[afraid]
MY WIFE'S A WINSOME WEE THING
She is a winsome wee thing,
She is a handsome wee thing,
She is a lo'esome wee thing,
This sweet wee wife o' mine.
I never saw a fairer,
I never lo'ed a dearer,
And neist my heart I'll wear her, [next]
For fear my jewel tine. [be lost]
The warld's wrack, we share o't,
The warstle and the care o't; [struggle]
Wi' her I'll blythely bear it,
And think my lot divine.
Similarly, most of the lyrics addressed to Clarinda in Edinburgh are
marked by the sentimentalism and affectation of an affair that engaged
only one side, and that among the least pleasing, of the many-sided
temperament of the poet.
But, in general, with Burns as with other poets, it was not the
catching of a first-hand emotion at white heat that resulted in the
best poetry, but the stimulating of his imagination by the vision of a
person or a situation that may have had but the hint of a prototype in
the actual. We have already noted that the best of the Clarinda poems
were written in absence, and that they drop the Arcadian names which
typified the make-believe element in that complex affair. So a number
of his most charming songs are addressed to girls of whom he had had
but a glimpse. But that glimpse sufficed to kindle him, and for the
poetry it was all advantage that it was no more.
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