Poem of the Day: ‘Winter: A Dirge’

Robert Burns (1759–1796) has appeared once before in the Sun’s Poem of the Day feature, but in these wintery days, it seems worth adding another. “Winter: A Dirge” is an early Burns poem, probably written around 1775, when the poet was 16 and still a little uneven in his poetic outpourings. The quotation marks around the first line of the second stanza, for example, Burns put in to indicate an unnecessary borrowing from Edward Young’s once enormously popular “Night-Thoughts” (1742–1745).

Still, the young poet shows off his talent in the three eight-line stanzas, written in the ballad meter of alternating four- and three-foot lines, rhymed on the three-foot lines — with an additional internal rhyme in the four-foot lines. Not an easy task, particularly when the poem celebrates winter’s grimness as both fitting the poet’s mood and teaching him about peaceful resignation to the will of the Divine.