Rabbie Burns and the long tradition of Scottish poets
He was called the ploughman poet Was that railway bridge disaster
Though not a lot of folk would know it But still the list is not quite done
The Ayrshire Bard was his name too There’s Robert Louis Stevenson
As his reputation grew Treasure Island, claimed his daughter
Rabbie Burns wrote lots of poems In rhyming couplets would be shorter
Even more than Sherlock Holmes Bonnie Prince Charlie we shouldn’t ignore
And Alexander Graham Bell His ballads number seventy four
Tried his hand at verse as well They made all his readers cry
Though he had to stop his own Till he lost them going to Skye
And go invent the telephone King James the Sixth took up his pen
Robert the Bruce wrote loads and loads And used rhyme royal now and then
Of rather melancholy odes Seven lines and all pentameters
He saw a spider, focused on it Were much too hard for only amateurs
To write a rather gloomy sonnet Sean Connery when not Bond
William Wallace was not averse Of acrostic poems was quite fond
To turning war cries into verse Though he told his literary betters
Many foes would run like hell Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s tricky letters
When he yelled a villanelle Finally there’s Andy Murray
That clever man John Logie Baird Dreams up lyrics in a hurry
Was keen to have his poems aired He hardly ever finds a rhyme
He favoured puns and soft elision But writes six haikus at a time
And read them all on television
When he was just a little boy
Stanzas flowed from brave Rob Roy
He read them out before the clan
Though sad to say they didn’t scan
Poor Walter Scott was very wrong
To make his poems so dull and long
And then there’s Will McGonagall
Who couldn’t really write at all
The only subject he could master
He was called the ploughman poet Was that railway bridge disaster
Though not a lot of folk would know it But still the list is not quite done
The Ayrshire Bard was his name too There’s Robert Louis Stevenson
As his reputation grew Treasure Island, claimed his daughter
Rabbie Burns wrote lots of poems In rhyming couplets would be shorter
Even more than Sherlock Holmes Bonnie Prince Charlie we shouldn’t ignore
And Alexander Graham Bell His ballads number seventy four
Tried his hand at verse as well They made all his readers cry
Though he had to stop his own Till he lost them going to Skye
And go invent the telephone King James the Sixth took up his pen
Robert the Bruce wrote loads and loads And used rhyme royal now and then
Of rather melancholy odes Seven lines and all pentameters
He saw a spider, focused on it Were much too hard for only amateurs
To write a rather gloomy sonnet Sean Connery when not Bond
William Wallace was not averse Of acrostic poems was quite fond
To turning war cries into verse Though he told his literary betters
Many foes would run like hell Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s tricky letters
When he yelled a villanelle Finally there’s Andy Murray
That clever man John Logie Baird Dreams up lyrics in a hurry
Was keen to have his poems aired He hardly ever finds a rhyme
He favoured puns and soft elision But writes six haikus at a time
And read them all on television
When he was just a little boy
Stanzas flowed from brave Rob Roy
He read them out before the clan
Though sad to say they didn’t scan
Poor Walter Scott was very wrong
To make his poems so dull and long
And then there’s Will McGonagall
Who couldn’t really write at all
The only subject he could master
