Burns poem to lovechild goes on sale at auction

Published on Friday 4 March 2011 18:43

ONE of Robert Burns' best-loved poems, addressed to his illegitimate baby daughter by his mistress, "bonie Betty", is to go under the hammer later this month.

The handwritten A Poet's Welcome to a Bastart Wean - now more widely known as A Poet's Welcome To His Love Begotten Daughter - is addressed to Elizabeth, the illegitimate baby of Burns and Elizabeth Paton, who was a family servant.

It celebrates the life of his first illegitimate child, while condemning the life-denying disapproval of members of the Kirk who, Burns said, would "ca' me fornicator".

Burns praises his "bonie, sweet, wee Dochter", born on 22 May 1785, and expresses his pride in the "bastart wean".

Before he married Jean Armour, Burns offered to take baby Elizabeth with them.

When Burns moved to Ellisland, in Dumfries and Galloway, his niece claimed, Elizabeth went to Mossgiel to live with his family.

The signed manuscript will be sold at Bonhams' in London on 29 March, when it is expected to fetch 8,000.

Burns gave the work the sub-heading "The vigorous offspring of a stolen embrace" which he took from Alexander Pope's translation of Homer.

The successful bidder will receive two poems for the price of one. The text comprises 48 lines in eight six-line stanzas, on three pages of conjoined quarto, with the fourth page featuring a stanza of eight lines from the bard's Musing on the Ocean's Roaring, which he deleted.

The manuscript poem is being sold as part of a collection amassed over 40 years by Roy Davids, an expert in rare manuscripts from Oxford.

Mr Davids, 68, said yesterday: "It is a beautiful poem, described by Burns' editor James Kinsley as 'generous and affectionate'.

"It has also been described as 'one of the best and most characteristic poems of his early maturity'.

"It is written on an A4 sheet folded in half to make four pages, the fourth featuring a verse of Musing on the Ocean's Roaring.

"He may have used the same sheet simply to save paper."