The bogle in the corn

THE BOGLE IN THE CORN
A Courtship Song in Literary Scots
Daniil Lazko
Tuapse · 28 September 2026
 
THE BOGLE IN THE CORN

The bogle in her faither’s corn
Has turned his hat aboot;
It sat richt square at yokin-morn —
An I ken wha, nae doot.

I tellt the bothy, when I rose,
Auld Lowrie’s mear wis lame;
Wee Tam jist tapped his muckle nose:
‘An whit’s the craitur’s name?’

The stooks stood up in rank an raw
Like sodgers in the park;
I jooked by Kirsty Moffat’s wa,
Wha keeks best in the dark.

She’d wan afore me tae the burn,
Her shawl drawn ower her heid:
‘I heard ye at the kirkyaird turn —
Ye’d wauk the very deid!’

She pickit caff frae aff my hair
Wi fingers quick an cauld,
An, stiff as ony bogle, there
I stood, nor crouse nor bauld.

I hapt thae hands aneath my coat
Against my dunnerin breist;
She said, wi lauchter in her throat,
‘Ye’re no sae deid, at least.

My mither has me mairrit aff
Tae Elder Baird’s lang Jock —
Three kye, a gig, a siller staff,
An slaw as Sabbath’s clock.’

Up by the hoose a sneck gaed back,
A lantern lowed an swung,
An ‘Ailie!’ — like a flail’s ae crack —
Cam frae her mither’s tongue.

She kissed me quick, as lasses nip
A thread atween their teeth,
Syne laid a finger on my lip
Wi ‘Setterday’ on her breith.

I watched her, whaur the stooks stood grey,
Set square his hat i the mirk;
The bogle stood, till Setterday,
As douce as ony kirk.

Daniil Lazko
Tuapse, 28 September 2026
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GLOSSARY OF SCOTS WORDS
Scots English
aboot about, round
ae one, a single
aff off
afore before
an and
aneath beneath
atween between
auld old
bauld bold
bogle scarecrow (tattie-bogle); also a goblin or bugbear
bothy hut or outbuilding lodging the unmarried farm servants
breist breast
breith breath
burn stream, brook
caff chaff
cam came
cauld cold
corn grain crop, especially oats
craitur creature
crouse cocky, confident, cheerful
deid dead
doot doubt
douce sober, sedate, respectable
dunnerin thudding, rumbling
Elder lay officer of the Presbyterian kirk session, charged with parish discipline
faither father
flail hand threshing implement, a swinging beater on a staff
frae from
frae aff from off
gaed went
gig light two-wheeled one-horse carriage
hapt wrapped, covered for warmth
heid head
hoose house
i in (before the)
jist just
jooked ducked, dodged, slipped past
keeks peeps, looks slyly
ken know
kirk church
kirkyaird churchyard
kye cows, cattle
lang long, tall
lasses girls, young women
lauchter laughter
lowed blazed, flamed
mairrit aff married off
mear mare
mirk darkness
mither mother
muckle big, great
nae no
no not
ony any
ower over
park enclosed field
pickit picked
rank an raw rank and row, in ordered lines
richt right; here: quite, properly
sae so
Setterday Saturday
shawl shawl, plaid worn over the head
siller silver
slaw slow
sneck latch
sodgers soldiers
stooks shocks of sheaves set upright in the field to dry
syne then, next
tae to
tellt told
thae those
wa wall
wan reached, got to (past tense of win)
wauk wake
wee small, little
wha who
whaur where
whit what
wi with
wis was
ye you
yokin a yoking of the plough team; a spell of work
yokin-morn the morning of the day's first yoking, early working dawn
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LITERARY ANALYSIS
Form and Metre
The poem is written in ten quatrains of Common Metre, the measure of the ballad and the psalm: lines of four stresses alternate with lines of three on a base of eight and six syllables, rhyming ABAB. The metre is handled as song rather than as arithmetic. Thirty-seven lines hold the 8/6 pattern exactly; in the remaining three the extra syllable belongs to the living phrase. Dunnerin in line 22 contracts naturally in speech, and lines 36 and 38 take an anapestic filling while keeping their three beats. The rhymes are full throughout. The single rhyme placed on a lighter syllable, grey / Setterday, falls on a metrical beat, so that in performance the voice lands on it exactly as the tune requires.
Narrative Architecture
Each stanza moves the action forward; none is a static meditation on longing. The first announces the sign. The second and third show the young man slipping out of the bothy and through the harvest fields past the village watcher. The fourth, fifth and sixth form the meeting itself, moving from teasing to touch. The seventh brings the social obstacle into the lovers’ private space through Ailie’s own words. The eighth breaks the meeting with a latch, a lantern and a cry. The ninth is the parting, and the tenth restores the sign.
The spatial movement mirrors the emotional one. The poem goes outward from the public world of the bothy and Kirsty Moffat’s wall to the hidden burnside, and then back toward the house, the lantern and the kirk. The lovers’ private world exists for eight lines of real closeness, enclosed on every side by the community.
The Central Sign
The whole poem turns on a single ordinary object: the scarecrow in the father’s field. Its hat, set straight in the morning and turned about by evening, is a message hidden in plain sight. The figure the farm puts up to frighten intruders from the corn becomes the lovers’ accomplice, and the most public object in the landscape carries the most private meaning.
The scarecrow also works as a mirror. In the fifth stanza the young man stands “stiff as ony bogle” while Ailie picks the chaff from his hair, so the comic image of the stuffed guardian passes onto the lover himself. The poem closes in a ring: the hat that “sat richt square” at dawn is “set square” again by Ailie’s hand in the dark. The sign is erased by the same person who made it, and the field looks as respectable as it did in the morning.
Character and Voice
Ailie is the true author of the poem’s plot. She devises the signal, reaches the burn first, mocks her lover’s noisy approach, reports her mother’s marriage plans with sharp irony, chooses the moment and manner of the kiss, names the next meeting, and removes every trace of it on her way home. Her personality comes through what she does and says; nowhere is she described as a decorative beauty.
The speaker is her counterweight: eager, nervous, physically awkward and aware of it. His self-portrait as a scarecrow and his heart “dunnerin” under her hands show a young man whose feeling runs ahead of his composure. Around the pair stands a small chorus of the village: Wee Tam with his bothy banter, Kirsty Moffat at her dark window, the mother’s voice from the house, and the absent suitor, Elder Baird’s Jock. Ailie’s name is first heard in the poem in her mother’s cry. The beloved is named by the very world from which the love must hide.
Imagery
The poem’s feeling is carried by things and gestures, not by statements. Every principal image comes from the work of the farm and the household: the stooks drawn up “like sodgers in the park”, chaff in the hair from the day’s harvest, cold hands warmed under a working coat, the crack of the threshing flail, the lantern swinging up by the house. Love is expressed in the vocabulary of labour, because labour is the world these people inhabit.
The central image of the ninth stanza shows this most clearly. Ailie kisses “quick, as lasses nip / A thread atween their teeth”. The comparison is domestic and exact: a practised, decisive, intimate movement of the mouth, performed without ceremony. It also carries a second meaning, since to nip the thread is to end the stitch, and the kiss ends the meeting.
Humour and Satire
The humour grows out of the situation and the characters. Ailie’s “Ye’d wauk the very deid!” at the kirkyard is answered two stanzas later, when she feels the lover’s heart beating and concludes: “Ye’re no sae deid, at least.” The joke becomes a declaration without ever naming love. Wee Tam’s question about the lame mare’s name, and Kirsty Moffat “wha keeks best in the dark”, are lighter strokes aimed at the easy wit of the bothy and the vigilance of village gossip.
The satire proper is concentrated in one line of inventory. Elder Baird’s Jock is reduced to “Three kye, a gig, a siller staff, / An slaw as Sabbath’s clock.” The figure yokes property and character in a single list, so that the suitor’s respectability becomes one more item among his possessions. The criticism is aimed at a marriage arranged by inventory, not at faith itself, and it is spoken by the woman whose future is being bargained over.
Language
The poem is written in literary Lowland Scots of the Central type, not in English with Scots words scattered through it. Scots governs the syntax as well as the vocabulary: “She’d wan afore me tae the burn”, “My mither has me mairrit aff”, “Up by the hoose a sneck gaed back”. The orthography is modern and consistent. Apostrophes are left out of an and wi, and the spelling ei represents the same vowel throughout: heid, deid, breist, breith. The word-stock belongs to farm and parish — bothy, stooks, park, flail, sneck, Elder, kirkyaird — so that the language is fixed in place as firmly as the landscape.
The Ending
The poem ends with neither a vow nor a moral, but with an object and a date. The lovers’ confidence lies in the practical certainty of the next meeting: Setterday, the eve of the Sabbath, a meeting set in the very shadow of the kirk. The last image returns the landscape to its public face. The scarecrow stands in the dark “as douce as ony kirk”, respectable, silent, and in on the secret.
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THE STYLE OF ROBERT BURNS IN THE POEM
The poem belongs to the broad tradition of Robert Burns without imitating any of his poems. It takes over none of his lines, refrains, characters, famous images or stanza patterns; its debt is to his manner.
The first element of that manner is vernacular authority. The poem is spoken entirely by a young farm servant from the bothy, in his own tongue and from inside his own world. Burns, who had followed the plough himself, established that such a speaker could carry serious lyric feeling without apology or condescension, and that the language of the farm was fit for love.
The second is the song. Burns gave much of his creative life to Scottish song, collecting, mending and writing lyrics for the great song collections of his time. The poem is built to be sung: plain Common Metre, a clear forward line of story, quatrains that each close on a strong rhyme, and a restrained last stanza that lets the tune fall away quietly.
The third is love as mutual and embodied. In the Burnsian love song, feeling is carried by closeness, touch, breath and warmth, and it is held within restraint. Here that means cold hands under a coat, laughter felt in the throat, and a kiss compared to biting through a thread. The sensuality is real but never explicit.
The fourth is the woman’s voice. Some of Burns’s strongest songs are spoken by women or give women the decisive word. In this poem Ailie holds the initiative in every stanza of the meeting, and her irony about her mother’s plans is the sharpest wit in the text.
The fifth is the mild satire of respectability. Burns’s quarrel with the kirk session’s policing of private life, and with piety used as social capital, is one of the defining strains of his work. The poem keeps that criticism light and local: an Elder’s son valued by his cattle and his silver-headed staff, a neighbour who watches best in the dark, a scarecrow as respectable as the kirk.
The sixth, and most essential, is the movement from the particular to the universal. A hat on a scarecrow in one farmer’s oat field becomes a figure for every private language that lovers have invented within a watching community. The poem never states this general truth; it leaves it standing in the field.
Where the poem departs from Burns, it does so deliberately. Its orthography is modern literary Scots rather than an eighteenth-century printed text with apostrophes. Its central sign is invented, not traditional. Its structure is a single continuous scene closed in a ring, rather than a sequence of lyric variations on a theme.
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UNIQUENESS AND MEANING
The underlying question of the poem is how love can stay genuine and free when ordinary social pressure demands that it stay hidden. The poem’s answer is not rebellion and not despair. The lovers neither defy the village nor submit to it; they create a language of their own inside the public landscape. The secret is not shame. It is a small world they have made together, with its own code, jokes, timetable and rules.
The poem’s originality lies in the way this answer is embodied. The signal is not a traditional love token but a working object of the farm, a figure meant to keep intruders out, turned into an invitation. The woman is not only the object of the song but the author of its code: she makes the sign, runs the meeting, and removes the evidence. The ring composition — square at dawn, set square at night — gives the whole event the shape of a secret that closes over itself without a trace.
There is also a quiet irony in the final image. The scarecrow, stuffed and propped up, standing “as douce as ony kirk”, is the visible face of village respectability: upright, correct, and hollow. The community’s gaze sees exactly what it expects to see. Behind that face the real life of the village goes on, in the burnside dark, in a laugh, in a word breathed against the lips.
The meaning of the poem therefore lies in patience and wit rather than in vows. Its confidence that the love will last is carried by a single ordinary word, Setterday. The next meeting is already arranged, and the scarecrow will turn its hat again. Love survives here not by defeating social pressure but by being cleverer, quieter and more faithful than it.
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NOTE ON THE TEXT
Genre Courtship song, love song
Primary theme Love and desire: secret mutual love
Secondary themes Memory and nostalgia; place and locality
Form Ten quatrains; 40 lines
Metre Common Metre: alternating four-stress and three-stress lines on an 8/6 syllabic base, with natural Scots stress allowing occasional extra unstressed syllables
Rhyme ABAB; full rhymes throughout, grey / Setterday rhyming on the metrical beat
Register Literary Lowland (Central) Scots in modern orthography, without apostrophes
Setting A Lowland farming district at harvest, late summer evening
Basis No specific historical event; rural courtship custom, bothy life, and kirk-centred village respectability