The ribbon reid

THE RIBBON REID
A Scots Love Song in the Manner of Robert Burns
Daniil Lazko
with a Glossary and a Literary Commentary
Tuapse · 27 September 2026
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THE RIBBON REID

The fiddler by the change-house door
Played doun the simmer sun,
An' Kirsty, birlin' up the floor,
Had ilka lad outrun.

Her ribbon, reid as rowan, flew
Lowse frae her yellow hair;
I pouched it quick — but weel she knew,
An' lat her look bide there.

She slippit out afore the tune
Was dune; I, close as debt,
Cam efter. 'Lad, ye're out gey sune —
Or hae ye tint ocht yet?'

'I've tint my heart,' says I, 'the nicht,
An' fand a ribbon reid.'
'Then gie me back my ribbon, wicht,
An' tak yer heart wi' speed!'

'The loan is mirk,' quo' I, 'an' lane;
I'll gie't ye at yer door.'
She stood an' thocht, as lang again
As ony reel afore.

'Aweel,' quo' she, 'but mind the stanes —
Ye dance like Geordie's stot.'
Three steps — an' doun I cam, my banes
Like tatties in a pot.

She lauched till she could hardly stand,
Then stoopit, saft an' slaw,
An' dichtit glaur frae cheek an' hand —
Syne didna lauch ava.

Her mither cried her in frae ben;
The collie gied a whine.
She took her ribbon back — but then
She left her hand in mine.

Daniil Lazko
Tuapse, 27 September 2026

Technical Note
Genre Love song; comic courtship lyric in the Scots folk-song tradition
Primary theme Love and desire: flirtation and mutual attraction
Secondary theme Humour and comic character: teasing, embarrassment, verbal wit
Form Eight quatrains, 32 lines; narrative and dialogic, without refrain
Metre Common Metre, iambic 8.6.8.6 (four and three beats), one initial inversion (line 6)
Rhyme scheme ABAB throughout
Register Literary Lowland Scots, following late-eighteenth-century spelling conventions
Basis A village dance at a change-house; rural courtship custom; no historical event or person

All thirty-two lines were checked by script for the 8.6.8.6 syllabic pattern; every line conforms. The rhymes are full rhymes in Scots pronunciation (tune / sune, lane / again, stanes / banes).

Glossary of Scots Words and Forms
The glossary lists every Scots word or form in the poem whose meaning is not self-evident to a reader of Standard English. Line references were generated automatically from the text.
Scots English Line(s)
afore before 9, 20
an' and 3, 8, 14, 16, 17, 19, 23, 26, 27
ava at all 28
aweel ah well; very well (a word of consent) 21
banes bones 23
ben the inner room of a cottage; frae ben, from within the house 29
bide stay, remain, rest 8
birlin' whirling, spinning in the dance 3
cam came 11, 23
change-house a small country inn or alehouse 1
cry in call (someone) indoors 29
collie sheepdog 30
dicht wipe; dichtit, wiped 27
didna did not 28
doun down 2, 23
dune done, finished 10
efter after 11
fand found 14
frae from 6, 27, 29
Geordie familiar form of George 22
gey rather, very 11
gie, gie't give, give it 15, 18
gied gave 30
glaur mud, mire 27
hae have 12
ilka every, each 4
lang long; as lang again, twice as long 19
lat let 8
lauch laugh; lauched, laughed 25, 28
lane lonely, solitary 17
loan a country lane or cattle track between fields 17
lowse loose 6
mirk dark 17
mither mother 29
nicht night; the nicht, tonight 13
ocht anything, aught 12
ony any 20
pouch pocket; pouched, pocketed 7
quo' quoth, said 17, 21
reel a lively Scottish country dance, or its tune 20
reid red 5, 14
rowan mountain ash, bearing scarlet berries in late summer 5
saft soft, softly 26
simmer summer 2
slaw slow, slowly 26
slippit slipped 9
stanes stones 21
stoopit stooped 26
stot young bullock 22
sune soon 11
syne then, thereupon 28
tak take 16
tatties potatoes 24
thocht thought 19
tint lost 12, 13
weel well 7
wi' with 16
wicht fellow, creature (half teasing, half contemptuous) 15
ye, yer you, your 11, 12, 16, 18, 22

Literary Analysis
1. The dramatic arc
The poem tells a whole courtship in thirty-two lines, and it does so almost entirely through scenes rather than statements. The first stanza is public: fiddle, dance floor, the whole village watching Kirsty outlast every partner. The second narrows the frame to a single object and a single glance. The third and fourth move outside and into speech; the fifth sets the terms of a bargain; the sixth breaks the tension with a fall; the seventh turns the laughter into silence; the eighth closes at her door. The movement is from the crowd to the couple, from noise to quiet, from the lit change-house to the dark loan and back to the light of her own home.
This sequence follows the emotional arc of the brief exactly (observation, attraction, teasing, embarrassment, recognition, a hint of love), but no stage of it is named. Each is carried by an action: a ribbon pocketed, a look that stays, a pause measured in dances, a man sprawled on the road, a woman who stops laughing.
2. Kirsty and the speaker
Kirsty controls the pace of the courtship from first to last. She sees the theft of the ribbon and chooses not to expose it; she opens the conversation with a question that already knows its answer; she dismisses his declaration with a joke; she makes him wait for her consent; she mocks his dancing; she is the one who helps him up; and she decides what happens at the door. The speaker is ardent, quick and a little absurd. His one grand phrase, I've tint my heart, is punctured within two lines, and his one physical display ends in the mud. Yet he is never merely ridiculous: it is his candour, and his willingness to be laughed at, that finally earns her silence and her hand.
Because the poem is narrated in the past tense, the speaker tells the story already knowing how it ended. His comic self-portrait is therefore the humour of a man who can afford to laugh at himself: the joke is told from the far side of success.
3. Dialogue and the pun on tint
The hinge of the dialogue is a single Scots verb. Kirsty asks, Or hae ye tint ocht yet?, meaning ‘have you lost anything yet?’ Her question is ironic, for it is she who has lost something and he who has found it. He takes her word and turns it: I've tint my heart … / An' fand a ribbon reid.. She takes it back again with tak yer heart wi' speed: keep your heart, give me my ribbon. The exchange is a small duel fought with one word, and each speaker is quicker than the conventional phrase they are playing with.
The bargain that follows (I'll gie't ye at yer door) converts the stolen ribbon into a reason for the walk. From that point the object carries the plot: it must be returned, and the poem cannot end until it is.
4. Objects and images
The poem's meaning is carried by things. The ribbon is reid as rowan, and the simile is chosen deliberately against the more familiar rose: the rowan is a hardy native tree of Scottish roadsides, and its berries redden in late summer, the season of the poem. Red on yellow hair, the one colour contrast in the text, fixes Kirsty visually in a single line. The village world is made of equally ordinary matter: stones on the road, mud on a cheek, a neighbour’s bullock, potatoes rattling in a pot, a mother’s voice from the inner room, a sheepdog whining at the door.
Time, too, is measured in concrete units. The fiddler plays doun the simmer sun, so that the evening is literally danced away; Kirsty's hesitation lasts as lang again / As ony reel afore, so that her pause is timed in dances. Nothing in the poem is abstract.
5. Humour and sensuality
The humour is warm and character-based. Close as debt is a wry simile from a world where debt is a familiar pursuer; Geordie's stot locates Kirsty's insult in the shared knowledge of the village; Like tatties in a pot deflates the speaker at the very moment the poem might have become tender too early. The fall is necessary to the design: it lowers the man physically so that she must bend to him.
The sensuality lies in that bending. She stoops, slowly; she wipes the mud from his cheek and hand; and then she didna lauch ava. Nothing is described beyond proximity and touch, and the eroticism is carried by the change of tone, laughter stopping, rather than by any statement of desire. The restraint follows the brief and the best of the song tradition alike.
6. The ending
The final stanza gathers three sounds and one gesture. The mother calls from ben; the collie whines; the farewell is due. Then comes the antithesis on which the poem rests: She took her ribbon back — but then / She left her hand in mine.. The verbs matter. She takes the object of the game and so closes the game; she leaves her hand and so begins something that is no longer play. The poem answers its underlying question (when does flirtation become affection?) without stating an answer: at the moment the pretext is returned and the touch remains.

The Manner of Robert Burns in the Poem
The song tradition
Burns wrote, collected and reworked songs for two major collections, contributing more than two hundred to James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum and about a hundred to George Thomson's Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs; much of his most lasting work is song rather than poem in the literary sense. The Ribbon Reid is written as such a song: short lines, strong beats, dialogue that can be sung in two voices, and a narrative that an audience follows at first hearing.
Metre and stanza
The alternation of eight and six syllables is the common metre of the ballad and the hymn, and it underlies some of Burns's best-known songs, among them Auld Lang Syne and A Red, Red Rose. The cross-rhymed quatrain keeps each stanza a single musical unit, and the regularity of the metre throws the few variations (the inverted opening of Lowse frae her yellow hair, the dashes of interrupted speech) into relief.
Language
Like Burns's own songs, the poem is written in literary Lowland Scots, not in English decorated with dialect words. The Scots works through grammar and idiom as well as vocabulary: quo' she, the nicht, as lang again, cried her in frae ben, the past tenses in -it (slippit, stoopit, dichtit). The spelling follows late-eighteenth-century conventions of printed Scots: out rather than the later oot, while doun keeps its older Scots form.
The courting woman with a voice
A central Burnsian precedent for Kirsty is the woman in his courtship songs who judges, teases and decides. In Duncan Gray the proud Meg scorns her wooer until the balance of feeling turns; in Last May a Braw Wooer the woman herself narrates how she mocked a suitor and yet made sure not to lose him; in Whistle an' I'll Come to Ye, My Lad the woman sets the terms of a secret meeting. Kirsty belongs to this family: she is witty, self-possessed and in command of the game.
Setting and sympathy
The change-house, the fiddler, the reel and the lane home are the social world of Burns's Ayrshire, and the change-house is itself a Burnsian location, the crowded hub of The Holy Fair. The poem shares Burns's sympathy for ordinary people: no one is mocked from above. The laughter is inside the community (Geordie's stot, the speaker's fall), and it binds the two lovers rather than dividing them.
Where the poem departs from Burns
By design the poem omits the social satire that runs through much of Burns's work; the brief asked for none, and the humour stays personal. It also avoids the explicit declarations of his more lyrical love songs. Where Burns often names the feeling outright, this poem leaves it entirely to gesture. The result is closer to the dramatic courtship songs than to the great lyrical ones, and closer still to the folk ballad's habit of letting action speak.

Meaning and Originality
At its centre the poem is about the moment when play turns serious without either player admitting it. Flirtation here is not decoration or conquest but a shared language in which both parties can test each other safely. The ribbon allows the man to declare himself as a joke and the woman to answer as a joke; the walk home allows both to postpone the answer. The poem suggests that the pleasure of the game and the seriousness of love need not be enemies: the game is how two people discover, without embarrassment, that the other has been playing for the same stake.
The situation is traditional (a dance, a pretty girl, a hopeful lad), and the poem does not pretend otherwise. Its originality lies in the particular mechanism. No line is borrowed from Burns or from the folk tradition. The stolen ribbon is not a love-token given but a pretext taken, and its return, not its bestowal, is the climax. The pun on tint turns a stock declaration into an exchange of wit. The courtship is measured in reels, broken by a fall, and resolved in silence. The final antithesis of taking and leaving distils the whole story into one gesture.
The woman, finally, is the poem’s strongest invention. She is neither the idealised beauty of the pastoral nor the scornful mistress of the comic song, but a young woman who enjoys her power, uses it with humour, and chooses, at the last moment and without a word, to give some of it away.

Note on the Text
This is the final text of 27 September 2026, reached after several rounds of revision. The final changes were the title (The Ribbon Reid, replacing The Wink at the Dance, since no wink occurs in the poem), line 30 (The collie gied a whine, replacing a line that merely stated the hour), line 22 (Geordie's stot, removing a repetition of ony), and the restoration of out for the later spelling oot in lines 9 and 11.