Today’s Poem: Comin thro’ the Rye

Need a body cry?

Ivan Shishkin, Rye, 1878 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Comin thro’ the Rye

by Robert Burns

O, Jenny’s a’ weet, poor body,   ◦ weet = wet
Jenny’s seldom dry:
She draigl’t a’ her petticoatie, ◦ draigl’t= dragged
Comin thro’ the rye!

chorus:
	Comin thro’ the rye, poor body,
	Comin thro’ the rye,
	She draigl’t a’ her petticoatie,
	Comin thro’ the rye!

Gin a body meet a body       ◦ gin = given = if
Comin thro’ the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need a body cry?            ◦ cry = weep; call out

(chorus)

Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro’ the glen
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need the warl’ ken?  ◦ warl=world; ken=know

(chorus)

Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro’ the grain;
Gin a body kiss a body,
The thing’s a body’s ain.      ◦ ain = own

chorus:
	Comin thro’ the rye, poor body,
	Comin thro’ the rye,
	She draigl’t a’ her petticoatie,
	Comin thro’ the rye!
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Sunday was Burns Day — January 25, the birthday of Robert Burns (1759–1796) — and we shouldn’t let it slip away without a gesture toward the Scottish poet. As we noted when we looked at “To a Mouse,” Burns’s rise to fame came in part from the advantage of coming early: a proto-Romantic to whom the Romantics would turn, a genial promoter of Scotland whose work would seem nation-defining to later Scottish nationalists, a poet who could write in English with a light Scots dialect that would endear him to the English-monoglot descendants of Scots scattered around the world.

What’s more, his poetry showed a genius, unmatched till Kipling’s prose, for using unfamiliar words (Scots, in Burns’s case; typically Hindi, in Kipling’s) and not defining them — but giving just enough surrounding information that the reader can more or less triangulate the meaning.

In his explicitly Scottish verse, Burns would take an existing anonymous song and work his magic on it to smooth it out and make it sparkle — and with the added benefit of his fame, his printed works distributed across the Anglosphere, the result would become what later generations took as the standard version. “Auld Lang Syne,” for example. “John Barleycorn.” And Today’s Poem, “Comin thro’ the Rye.”

Robert Burns (Wikimedia Commons)

There’s some suggestion that early versions were bawdier, and there are later versions in which the sex between Jenny and her swain — or multiple swains, one each time she passes through the rye — is spelled out. Burns’s own version is milder, but even that is often Bowdlerized: erasing the draggled petticoats, for example, dropping the suggestive “wet” and reference to Jenny’s “thing,” and implying that all they did was kiss. Knowing the bawdiness of the song makes even more ironic Holden Caulfield’s mistaken use of the song as an image of protecting innocence in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Note that the usual melody for the song — here, for example, in a 1904 recording by Nellie Melba — is nearly the same as “Auld Lang Syne,” just varied in pacing. And even so, we can see what Robert Burns left us: his genius for taking raw materials and making them into something much of the world can sing along with.

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