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Description: | Tam has spent the evening in a pub getting drunk with his friends and on his way home on horseback encounters the devil and a crowd of witches cavorting inside the auld Kirk of Alloway. Careless with drink, Tam disturbs the witches and flees towards the nearby bridge over the river Doon - with the witches in hot pursuit. (poem No 321)
Printed in the second volume of The Antiquities of Scotland by Captain Grose. Burns had persuaded Grose to include a drawing of Alloway Kirk in his work which Grose agreed to do, on condition that Burns provided him with a suitable poem to go with the engraving.
Page eight of fourteen which reads from 'A winnock-bunker' down to 'murder crusted'. Burns paints a ghoulish picture for Tam being played out in the Kirk with the devil taking shape as a beastly black dog seated in an eastern window ledge playing the bagpipes for a motley crew of witches. He decorates the scene with all manner of shocking images of corpses and lurid weapons of murder and destruction well suited to the wild imagination of a drunken Tam. | License: | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0 | Publisher: | Burns Monument Trust | Temporal: | 1790-01-01 - 1790-12-31 | Source: | Burns Scotland | Identifier: | Poem by Robert Burns: 'Tam o' Shanter - | Go to resource |
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