Highland Mary

“Highland Mary” was written by Scottish poet and lyricist Robert Burns. The poem was published in 1792 and was set to the traditional Scottish melody “Katherine Ogie.” Inspired by Burns’ real affair with a woman named Mary Campbell, “Highland Mary” portrays the passionate but short-lived love between the two. Throughout the poem, Burns recollects the events of their affair and their final separation, lamenting the broken vows caused by the untimely death of his lover.

Composed in the middle of Burns’s poetic career, “Highland Mary” in many ways acts as a bridge between his early and later poems. The first poem Burns ever wrote was the love poem “O, Once I Lov’d a Bonnie Lass,” and many of his early poems were similarly dedicated to the pursuit of love. Burns composed at least five poems about Mary Campbell, and he also devoted plenty of other love poems to his various mistresses. However, after the publication of his first and only collection of original poetry Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) and his marriage to Jean Armour, the trajectory of Burns’s poetic career shifted. The final decade of his life was consumed with the editorial task of compiling, reworking, and preserving Scottish culture in the form of traditional Scottish ballads and songs in The Scots Musical Museum anthology. Thus, as a love song which also venerates the natural beauty and common people of the Scottish highlands, “Highland Mary” embodies traits from both periods that defined Burns’s career as “Caledonia’s Bard.”

Poet Biography

Robert Burns was born to William Burnes and Agnes Broun in 1759, and was the eldest of seven children (the different spellings of William and Robert’s last names indicate the looseness of 18th century spelling rules—each simply picked a preferred way to style his name). He was raised in Ayrshire, Scotland, where he spent much of his early childhood and young adulthood behind a plough alongside his father and brother Gilbert. Although a poor tenant farmer, William Burnes was well-educated, and he taught Robert reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history. Burns’s mother Agnes Broun was responsible for exposing him to Scotland’s oral tradition of folk songs. Much of Burns’s education was self-directed, however—he thoroughly pursued theology, politics, philosophy, and most importantly literature. It was in these formative years that Burns discovered such poets as Shakespeare, Milton, John Dryden, Thomas Gray, Alexander Pope, and Oliver Goldsmith, whose influence would inspire and ultimately shape his poetic career.

At a young age, Burns began writing love poems, a subject that would dominate much of his early poetics. At 15 years old, Burns composed his first poem “O, Once I Lov’d A Bonnie Lass” after working alongside Nelly Kilpatrick during the harvest season of 1774. The next year, he dedicated the love song “Now Westlin’ Winds” to another girl, Peggy Thompson. When William Burnes’ troubled financial situation forced the family to relocate to a farm near Tarbolton in 1777, Burns met Alison Begbie and, in a failed attempt to woo and marry her, composed four songs for her.

William Burnes died bankrupt in 1784. During the next couple years, Burns experienced many of the most significant lows of his life. Hard work as a ploughman exacerbated a heart condition that would ultimately prove fatal. Agnes Broun’s servant Elizabeth Paton bore Burns’s first illegitimate child in 1785, a few months before he impregnated Jean Armour, the daughter of a stonemason in Ayshire. When Armour’s father forbade their intended marriage, a discouraged Burns began a relationship with Mary Campbell, whom he nicknamed “Highland Mary.” Campbell inspired at least five poems, but their relationship was also short-lived; in 1786, the same year they met, Mary died of typhoid fever.

Although Burns’s personal life during this time was full of disappointments, his poetry flourished. He produced his most successful and critically acclaimed satires—including “Holy Willie’s Prayer” and “The Jolly Beggars”—in 1785, and a year later, he published his first collection of poetry, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. Written in a fusion of English and Scots dialect, the collection celebrated the rustic simplicity of the rural Scottish lifestyle and was beloved by poor farmers and Edinburgh elite alike. The collection was an instant commercial success and featured many of Burns’s most famous and critically admired poems, including “To a Mouse,” “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” “The Twa Dogs,” “The Holy Fair,” and “To a Mountain Daisy.” The deliberate framing of Burns as a rustic farmer and a natural, uneducated man earned him the nickname of the “Heaven-taught ploughman,” a reputation that followed him the rest of his life. Burns became nationally revered at just 27 years old.

Edinburgh’s literary circle much admired Burns. In Edinburgh, Burns and music engraver James Johnson embarked on a nationalistic mission to preserve the oral tradition of Scottish ballads. Burns worked as the editor of Johnson’s anthology The Scots Musical Museum, finding, reworking, and transcribing folk songs. The first volume was published in 1787 and included three original songs by Burns. The second volume saw 40 more songs from Burns; by the anthology’s completion, Burns had contributed over 200 songs to the collection. Despite this, Burns refused any payment and remained an anonymous contributor, believing the collection was merely his duty as a Scottish patriot.

While collaborating with Johnson, Burns also worked as a tax inspector and maintained a farm in Ellisland near the town of Dumfries with Jean Armour, whom he finally married in 1788. Eventually, recurring ailments forced Burns to give up the farm, and he moved to Dumfries in 1791, where he remained for the rest of his days. In Dumfries, Burns undertook yet another poetic task, contributing roughly a hundred folk songs to musician George Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice (1793-1818). With the exceptions of his beloved narrative poem “Tom O’ Shanter” (1791), the democratic song “A Man’s a Man for A’ That” (1795), and the patriotic anthem “Scots Wha Hae” (1793), Burns did not produce as much noteworthy original poetry during his last years. His legacy was instead established by the many folk songs he edited and revised, including the famous love song “A Red, Red Rose” and the New Year’s staple “Auld Lang Syne.”

On July 21, 1796, at only 37 years of age, Robert Burns died, possibly from endocarditis. He was initially buried in St. Michael’s Churchyard in Dumfries, but his body was ultimately moved to the Burns Mausoleum in 1817. Within only a few decades of his death, his birthday became a national holiday in Scotland. To this day, the poet is still celebrated with feasting and readings of his most famous poems every Burns Night.

Poem Text

Ye banks, and braes, and streams around

         The castle o' Montgomery,

Green be your woods, and fair your flowers,

         Your waters never drumlie!

There Simmer first unfald her robes,

         And there the langest tarry:

For there I took the last Fareweel

         O' my sweet Highland Mary.

How sweetly bloom'd the gay, green birk,

         How rich the hawthorn's blossom;

As underneath their fragrant shade,

         I clasp'd her to my bosom!

The golden Hours, on angel wings,

         Flew o'er me and my Dearie;

For dear to me as light and life

         Was my sweet Highland Mary.

Wi' mony a vow, and lock'd embrace,

         Our parting was fu' tender;

And pledging aft to meet again,

         We tore oursels asunder:

But Oh! fell Death's untimely frost,

         That nipt my Flower sae early!

Now green's the sod, and cauld's the clay,

         That wraps my Highland Mary!

O pale, pale now, those rosy lips,

         I aft hae kiss'd sae fondly!

And clos'd for ay the sparkling glance,

         That dwalt on me sae kindly!

And mouldering now in silent dust,

         That heart that lo'ed me dearly!

But still within my bosom's core

         Shall live my Highland Mary.

Burns, Robert. “Highland Mary.” 1792. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

Burns’s poem begins with a description of the natural environment and scenery in which his love Mary resides. In the first stanza, he describes the beautiful river banks, streams, and clear waters surrounding Montgomery Castle, where Mary Campbell actually lived during their courtship. He praises the green forests and “fair” (Line 3) flowers as he recalls the long summer in the highlands when he parted from Mary for the last time.

In the second stanza, Burns carries on his description of the highland scenery, vividly describing the “green birk” (Line 9), or birch trees, and the blooming hawthorn shrubs that shaded him and his lover as they “clasp’d” (Line 12) and embraced each other. He fondly recalls the angelic hours they spent together and affirms that Mary was as “dear” (Line 15) to him as his own life.

Continuing this image of him and Mary together, the third stanza notes the many vows and tightly “lock’d embrace” (Line 17) they shared before parting for the last time. Burnss’ description of their reluctant and “tender” (Line 18) farewell, accompanied by pledges and promises to “meet again” (Line 19), is rendered tragic. He laments the “untimely” (Line 21) arrival of death, which nips his flower, Mary, too soon (Line 22). The vibrant green he previously admired in the woods where they embraced he now sees in the “cauld sod” (Line 23), or cold ground, in which Mary lies buried.

In the fourth and final stanza, Burns shifts his description from the natural scenery to Mary’s physical body. He remembers kissing her once “rosy lips” (Line 25) that have since gone “pale” (Line 25) and become “clos’d” (Line 27) in death. Her once lively body and affectionate heart now lie “mouldering” (Line 29) in the ground, and she lives on only within Burns’s “core” (Line 31). The poem concludes with a variant of its refrain, as Burns promises to preserve the memory of “[his] Highland Mary” (Line 32).