The Farmer's Ingle
November dusk, the plough put by and the oxen loosed, and a Lothian farm household draws in to the hearth for kail and cheese, the day's gossip, and the grandmother's tales of warlocks and witches before the beasts are foddered and the house goes to bed. The whole evening is in Scots, in a nine-line stanza, with the hired hands eating at the farmer's own table and the goodwife counting the wool she will spin. Fergusson died at twenty-four in Edinburgh's bedlam; Burns kept a portrait of him, paid for his unmarked grave, and took this poem as the direct model for The Cotter's Saturday Night.
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