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Poem of the week: Oh wert thou in the cauld blast by Robert Burns

<span>Photograph: Alamy</span>
Photograph: Alamy

Oh wert thou in the cauld blast

Oh wert thou in the cauld blast,
On yonder lea, on yonder lea;
My plaidie to the angry airt,
I’d shelter thee, I’d shelter thee:
Or did Misfortune’s bitter storms
Around thee blaw, around thee blaw,
Thy bield should be my bosom,
To share it a’, to share it a’.

Or were I in the wildest waste,
Sae black and bare, sae black and bare,
The desert were a Paradise,
If thou wert there, if thou wert there.
Or were I monarch o’ the globe,
Wi’ thee to reign, wi’ thee to reign;
The brightest jewel in my crown
Wad be my queen, wad be my queen.

Airt – the direction, or quarter, of the wind
Bield – shelter

Robert Burns (1759–1796) composed the lyrics to a considerable number of traditional Scottish melodies. These lyrics have a remarkable power to sing from the page, even for readers unfamiliar with the original tunes. “Oh wert thou in the cauld blast …” is one of my favourites. I don’t know the original melody, but feel as if I did; it’s a mysterious ghostly voice, half-caught between the lines.

Related: Poem of the week: Huia by Bill Manhire

What qualities in the verse sound the melody so effectively? First of all, there’s the unique audio power of Scots. The diphthong in “cauld”, for example, makes it not only sound, but look, colder than “cold”. “Blaw” suggests a fiercer, more extended stretch of winter wind than the gustier “blow”. There’s a special briskness in words like “wi” and “wad”; they ring harder in the line than their English counterparts.

Melody is inherent in the light-footed rhythmic patterning, and in rhymes that make their presence felt, but with subtlety. Notice how “blast” in the first line is picked up in the next verse by “waste”, an echo that enriches the imagery of both. And Burns’s copious use of the repetitive device, anaphora, is unobtrusively effective. In both verses the first phrase of the second, fourth, sixth and eighth lines chimes twice. And of course, the effect is not simply melodic. At the simplest level, the repetitions seem a guarantor of genuine utterance. They carry the song, but at the same time they emphasise the singer’s emotional intensity.

A broader sense of the surrounding landscape is achieved by the repetitions in line two. In the first verse, it’s simply the sight of fields, stretching away to the horizon – “On yonder lea, on yonder lea …” In the second, the wasteland is cosmic. In both verses, the fourth line directly addresses the speaker’s beloved. There’s a change of tone each time, a greater sense of the gap between the longed-for intimacy and the immediate reality.

In the last verse, the flight of fantasy is developed, and becomes more consciously literary. It reveals, I think, the real distance between the speaker and the dream. There’s a gain in pathos, at least. “Or were I monarch o’ the globe, / Wi’ thee to reign, wi’ thee to reign; / The brightest jewel in my crown / Wad be my queen, wad be my queen.” It is the least likely of the three scenarios imagined earlier – the “cauld blast”, “Misfortune’s bitter storms” and “the wildest waste”.

In imagination, though, the speaker is now all powerful. The beloved is queen to his monarch, but the reference to “the brightest jewel” in his crown doesn’t suggest full equality of opportunity. But this is a love song, and the character we imagine singing it is an ordinarily humble person, expressing a rising scale of wishful thinking. Folk songs may be politically hard-hitting, but they’re also permitted to be simple love songs. This is among the best of the genre, one of the many kinds of poem in which Burns excelled.

A small glowing fire, holding off the various cauld blasts on our local and global horizon, it’s a song to hearten us as the nights draw in.