introduced with a note of the season, even when it has
no marked relation to the tone of the poem. _The Cotter's Saturday
Night_ opens with

November chill blaws loud wi' angry sugh;

_The Jolly Beggars_ with

When lyart leaves bestrew the yird;

_The Epistle to Davie_ with

While winds frae off Ben-Lomond blaw,
An' bar the doors wi' drivin' snaw,

though in this last case it is skilfully used to introduce the theme.
These introductions are probably less imitations of the traditional
opening landscape which had been a convention since the early Middle
Ages, than the natural result of a plowman's daily consciousness of
the weather.

For whether related organically to his subject or not, Burns's
descriptions of external nature are to a high degree marked by actual
experience and observation. Even remembering Thomson in the previous
generation and Cowper and Crabbe in his own, we may safely say that
English poetry had hardly seen such realism. Its quality will be
conceived from a few passages. Take the well-known description of the
flood from _The Brigs of Ayr_.

When heavy, dark, continued, a'-day rains, [all-day]
Wi' deepening deluges o'erflow the plains;
When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil,
Or stately Lugar's mossy fountains boil,
Or where the Greenock winds his moorland course,
Or haunted Garpal draws his feeble source,
Arous'd by blust'ring winds an' spotting thowes, [thaws]
In mony a torrent down the snaw-broo rowes; [melted snow rolls]
While crashing ice, borne on the roaring spate, [flood]
Sweeps dams, an' mills, an' brigs, a' to the gate; [way (to the sea)]
And from Glenbuck, down to the Ralton-key,
Auld Ayr is just one lengthen'd, tumbling sea;
Then down ye'll hurl, deil nor ye never rise! [devil if]
And dash the gumlie jaup up to the pouring skies! [muddy splashes]

Any reader familiar with Gavin Douglas's description of a Scottish
winter in his Prologue to the twelfth book of the _AEneid_ will be
struck by the resemblance to this passage both in subject and manner.
It is doubtful whether Burns knew more of Douglas than the motto to
_Tam o' Shanter_, but from the days of the turbulent bishop in the
early sixteenth century down to Burns's own time Scottish poetry had
never lost touch with nature, and had rendered it with peculiar
faithfulne