enthusiasm of passion," he wrote in his commonplace-book; ³
and his emotion was none the less powerful for being harnessed
to a convention of rural courtship. It often happened in that
age of folk dance and folk music that lovers sang songs to their
mistresses with as sweet and proud a grace as the sonneteers of
an earlier time and a higher social class. The Ayrshire of those
days must have been almost as much a nest of singing birds as
Elizabethan England is reputed to have been: not even the
Kirk could stamp out the singing and making of songs, and
(who knows?) even Holy Willie himself may have been known
to "roar a ditty up" in his hot youth. Burns was doing nothing
out of the ordinary when he wrote "O, once I lov'd." One of
his companions had already sung to Nelly Kirkpatrick a song
of local composition, though he had not made it himself;
Robert simply wished to go one better by producing something
of his very own. ⁴

"O, once I lov'd" differs from anonymous folk-songs only
in that we know who the author was. If we are to believe
Burns's account of how he came to write it, it was intended for
oral delivery and to be sung to a tune, I am a man un-
married, which has unfortunately not survived. Right in this
very first work of his, Burns's vocabulary is both Scots and
English. The poem does not move from a Scottish beginning
to an apparently English conclusion, as is common in many of
his later works, but from English to Scots and then back to
English again. Long before he came up against the advice of
the Edinburgh literati, who told him to learn classical mythology
and write in heroic couplets, he found himself poised between
two languages, two mental worlds. "O, once I lov'd" owes
whatever character it possesses to the alternation between
them; and the point of beginning and return, the centre of its
statement, is quite definitely English. Though words like
"virtue, reputation, qualities," or metaphors like "it's innocence
and modesty that polishes the dart," are from the common
stock of art-song, they had in all probability become folk

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