To keep me sicker,
Tho’ leeward whyles, against my will,
I took a bicker.
I there wi‘ Something does forgather,
That pat me in an eerie swither;
An awfu’ scythe, out-owre ae shouther,
Clear-dangling, hang;
A three-tae’d leister on the ither
Lay, large an’ lang.
Its stature seem’d lang Scotch ells twa;
The queerest shape that e’er I saw,
For fient a wame it had ava’
And then its shanks,
They were as thin, as sharp an’ sma’
As cheeks o’ branks.
Translate:
fou: drunk, inebriated, full of ale.
Robert Burns; excerpt from his poem ‘Death and Dr Hornbook’.
′fu
The Scottish Word: fou with its definition and its meaning illustrated and captioned with the word used in context in the Scots language and in English.
You can read the complete poem here alongside an English translation. Death and Dr Hornbook; a true story.
Discworld and Perception.
I’d like to think that if Terry Pratchett had read this poem he would have approved of Burns gifting a person just enough drunkenness to reach the ability to see what’s really there.
In the Discworld only young children, wizards and witches have that gift.
And I suspect Pratchett would also have relished Burns’s depiction of Death with his rant against ‘know it alls’ quacks and charlatans embodied by a Dr Hornbook.
Dr. Hornbook, a know it all, who robs loved one’s of a timely death by denying Death his honest task and trading in death himself.
This poem stands the test of time too. And easily applies to ‘influencers’, anti-vaxers and alternative-medicine blogs, the Dr Hornbook’s of our times.
Death
My inspiration for Death came from my excellent surface anatomy book from my days at art college when the anatomy lecturers thought nothing of marching you around the corner to the University Anatomy Lab where you were handed out human bones with fragments of meat still clinging, got a chance to assist in rolling over a flayed cadaver, and saw one or two skeletons of real character.
Happy days.