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Description: | Burns when he was in Edinburgh decided to create his second Commonplace Book where he could record his thoughts and compositions as they occurred to him. Commenced on April 9th 1787, its pages are numbered from 1 to 40 with pages 23-26 missing. The bulk of the pages contain copies of poems, which he saved for later use, and his personal reflections are confined to the first dozen or so pages.
The poem is an abridged version of a poem by the Rev. John Mackenzie of Portpatrick and was published in the Scots Magazine of March 1769. Burns enclosed a copy of it in a letter to Mrs Dunlop in July 1789 which for a time gave it the unlikely appearance of one of Burns's own works.
Page 8 starts with the last lines of Burns's notes on Wm Creech followed by someone else's comments. There follows an Elegy which Burns introduces as 'the work of some hapless, unknown son of the muses, who deserved a better fate', but one which Burns clearly likes and has copied into the book. | License: | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0 | Publisher: | Burns Monument Trust | Temporal: | 1787-01-01 - 1787-12-31 | Source: | Burns Scotland | Identifier: | The Second Commonplace Book of Robert Bu | Go to resource |
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