poetry

The order of service for a proper Burns supper

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Burns Night is a jolly occasion to eat haggis, read poetry and drink whisky, but there is more to it. If you want to go the whole hog here’s a traditional Burns Night order of service, poetry recitals and all

Celebrated on the Bard’s birthday (that’s Robert Burns to the uninitiated), Burns Night is a jolly occasion to eat haggis, read poetry and drink whisky, but there is more to it. If you want to go the whole hog here’s a traditional Burns Night order of service, poetry recitals and all.

  1. Gathered celebrants mingle, catch up on gossip, pore through their Burns editions, and peruse the whisky selection. The host may make some introductions, assign some readings, or deliver a few opening remarks. This may be a little different this year…
  2. Welcome Grace Celebrants are called to the table. The host offers an opening grace – traditionally The Selkirk Grace, and the soup course is served.
  3. Parade the haggis: the evening’s highest moment of pomp. The chef, carrying in the haggis, follows the piper – playing Brose & Butter, or some other appropriate tune – in a procession through the hall. The chef lays the haggis, on its groaning trencher, before the host at the high table.
  4. Address the haggis: a previously designated reciter reads a poem over the haggis. A ‘guid whisky gill’ is offered to the piper, chef and reciter, and with alacrity the haggis is sliced open with a ceremonial dirk (though any old knife will do). The meal is then served with all its composite courses and copious helpings of guid ale and whisky.
  5. Interval: after the meal there is a brief interval while the table is cleared or the celebrants retire to another room for the rest of the evening’s festivities. The host needs to keep the guests focused and facilitate the flow of the songs, toasts and poetry that are to follow. Time to refill your glasses!
  6. Song: a good warm-up for the Immortal Memory. Ask a musically inclined guest or two to sing a Burns song.
  7. Immortal Memory: the host, or designated speaker, delivers the Immortal Memory address. This should be a serious and careful consideration of the life and art of Robert Burns. It may be a general, biographical sort of speech, or address a specific aspect of the Bard’s work that is relevant to the particular group. This speech should be long-winded enough to remind the guests that this isn’t the office Christmas party, yet not so long as to induce cramping, dry-mouth, or ringing in the ears (about 25 minutes). This speech always ends with standing guests, raised glasses and an offered toast to the immortal memory of the Bard of Ayr.
  8. Songs, music and readings: Now follow the other poems, toasts, songs and addresses of the evening. Celebrants who have arrived with selections to read take their turn. It always helps if the host has some readings selected for guests who have arrived unprepared. Anything that honours the immortal memory and spirit of the Bard is welcome. These include stories and anecdotes pertaining to Burns and his time, poems and songs by other Scottish poets, and original works composed by the celebrants.
  9. Toast To The Lassies: this toast should be a light-hearted lampoon of the lassies’ (few) shortcomings. Illustrations from Burns, or from first-hand knowledge of the subject, may be used.
  10. Reply From The Lassie: always delivered with grace, charm and wit, this savaging of the men is always accepted with good humour by the menfolk present.
  11. Tam o’ Shanter: No Burns Night is complete without a recitation of the great narrative poem.
  12. Songs and Poems: The host may play it by ear and keep the readings going as long as the guests are willing. Alternatively, the evening may evolve into a bacchanal of music, song and dancing.
  13. Closing remarks from the host: When an end to the festivities has finally arrived the host should thank the guests. A few reciprocal remarks, or a toast, may be made by one of the celebrants and a vote of thanks offered.
  14. Auld Lang Syne: The traditional end to any Burns Night – indeed, an appropriate end to any evening spent among the company of friends. It always helps to have the correct lyrics printed out for the, by now, groggily satisfied guests.

Source: The order of service for a proper Burns supper

No Man Is an Island

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By John Donne

No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.


A portrait of Donne as a young man, c. 1595, in the National Portrait Gallery, London

John Donne

Born: 22 January 1572, London, Died: 31 March 1631 (age 59 years), London, UK

Patrick Kavanagh’s poem “Bluebells for Love”

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Patrick Kavanagh’s poem ‘Bluebells for Love’ was published in The Bell magazine, June 1945. It was inspired by a walk he took with his great love Hilda Moriarty in the wooded demense of Lord Dunsany’s estate in Co. Meath some weeks before.

Bluebells for Love

There will be bluebells growing under the big trees

And you will be there and I will be there in May;

For some other reason we both will have to delay

The evening in Dunshaughlin – to please

Some imagined relation,

So both of us came to walk through that plantation.

We will be interested in the grass,

In an old bucket-hoop, in the ivy that weaves

Green incongruity among the dead leaves,

We will put on surprise at carts that pass –

Only sometimes looking sideways at the bluebells in the

Plantation,

And never frighten them with too wild an exclamation.

We will be wise, we will not let them guess

That we are watching them or they will pose

A mere facade like boys

Caught out in virtue’s naturalness.

We will not impose on the bluebells in that plantation

Too much of our desire’s adulation.

We will have other loves – or so they’ll think;

The primroses or the ferns or the briars,

Or even the rusty paling wires,

Or the violets on the sunless sorrel bank.

Only as an aside the bluebells in the plantation

Will mean a thing to our dark contemplation.

We’ll know love little by little, glance by glance.

Ah, the clay under these roots is so brown!

We’ll steal from Heaven while God is in the town –

I caught an angel smiling in a chance

Look through the tree-trunks of the plantation

As you and I walked slowly to the station.

Patrick Kavanagh 1904 – 1967.

William Butler Yeats 101

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The different sides of Ireland’s most famous poet.

It is possible that no other 20th-century poet has had as much of a singular and lasting impact on his nation and national literature than William Butler Yeats (1865–1939). Yeats’s wide range of styles and subjects reflected the changing world he inhabited and influenced generations of writers who came after him. He once wanted to “hammer his thoughts into unity,” but his best writing was borne of his own personal conflicts and ideological contradictions in order to engage the full complexity of life.
On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Yeats’s birth, the editors celebrate the man and the myth by looking back at his long and varied career, with samples from our poetry archive.
Romantic Beginnings
Yeats showed an interest in poetry from an early age. His first works, many written before he turned 20, show the influence of Romantic poets, especially William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Notable examples include “The Song of the Happy Shepherd,” featuring elements of mysticism, and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” an idealized and nostalgic poem that fantasizes about rural living. Some characteristics of these early poems, such as a focus on unrequited love and a fascination for dreams and visions, remained common themes throughout Yeats’s long and multifarious career.
Irish Folklore and Revivalism
Fascinated by the Ireland of centuries past, Yeats wrote poems about Irish history and figures of Celtic mythology, including “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time,” “To Ireland in the Coming Times,” and “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” These poems in particular engage in legends and folklore while evoking traditional ballads and songs. Yeats’s endeavors into the Irish Literary Revival movement were not limited to poetry alone: he founded the National Literary Society in 1892, cofounded the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, and years later founded and wrote plays for the Abbey Theatre, which showcased works of contemporary Irish playwrights and authors and found great success. Some of his plays, including Ego Dominus Tuus, appeared in Poetry magazine.
A Dramatic Shift
In poems such as “Adam’s Curse,” Yeats’s earlier, more formal and elevated language of Romanticism begins to evolve into a more colloquial and direct style of speech. This shift continued after Yeats met the highly influential poet and critic Ezra Pound in 1909. Pound became Yeats’s secretary and helped dramatically reshape Yeats’s writing. Poems from this time, such as “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing” and “September 1913,” are widely seen as Yeats’s first Modernist poems. As evident in the drastic stylistic changes between “To Ireland in the Coming Times” and “September 1913,” Yeats and other artists and writers were beginning to realize that the language they used to describe ancient battles, among other things, was inadequate in the face of the actual upheaval of the early 20th century. There could be no more talk of “The weak worm hiding down in its small cave, / The field-mouse running by me in the grass … ”, as he writes in an earlier poem, because now “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave.”
Poetry and Politics
Yeats’s new, Modern way of seeing the world, matched with a rapidly changing political landscape, led to some of his best-known works. Chief among them is “Easter, 1916,” a reaction to the Easter uprising, a violent and failed attempt by Irish nationalists to overthrow British rule. In the poem, Yeats, himself a strong supporter of the nationalist cause, commemorates the dead insurgents without idealizing them as he struggles to make sense of the event, repeating the lament “A terrible beauty is born.” Yeats felt conflicted about whether violence was the best (or necessary) route to Irish independence, and this ambivalence marks many of his poems. In “An Irish Airman foresees his Death,” Yeats envisions a WW I pilot embarking on a fatal flight, knowing that “Those that I fight I do not hate, / Those that I guard I do not love;” and ruminating on his decision to enter a war in which “No likely end could bring them loss / Or leave them happier than before.” In another poem from the same book, “On being asked for a War Poem,” Yeats is even more ambivalent, suggesting poetry ought to stay out of politics altogether.
Aging and Mysticism
Yeats had always been interested in mythology and mysticism, and even the occult, but these worlds began to influence his work profoundly in the middle of his career. In 1917, Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees, and the couple soon began experimenting with automatic (or unconscious, spirit-driven) writing. These activities led to a renewed and expanded interest in magic and mysticism clearly visible in his book A Vision (1925). From this collaborative work with his wife, Yeats developed complicated theories about life and history, believing that certain recurring patterns existed. Yeats took up this idea in “The Second Coming,” which is seen as a masterpiece and a critique of post–WWI Europe: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Perhaps inspired by war’s constant reminder of mortality, Yeats remained, at other times, reflective on his own life in Ireland, as in “A Prayer for My Daughter.” His poem “Sailing to Byzantium” is a more subdued reflection on aging: “An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick. … ”
Later Poetry
Despite his laments about aging, Yeats continued to write and publish at a feverish pace in his 60s and 70s. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 and served in the Irish Senate from 1922 to 1928 to further his attempts to encourage the artistic vitality of Ireland. The poems and plays he produced during his Senate terms and beyond are simultaneously local and general, personal and public, and Irish and universal. His writing then became even more reflective as he contemplated not only the world around him but also his role as contemplator. An avid editor of his own collections, Yeats chose to end his final volume, Last Poems (1939), with “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” and “Politics,” which both record Yeats’s own evaluation of his career and his four great subjects: youth and old age and the head and the heart. In “Politics,” the speaker cannot focus on world events when he notices a girl and concludes, “But O that I were young again / And held her in my arms.”
At the time of his death in 1939, Yeats was not only a national favorite in Ireland but also a major literary figure around the world.