Halloween (poem)

From the original

Burns's Halloween opens by invoking fairy light on Cassilis Downans and riders prancing beneath the moon's pale beams, before gathering merry country folk beside the winding banks of the Doon where Bruce once shook his Carrick spear. The company meets to burn nuts, pull stalks and keep Halloween. The lasses arrive neat and cheerful, the lads trim with love-knots at their garters. The first game involves groping blindfolded through the kail to pull up a stock; poor Will pulls a runt like a sow's tail. The stocks are then judged straight or crooked, and either kept or cast aside, with the custock tasted by joctelegs and placed above the door to lie for the night. The girls go out to pull their stalks of corn, but Rab slips behind the big thorn, grabs Nelly, and the girls shriek. The old goodwife's carefully hoarded nuts are divided round and the fates of lads and lasses decided as pairs of nuts burn side by side or leap out over the chimney. Jean secretly names two nuts, Jock and herself, and they blaze together until one flies up the lum and leaves her sad. Poor Willie's kail runt burns with prim Mallie; Mall's nut leaps out and burns her own foot in pride, and Willie swears that is just the way he wanted it. Nell thinks of the false-house and pairs herself with Rob; their nuts burn in a loving blaze until white in ashes, and Rob steals a kiss unseen. Merran, thinking of Andrew Bell, slips away to the kiln, gropes for the beams in the dark and throws in the blue clue, terrified, until something grips the pot and she flees without waiting to ask what it was. Wee Jenny asks her grandmother to come with her to eat the apple at the glass given by uncle Johnie; the grandmother scolds and warns that many who sought the foul thief got a fright and lived and died delirious. She recalls a harvest before the Sherra-moor when she was a gilpey under fifteen: stuff was green, they had a ranting kirn, and on Halloween the stibble-rig Rab M'Graen got Eppie Sim with child; he sowed hemp-seed and was sorely frightened that very night. Fighting Jamie Fleck swears he could sow a peck of hemp-seed and dismisses it as nonsense; the goodman gives him a handful and sends him out alone to try it. He marches among the stacks, taking a graip for a harrow, and calls out that he sows hemp-seed and his future lass should come after him and draw. He whistles Lord Lennox' March for courage, his hair bristles with fear, until he hears a squeak, groan and grunt, looks over his shoulder, and tumbles over. He roars murder, everyone runs out, and the culprit turns out to be grumphie the pig. Meg goes to the barn to win three wechts of nothing, giving the herd nits and two red-cheeked apples to watch; turning the key cautiously, she calls on Sawnie first, then enters, but a rat rattles up the wall and she flees through midden-hole, praying fervently. Will is sent out again with fine promises; the stack he clasped thrice turns out to be propped for threshing, he takes a swirlie old moss-oak for a black grisly carlin, and draws a stroke until skin peels off his fists. Widow Leezie, as playful as a kitten, gets a fearful settling that night among the shaws; she runs through whins and by the cairn and over the hill to where three lairds' lands meet at a burn to dip her left sark-sleeve. The burn plays over a linn and around a rocky scar; the devil, or else an outler quey, rises between her and the moon and gives a croon, and she misses her footing and plunges into the pool. Back at the hearth, the three luggies are ranged in order and carefully changed each time; uncle John, who has desired wedlock's joys since Mar's-year, got the empty dish three times and heaved them on the fire in wrath. The night closes with merry songs, friendly cracks, strange tales, funny jokes and cheap cheer, until buttered sowens with fragrant steam set all their mouths astir, and with a social glass of strunt they parted, blithely, that night.