From a speech given at Burns Supper Tbilisi 2025.
For some of you sitting here, this may be your first experience of a Burns supper. Maybe even your first exposure to Scottish culture. You’ve got dressed in your finest outfits, and ordered your Bolt Premium to come and celebrate an evening of sophistication and grandeur.
And now you are sitting in bemusement as a room of 200 people in bow ties have just watched a man speak in prose to a lump of meat and then attack it with a dagger (Address to the Haggis). Possibly a little unexpected.
Well Scottish culture…is……Scottish. And Robert Burns, has come to be known as the most Scottish of them all. And my role is to tell you a bit about him.
So how did he come to embody Scottish identity? How did his work outlast his death by 250 years, and counting?
Robert Burns was born in 1759 in Ayrshire, Scotland, in the era of the great Scottish enlightenment. Scotland was producing some of the great figures of the world in medicine, engineering, law, and art.
And yet Scotland was also struggling to assert its identity, having suffered a series of defeats, including a deeply unpopular union of Parliaments with England, and a savage crushing of the Jacobite rebellion by the British at the Battle of Culloden.
Robert Burns, a son of tenant farmers, stepped into this political turbulence and achieved rapid acclaim. His poems drew on the everyday lives of the Scots, giving voice to their joys and struggles. This is no more obvious than in his poems of love. They required no education and no politics. In his most famous poem ‘A Red, Red Rose’, he says:
Till a’ the seas gang dry my dear
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun
And I will luve thee still my dear
While the sands o’ life shall run.
But Burns’ world was one of extreme inequality. With privilege there was wealth and power. In poverty, there was destitution and anguish.
He was a poet, but also a campaigner. He advocated for the basic democratic interests of his fellow Scots. He didn’t preach at them, tell them what they should think, or what their traditions were. He spoke to their frustrations at a failed ruling elite.
In his poem ‘Man Was Made to Mourn’ he protests:
If I’m designed yon lordlings slave
By nature’s law designed
Why was an independent wish
E’er planted in my mind?
If not why am I subject to
His cruelty or scorn?
Or why has man the will and pow’r
To make his fellow mourn
Similarly, in a poem entitled ‘Written in A Lady’s Pocket Book,’ he declared quite simply:
Grant me, indulgent Heav’n, that I may live,
To see the miscreants feel the pain they give
Deal freedom’s sacred treasures free as air
Till slave and despot be but things which were
Burns’ radical ideas sought a society where every voice, no matter whose, had a place in the conversation; where every individual had the right to determine their own fate.
The revolutionary ideas coming out of France made the ruling elite uncomfortable. They enforced curbs on the rights of free speech and expression.
But this didn’t stop Burns. In ‘A Man’s a Man for A’ That,’ Burns tells us that wealth and power brings no true happiness. The worth of a person is not measured by their position or wealth, but by their integrity and honor. He says we should not just stand against tyranny, but laugh in the face of it:
You see yonder fellow called ‘a lord,’
He struts, and stares, and all that?
Though hundreds worship at his word,
He is but a fool for all that.
For all that, and all that,
His ribbon, star, and all that,
A man of independent mind,
He looks and laughs at all that.
But perhaps, most importantly, Burns as an individual reflected the divisions of his own society. Historical figures are generally more complex than we care to admit. Burns was very much a series of contrasting characteristics, often at war with each other.
He wrote eloquently about the rights of women, but his treatment of them might suggest he didn’t really understand the principles of which he spoke. He attacked the church for their hypocrisy, whilst at times failing to hit those standards himself. He moved between patriotic nationalist ideas to praising the British royals.
Lord Byron wrote of him:
“What an antithetical mind! – tenderness, roughness – delicacy, coarseness – sentiment, sensuality – soaring and groveling, dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!”
But Burn’s own contradictions are really a mirror of the Scottish cultural experience. From the very beginning to the present day, Scotland has had to deal with apparently inconsolable opposites. Are Scots highlander or lowlander; Catholic or Protestant; royalist or republican; nationalist or Briton. What is Scottish language: Gaelic, Scots or English? Burns’ own life shows us that no person, and no nation, can be summarized in a simple phrase, we are uniquely complex, and all the better for it.
In just 37 years, Burns achieved more with a pen than many have since sought to achieve through the threat of their sword or the force of their wealth.
Burns’ words stand the test of time. They are just as relevant to you and I today as they were to a Scottish farmer two hundred years ago. This is what unites Scots across generations.
Georgia is not alone in the struggle to unite and define a society. In Robert Burns, we learn to walk in the shoes of our fellow citizens, to act on the democratic principles of fairness and equality, and to see the differences in our society not as a threat, but that which makes up our national and cultural identities.
Those forces that seek to divide and distil society into warring tribes or simple tales of right and wrong, do so only for their own benefit, and at the expense of society’s fabric. Because we are ultimately a collection of Robert Burns’; a collection of flawed and contradictory people- at the end of the day all left with each other.
Thanks to Burns, Scotland embraces passion for its identity, as well as its compassion for its people. And, I think, Georgia is rich for the same reason.
Every country needs a hero. It is illustrative that Scotland’s greatest person was not a politician, nor a businessman, but a poet. It is, so often, civic and cultural society that is the greatest force for binding us in difficult times.
So I leave you with some simple and timeless words from Burns:
The social, friendly, honest man,
Whatever he be
Tis he fulfils great Nature’s plan
And none but he.
And I ask you all…Scot or not….to fill your glasses and raise them high as I give you, the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns.
By Oliver Dixon, spoken at the 2025 Burns Supper Tbilisi
