The first walk hame

THE FIRST WALK HAME
A Love Song in Literary Scots
DANIIL LAZKO

The fiddle scraped its hinmaist reel,
The barn door gantit wide;
I trimmed the lantern, trimmed it weel,
And trimmed it, till she cried:
“Leave wick eneuch tae licht the gate,
Or maun I walk mysel? It’s late.”

Ahint us aa the barn’s warm din
Drapt ower the stibble hill;
The dew cam grey upon the whin,
The kye lay douce and still;
The lantern swung atween us twa
And cuist a giant on ilk waa.

“Ye danced,” says she, “like some young stot
Wha’s never seen a flair.”
I blamed the fiddler, blamed the lot:
The dust, the drink, the air.
She lauched intil her shawl. I’d heard
Her speak at kirk scarce hauf a word.

I raxed my haun oot at the burn
Tae guide her ower the stanes;
She lowpit past it wi a turn:
“Save that for auld wives’ banes!”
But on the bank her fit gaed wrang;
She grippit me a thocht ower lang.

Nae mair we spak. At some faur toun
A tyke gied tongue, and hushed;
The lantern shoogled up and doon:
It was my nieve. I blushed.
And there, afore I’d ocht tae say,
Her mither’s yett stood in the way.

We stood. She didna lift the sneck.
A moth gaed at the lamp.
I watched the moth. I watched her neck,
Whaur hair hung lowse and damp.
I had it ready: jist “Guid nicht.”
I said, “That moth’s a muckle wicht.”

She took the lantern, turned it doon
Till scarce a glim was there,
Syne set my collar richt aroon,
As gin it was her care.
Her cauld haun lay on my hause-bane,
And bade ae breath, and syne was gane.

“I’ll haud your licht in wad,” she said,
“Ye’ll cry for’t efter kirk.”
The sneck fell to. The dyke-heid led
My haun back tae the birk.
I turned, and saw my lantern climb
Her stair, ae winnock at a time.


Glossary of Scots
The glossary covers every Scots form in the poem whose meaning is not self-evident to a reader of English. Spelling follows modern literary Scots practice: forms are written as words in their own right, without the apostrophes (an’, o’, wi’) that eighteenth-century printers used to present Scots as clipped English.
Scots Meaning
aa all
afore before
ahint behind
aroon around, all round
atween between
auld old
bade stayed, remained (past of bide)
banes bones
birk birch tree
burn stream, brook
cam came
cauld cold
cry for call for; come to collect
cuist cast, threw (past of cast)
didna did not
din noise, clamour
doon down
douce quiet, sedate, well-conducted
drapt dropped
dyke dry-stone field wall; dyke-heid, the top of the wall
efter after
eneuch enough
faur far
fit foot
flair floor
gaed went; gaed wrang, went wrong, slipped; gaed at, went for, flew at
gane gone
gantit yawned, gaped
gate road, way (not a garden gate; compare yett)
gie tongue of a dog: to bark, give voice
gin if; as gin, as if
glim glimmer, faint gleam
grippit gripped, clutched
guid nicht good night
hauf half
haud hold, keep
haun hand
hause-bane collarbone
hinmaist last, hindmost
ilk each
intil into
jist just
kirk church
kye cattle, cows
lang long
lauched laughed
licht light; to light
lowpit leapt
lowse loose
maun must
mither mother
muckle big, great
mysel myself
nae mair no more
nieve fist, closed hand
ocht anything, aught
ower over; too (a thocht ower lang, a touch too long)
raxed reached, stretched out
richt right, properly
scarce scarcely
shoogled shook, joggled
sneck latch of a door or gate
spak spoke
stanes stones; here, stepping-stones
stibble stubble
stot young bullock; as a verb, to bounce
syne then, next
tae to
thocht thought; a thocht, a little, a touch
toun farm settlement, ferm-toun; not a town
trim to cut away the charred end of a wick
twa two
tyke dog, cur
waa wall
wad pledge, security; in wad, held as a pledge
wha who
whaur where
whin gorse, furze
wi with
wicht creature, fellow (often humorous)
winnock window
wrang wrong
yett gate of a house, yard or field

Literary Analysis
The situation and its movement
The poem narrates a single walk: from the end of a harvest dance in a barn to the gate of the girl’s home, and a few steps back. Nothing happens in it that would count as an event in a ballad. There is no rival, no parent, no quarrel, no kiss. The drama is entirely one of perception: over forty-eight lines the speaker learns that the ordinary girl beside him has become someone whose smallest movement matters. The eight stanzas follow a clear emotional curve. The first two establish the scene and the speaker’s nervousness; the third and fourth move through teasing into the first accidental touch; the fifth and sixth bring silence and bodily awareness at the gate; the seventh gives the decisive gesture; the eighth separates the lovers and fixes the moment as an image.
The poem opens in action rather than reflection. Its first word after the article is fiddle, and its first human act is a comic one: the speaker trims the lantern wick again and again because he needs something to do with his hands. The girl’s first words puncture this at once. Leave wick eneuch tae licht the gate is both a practical instruction and a tease, and it tells the reader immediately who holds the initiative in this pair.
The lantern
The lantern is the poem’s central object, and its meaning changes with each appearance. In the first stanza it is a prop for embarrassment. In the second it becomes a source of light between the two walkers, and throws their shadows apart onto the walls on either side of the lane: they walk together, yet the light that joins them sends their images in opposite directions. In the fifth stanza it betrays the speaker, shaking in his fist. In the sixth a moth flies at it, and the speaker, having rehearsed a simple Guid nicht, can only remark on the moth. In the seventh the girl takes it, turns it down to a glimmer, and in that near-darkness makes the one intimate gesture of the poem. In the eighth she keeps it as a pledge. The final image is the lantern again, now in her hands, climbing her stair from window to window.
The object therefore passes from him to her. It begins as the sign of his awkward duty as escort and ends as a light moving through her house, which he watches from outside. The poem never states that he has given her something of himself; the transfer of the lantern states it.
Hands, walls and temperature
Three quieter motifs run beneath the lantern. The first is the hand. At the burn the speaker reaches out his hand and she refuses it with a joke; on the far bank she stumbles and grips him a thocht ower lang; at the gate he discovers that the trembling lantern is his own fist; then her cold hand lies on his collarbone for the length of one breath; and at the end his hand, with no light to guide it, follows the top of the dry-stone wall back to the birch tree. The whole history of the evening can be told through hands.
The second motif is the wall. In the second stanza the dykes along the lane receive the two shadow-giants thrown by the lantern. In the last stanza the same dykes, now in darkness, become something the speaker must feel his way along. The wall that was a screen for their shared light becomes his only support once the light has gone to her.
The third is temperature. The barn’s din is warm; the dew on the gorse is grey; her hand is cauld; the stone of the wall at the end is left to the reader’s own sense of an autumn night. The movement from the heat of the dance to the cool of the field is also the movement from public company to private feeling.
Humour
The poem uses humour to keep tenderness from sentimentality, and all of its humour comes from character. The girl mocks the speaker’s dancing by comparing him to a young bullock that has never seen a floor; he blames the fiddler and then everything else in sight. She scorns his offered hand at the stepping-stones as fit only for old women’s bones. His worst moment is the failed farewell: he has the two words ready, and what comes out is a remark about the size of a moth. Each joke is at the speaker’s expense, told by the speaker himself. This matters: the retrospective narrator is amused by his younger self but never ashamed of him, and the reader trusts him because of it.
The beloved
The girl is never called beautiful. The reader learns about her through what she says and does. She speaks four times, and every utterance is practical, wry or both. She leaps the burn on her own feet. In church, the speaker notes, she is known for saying almost nothing, and her laughter into her shawl is therefore a private discovery: he is seeing a side of her the village does not see. At the gate she takes charge. She turns the lantern down, straightens his collar as gin it was her care, and invents the pretext for their next meeting. She is warmer, quicker and more assured than he is, and the speaker falls in love as much with that assurance as with her presence.
Desire and restraint
The poem’s sensuality rests almost entirely on things not done. Its strongest bodily details are small and exact: the grip that lasts a fraction too long; the damp, loosened hair at the nape of her neck after the dance, which the speaker watches while pretending to watch the moth; the collar set right; the cold hand on the collarbone that stays for one breath and is gone. There is no kiss. The gesture at the gate is at once maternal, proprietary and erotic, and the poem does not choose between these readings. The kirk is present only as the place where she is silent and where he will be allowed to see her again, which is how the moral atmosphere of a village enters a love story: as the frame within which courtship may lawfully continue.
The ending
The last stanza contains the poem’s only plot: she keeps the lantern in wad, as a pledge, so that he must call for it after church. The word wad belongs to the language of debt and security, and her use of it turns an object into a small contract between them. The last two lines then withdraw from speech altogether. He turns at the birch tree and sees his own lantern climbing her stair, one window at a time. The image records the moment at which the evening becomes memory, and it leaves the future open. The title, with its word first, quietly promises the second walk that the pledge has arranged.

Robert Burns: Style and the Love Song
The poet and the song tradition
Robert Burns (1759–1796) was born at Alloway in Ayrshire, the son of a tenant farmer, and spent most of his working life on the land before becoming an excise officer in Dumfriesshire. His first book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, was printed at Kilmarnock in 1786 and made him famous within months. Much of his most lasting work, however, lies outside that volume. In the last decade of his life he devoted himself to Scottish song, collecting, mending and rewriting traditional words and composing new ones for James Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum and George Thomson’s Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs. He contributed hundreds of songs, largely without payment, and regarded the work as a service to his country’s music.
Burns usually wrote to an existing tune. The melody came first, and the words were shaped to its phrasing and stresses. This accounts for much of the character of his lyrics: the lines are built to be sung, the stresses fall where the music falls, and syllable counts give way to natural speech rhythm. It also explains his fondness for short stanzas with strong closing cadences, where a couplet or a refrain returns the singer to the tonic of the air.
Features of his style
Burns wrote across a range of registers, from Augustan English to the dense Scots of Ayrshire speech, and he moved between them deliberately. Scots in his work tends to carry intimacy, humour, physical life and moral candour; English often carries elevation, sentiment or public statement. His best poems draw their authority from the vernacular. They speak in the voice of ordinary people about ordinary things (a mouse’s nest, a field, a drink, a lover’s meeting) and find in them matters of consequence. His images are concrete and local; his feeling is direct; his humour is quick and often turned against the speaker himself; and his sympathy with working people is constant. In his epistles and satires he used the six-line stanza since named after him, rhymed aaabab with a short fourth and sixth line; in his songs he preferred the looser four-beat measures of the folk tradition.
Burns and love
Love is the largest single subject of Burns’s songs, and it appears in almost every form. There is the declaration of lasting devotion in “A Red, Red Rose”; the grief of final parting in “Ae Fond Kiss,” written for Agnes McLehose; the long companionship of an old married couple in “John Anderson, my Jo”; the early, painful admiration of “Mary Morison”; the frank celebration of a harvest night in “Corn Rigs”; the comic courtship of “Duncan Gray”; and songs in women’s voices, playful in “O Whistle an’ I’ll Come to Ye, My Lad” and forsaken in “The Banks o’ Doon.” His love poetry is notable for its honesty about the body, its readiness to let women speak, and its equal fluency in joy and loss.
First love had a special place in his own account of himself. In later autobiographical writing Burns traced his first attempt at verse to a girl who worked beside him in the harvest field when he was about fifteen, and to the song he made for her. Harvest labour, shared work and the first discovery of desire were, for him, the point at which poetry began.

What Is Distinct in This Poem
The First Walk Hame is written from inside the tradition Burns shaped, but it is not built from his poems. It borrows none of his lines, characters, refrains or situations, and several of its choices run deliberately against the grain of his love songs.
Narration instead of address
Burns’s love songs overwhelmingly speak to the beloved or about her in the lyric present: my love, my dear, my jo. This poem never addresses her. It is told after the fact to an unnamed listener, as a story. The girl is therefore seen rather than praised, and the reader forms a judgement of her independently of the speaker’s feelings.
The beloved as agent
In most male-voiced love songs of the tradition the woman is the object of admiration. Here she drives the action. She sets the pace, makes the jokes, crosses the burn unaided, performs the decisive gesture and arranges the next meeting. The speaker’s role is to notice, to fail, and to be changed.
No declaration
No one in the poem says love. The feeling is carried entirely by objects and gestures: a lantern, a shawl, a moth, a collar, a latch, a wall, a window. Where Burns often states the feeling and lets the image confirm it, this poem withholds the statement and lets the image do all the work.
Harvest without consummation
The harvest setting touches Burns’s own origin as a poet, and it recalls the tradition of harvest-night love songs. But where that tradition moves toward fulfilment, this poem stops at a hand on a collarbone and a pledge. Its subject is not the night of love but the moment just before a person knows what is happening to him.
An ending that opens
Many of Burns’s finest love songs are songs of parting or loss, looked back on from the far side. This poem ends with a separation that is also an appointment. The last image is not of absence but of his own light, held by her, moving upward through her house.
Scots as a language, not a costume
The orthography is modern and unapostrophised, and the vocabulary is drawn from rural, domestic and farm speech rather than from a stock of recognisably Burnsian words. Scots distinctions do real work in the poem: gate in the first stanza means the road, and yett in the fifth means the gate of her mother’s house. The language is the medium of the story, not a decoration applied to it.

Technical Note
Parameter Value
Genre Love song; rural narrative lyric
Primary theme Love and desire
Secondary theme First love
Form Eight six-line song stanzas, 48 lines, each closing on a rhymed couplet
Meter Four-beat accentual Scots song metre with iambic tendency; syllabic pattern 8.6.8.6.8.8; ower read as one syllable
Rhyme scheme ABABCC
Scots register Modern literary Lowland Scots, unapostrophised spelling; rural, domestic and farm vocabulary
Cultural basis Lowland harvest dance in a barn; the escort home by lantern; courtship within a kirk-going village; the Sabbath as the sanctioned occasion for a second meeting