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Updated: June 5, 2025
"Abe, have ye learned the Cotter's Saturday Night?" "Not yet. It's a heavy hog to hold but I'll get a grip on an ear and a hind leg and lift it out o' the pen before long. You see." "Don't fail to do that. It will be a help and joy to ye." "Old Kirkham is a hard master," said Abe. "I hear his bell ringing every time I get a minute's leisure. I'm nigh through with him.
"That is more than I can tell; if they have been watching me they must have known that I was intimate with you; they have seen me come out of Cotter's Bank, and afterwards enter your lodgings; they would feel sure that I had heard that there would be danger connected with the diamonds, and might suppose that I should get some friend to take them from the bank, and may have followed your movements as well as mine.
Mark placed himself' by the side of Cotter, a stranger stood immediately behind his chair, another member of the club was on the other side, and Sir James Flash stood partly behind him, so that although somewhat in the background he could obtain a view between their heads of Cotter's cards.
LIFE. Burns's life is "a life of fragments," as Carlyle called it; and the different fragments are as unlike as the noble "Cotter's Saturday Night" and the rant and riot of "The Jolly Beggars." The details of this sad and disjointed life were better, perhaps, forgotten. We call attention only to the facts which help us to understand the man and his poetry.
Burns's world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners, is often a harsh, a sordid, a repulsive world; even the world of his Cotter's Saturday Night is not a beautiful world. No doubt a poet's criticism of life may have such truth and power that it triumphs over its world and delights us.
His "Cotter's Saturday Night," "Tam O'Shanter," "Bonnie Doon," "Auld Lang Syne," "Bruce's Address," "A Man's a Man for a' That," and many others that might be named, are likely to live for generation after generation; and his character as a man, although subject in many respects to severe criticism, can always be covered with a mantle of loving charity, when we remember his generosity of heart, his manly independence of spirit, his natural nobility of mind, and consider the difficult circumstances and terrible temptations that encompassed his stormy life.
Captain Cotter's two bronze guns gleamed bright on the top of the ridge beyond the pretty little town, and before the sun went down, the new white tents had been carried up to the slope and pitched there. The steamers were moored to the shore, and the low slanting rays of the sunset fell upon as charming a picture as was ever painted.
It was just because Burns could write The Cotter's Saturday Night that he could write The Holy Tulzie, Holy Willie's Prayer, The Ordination, and The Holy Fair.
They fingered his skull, 'applied their compasses to it, and satisfied themselves that Burns had capacity enough to write Tam o' Shanter, The Cotter's Saturday Night, and To Mary in Heaven. Let us take the poet as he comes to us, a gift of the gods, and be thankful. As La Bruyère puts it, 'Ces hommes n'ont ni ancêtres ni postérités; ils forment eux seuls toute une descendance.
So I read "The Cotter's Saturday Night." I love the poem very much myself, sometimes reading it aloud, not so much for the tenderness of its message, though I prize that, too, as for the wonder of its music: "Compared with these, Italian trills are tame; The tickl'd ear no heart-felt raptures raise." I suppose I showed my feeling in my voice.
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