learned clerks;
But weel the watching lover marks
The kind love that's in her e'e.

POORTITH CAULD

O poortith cauld, and restless love, [cold poverty]
Ye wreck my peace between ye;
Yet poortith a' I could forgive,
An' 'twere na for my Jeanie. [If 'twere not]

O why should fate sic pleasure have, [such]
Life's dearest bands untwining?
Or why sae sweet a flower as love
Depend on Fortune's shining?

The warld's wealth when I think on,
Its pride, and a' the lave o't,-- [rest]
My curse on silly coward man,
That he should be the slave o't.

Her een sae bonnie blue betray
How she repays my passion;
But prudence is her o'erword aye, [refrain]
She talks of rank and fashion.

O wha can prudence think upon,
And sic a lassie by him?
O wha can prudence think upon,
And sae in love as I am?

How blest the wild-wood Indian's fate!
He woos his artless dearie--
The silly bogles, Wealth and State, [goblins]
Can never make him eerie. [afraid]

MY WIFE'S A WINSOME WEE THING

She is a winsome wee thing,
She is a handsome wee thing,
She is a lo'esome wee thing,
This sweet wee wife o' mine.

I never saw a fairer,
I never lo'ed a dearer,
And neist my heart I'll wear her, [next]
For fear my jewel tine. [be lost]

The warld's wrack, we share o't,
The warstle and the care o't; [struggle]
Wi' her I'll blythely bear it,
And think my lot divine.

Similarly, most of the lyrics addressed to Clarinda in Edinburgh are
marked by the sentimentalism and affectation of an affair that engaged
only one side, and that among the least pleasing, of the many-sided
temperament of the poet.

But, in general, with Burns as with other poets, it was not the
catching of a first-hand emotion at white heat that resulted in the
best poetry, but the stimulating of his imagination by the vision of a
person or a situation that may have had but the hint of a prototype in
the actual. We have already noted that the best of the Clarinda poems
were written in absence, and that they drop the Arcadian names which
typified the make-believe element in that complex af