What Burns means to me: Prof David Purdie

writer, and doctor of medicine

THE BIBLE upon which Barack Obama swore his oath on Tuesday was that of Abraham Lincoln. That Bible lay on the bedside table every night that Lincoln spent in the White House, but it was not alone. Beside it lay his copy of the collected works of Robert Burns, many of which Lincoln knew by heart, having learned them as a child in the family cabin in Missouri.

And that is what the poet says to me. That great lyric poetry with its graphic imagery and verbal firepower, as in Burns's The Slave's Lament may cross oceans and yet still penetrate to the innermost labyrinth of the human heart.

Our poet showed us that a Scots farmer might write an anthem for the common man – that for all the strife and fury of the world, a man is a man, for all that. This brave singer cut though the cant and the posturing to insist that there is a benevolence within us, which he caught and gave to humanity in that great song.

My friend Sheena Wellington rose and sang it to the newly summoned Parliament in Edinburgh and none who heard her – and Burns – that day will ever forget it.

He says to us that true worth lies neither in inherited wealth nor acquired position in society, nor even in strength of intellect. It lies, rather, in the space within the heart that we reserve for the weal and the welfare of our fellow men. As he wrote to his friend Davie Sillar: "The heart's aye the part, aye, that maks us richt – or wrang…"

He also says to us that whatever the hardships, pay your dues. No man, nor woman neither, did Burns a great favour and lived to regret the day. To young Jenny Cruikshank at whose harpsichord he weaved the words of his songs into the old airs of Scotland, went a copy of his Poems and the great song A Rose-Bud By My Early Walk. To Robert Fergusson, poet of Edinburgh, he gave a stone for his unmarked grave – and to faithful, stoical Jean Armour he gave her immortality.

Our emigrants would place the works of Burns in the family kist when they packed to go on their long voyages to Canada, or to the Cape and over the southern ocean to Australia and New Zealand. It was not just because he spoke and sang to them in the accents of home. It was because Burns always has something to say, to the struggling farmer, to the uncertain lover, to the young soldier facing his first action. And the refrain is constant, insistent: courage, brother, do not falter – and never, ever, despair.

He places before us one of the great stories of our long history. How a child born in a two-roomed cottage, which sits by an Alloway roadside, became the man now regarded by modern critical scholarship as one of the finest poets and songsmiths ever to lift a pen. Among us for such a short time, he was gone at 37, leaving a desolate widow, no child above the age of ten – and a body of verse that will ever remain one of the jewels in the crown of our literature.

And far beyond our homeland, a great president freed the slaves and showed us how Robert Burns's poems and songs, first laid before his family and neighbours in the farmlands of Ayrshire, were to become the property and the patrimony of mankind.