The Yett at Craigie s Park

The Yett at Craigie’s Park
A Song of Memory in Literary Scots
Daniil Lazko
The poem, with a Scots–English glossary and a literary commentary
Tuapse, 30 September 2026

The Yett at Craigie’s Park

The hairst is in, the stibble’s bare,
The craws are ower the wid,
An’ I cam doon the Mill-dam road
The wey I aften did;
An’ there’s the yett at Craigie’s park,
The sneck in docken hid.

I laid my loof alang the bar,
The airn cauld an’ weet;
I liftit it, an’ there it was,
That skirl, hauf-grane, hauf-greet,
Uncheynged by thirty year o’ rust.
It stoppit baith my feet.

For Isa never had the time
Tae wheedle at a sneck;
Her knee gied it a dunt, an’ through,
Her hap o’ faded check;
An’ me still fummlin. “Slaw, slaw, slaw!”
She’d lauch, an’ crane her neck.

“It’s greetin for its tea,” she’d say,
Aye when the sneck wad cry,
“Like you at lowsin-time, Wat Grieve,
Your parritch-cog gane dry.”
I said it wasnae worth a lauch;
She snochert, wat o’ eye.

Ae simmer nicht I let the sneck
Drap on her finger-end;
She swore a word no taught at kirk,
Syne held it oot tae tend.
I pit my mooth tae’t, rust an’ saut.
“Awa,” she said, “it’ll mend.”

It wasnae ony muckle thing
That set us twa apairt:
She wantit Paisley an’ the mills,
I wantit horse an’ cairt;
We had it oot across this bar,
An’ neither wad cheynge airt.

They tell me she’s in Greenock noo,
Wi’ grandweans roon her chair,
A cooper’s wife, an’ stoot, an’ grey,
Wi’ flour-dust in her hair.
I wadnae hae it ither wey.
I stood a meenit mair.

The licht was drainin aff the park,
The burn ran broon an’ fu’,
An’ ere I kent, my knee had gien
The rail its dunt, an’ through.
Ye’d lauch, if ye could see me, lass,
Slaw, but I’ve learned it noo.

I didnae turn aboot tae steek,
But left it whaur it hung;
An’ somewhere at my back the wind
Cam ower the dyke, an’ swung
The auld yett roon, an’ faur ahint
I heard the sneck gie tongue.

Daniil Lazko
Tuapse, 30 September 2026

Form and Metre
Genre Reflective love song; song of memory with a light narrative-ballad element
Primary theme Lost love
Secondary themes Memory and nostalgia; place and locality; human contradiction
Form Original six-line song stanza; nine stanzas, fifty-four lines
Metre Predominantly iambic 8.6.8.6.8.6 song metre (alternating tetrameter and trimeter), with natural Scots variation: initial inversions, occasional anapestic substitution, monosyllabic ower
Rhyme scheme ABCBDB: the even lines rhyme, the odd lines run free
Register Plain-to-literary Lowland Scots with a rural working vocabulary, kept light on apostrophes
Basis None historical; an original fictional episode set in an unspecified Lowland parish, drawing on the Scots song and ballad tradition

Scots–English Glossary
The glossary lists every Scots form in the poem, together with a few English words that carry a specifically Scots sense in context. Spellings follow the poem. Craigie’s park and the Mill-dam road are invented local names. Paisley and Greenock are real: Paisley, in Renfrewshire, was a centre of thread and textile mills; Greenock, on the Clyde, a port of shipyards and sugar refineries, where coopers had steady work.
Scots English
aboot about; turn aboot, turn round
ae one, a single
aff off
aften often
ahint behind
airn iron
airt direction, point of the compass; cheynge airt, change course
alang along
an’ and
apairt apart
auld old
awa away; as an exclamation, ‘nonsense, get away with you’
aye always, ever (not ‘yes’ here)
baith both
bar the horizontal rail of a field gate
broon brown
burn stream, brook
cairt cart
cam came
cauld cold
check chequered cloth; hap o’ faded check, a shawl of faded checked material
cheynge change
cog wooden bowl or pail; parritch-cog, porridge bowl
cooper maker of barrels and tubs
craws crows, rooks
didnae did not
docken dock, the broad-leaved weed of field edges
doon down
drainin aff draining off, ebbing away (of light)
drap drop, fall
dunt a dull blow, a knock
dyke a dry-stone field wall (not a ditch)
ere before
faur far
fu’ full; here, of a stream in spate
fummlin fumbling
gane gone; gane dry, gone empty
gie give; gie tongue, give voice, as a hound gives tongue
gied gave
gien given
grandweans grandchildren
grane groan
greet weep, cry; greetin for its tea, crying for its supper
Grieve a surname; as a common noun, grieve is a farm overseer or steward
hae have
hairst harvest
hap shawl, wrap
hauf half
Isa a Scots pet form of Isabel
ither other
kent knew
kirk church
lass girl, young woman; a term of affection
lauch laugh
learn learn; in Scots also ‘teach’
licht light
liftit lifted
loof palm of the hand
lowsin-time the hour when work is done and the horses are unyoked
mair more
meenit minute
mooth mouth
muckle great, big
nicht night
no not
noo now
o’ of
ony any
oot out; had it oot, argued it through
ower over; pronounced as one syllable
park an enclosed field (not a public park)
parritch porridge
pit put
richt right; here, ‘exactly, squarely’
roon round, around
saut salt
simmer summer
skirl a shrill cry or screech
slaw slow
sneck the latch of a door or gate
snochert snorted, laughed through the nose
steek shut, close
stibble stubble
stoot stout, sturdy
stoppit stopped
syne then, next
tae to; tae’t, to it
twa two
uncheynged unchanged
wad would
wadnae would not
wantit wanted
wasnae was not
Wat short for Walter
wat wet; wat o’ eye, wet-eyed
weet wet, damp
wey way
whaur where
wheedle coax, work at gently
wi’ with
wid wood
ye you
year year; after a numeral Scots keeps the singular, thirty year
ye’d you would
yett gate

Literary Analysis
The situation
A man walks home along the Mill-dam road at the end of harvest. At the edge of a field he comes to an old iron gate, lifts its latch, and hears a sound he has not heard for thirty years. The sound returns him to Isa, the young woman who once went through that gate with him, and to the ordinary life they shared on either side of it. He learns nothing new, meets no one, makes no decision. He goes through the gate and walks on. That is the whole event, and the poem is built so that nothing more is needed.
The emotional arc runs from present encounter to sensory recognition, from recognition to memory, from memory to an account of what has changed, and back to the present. The return is not a conclusion but a movement: the speaker is already walking away when the poem ends.
The gate as centre
The gate is first of all a real gate. It has a bar, a bottom rail, a latch hidden in dockens, iron that is cold and wet in the evening. Everything the poem remembers happens at this object or through it. Isa knees the rail open; she jokes that the latch is greetin for its tea; the speaker once lets it drop on her finger; the two of them argue out their future across this bar; at the end his own knee gives the rail its knock, and the wind swings the gate behind him.
The poem never says what the gate means, and it does not need to. A gate divides two fields and joins them; it is a place where one waits or passes through; it is opened and left open. All of these meanings are present, but each arises from use rather than statement. The phrase Uncheynged by thirty year o’ rust is the closest the poem comes to comment, and even there the claim is literal: the rust has not altered the sound.
Isa
The former beloved is drawn entirely through what she does and says. She is impatient with mechanisms and with slowness; she opens gates with her knee instead of her hand; she wears a shawl of faded check; she mocks her lover for fumbling; she laughs through her nose until her eyes run; she swears a word she did not learn in church; she dismisses her injured finger with Awa, it’ll mend. She wanted the mills of Paisley rather than a farm cart. None of this is praise, and none of it is idealised. She is quick, earthy, funny and a little unkind, and the poem loves her for exactly those qualities.
The speaker, by contrast, reveals himself mostly by omission. He fumbles with latches, finds her jokes less funny than she does, and wanted to stay with horse and cart. He is slow in every sense, and the poem allows him the dignity of admitting it.
Imperfection and the parting
The remembered relationship contains no grand betrayal. It contains a teased man, an unappreciated joke, a pinched finger, a stubborn argument. The parting itself is rendered in four lines of plain fact: she wanted one life, he wanted another, An’ neither wad cheynge airt. The Scots word airt, a direction or quarter of the compass, turns a personal quarrel into something as impersonal as a wind: two people facing different ways.
This restraint is what allows the seventh stanza to work. The speaker learns that Isa is now a cooper’s wife in Greenock, stout and grey, with grandchildren and flour in her hair. The image is warm, domestic and slightly comic, and it is entirely outside his life. His response is a single sentence of acceptance, I wadnae hae it ither wey, followed by a single action that contradicts it without cancelling it: I stood a meenit mair. The poem holds both lines to be true.
The echo and the ending
Two motifs carry the memory into the present. The first is Isa’s gesture: in the third stanza she knocks the rail with her knee; in the eighth the speaker does the same, before he knows it. The second is her word: in the third stanza she calls him Slaw, slaw, slaw!; in the eighth he answers her across thirty years, Slaw, but I’ve learned it noo. What survives of the love is not a feeling that is named but a habit that has passed from her body into his.
The last stanza returns everything to the physical world. The speaker does not shut the gate. The wind comes over the dyke and swings it, and far behind him he hears the latch gie tongue, the phrase used of a hound giving voice. The sound that stopped him in the second stanza now follows him as he walks away. The poem does not say what the sound says.

The Burns Tradition in the Poem
The poem is not an imitation of any particular poem by Robert Burns. It borrows no line, refrain, character, scenario or stanza pattern from his work. What it takes from Burns is a set of habits of mind and craft that run through his songs and his narrative verse.
Vernacular authority
Burns showed that the speech of Ayrshire farm people could carry every emotional register, from bawdy comedy to grief, without apology. The poem is written in Scots as its actual medium, not as decoration laid over English. Its syntax is spoken: An’ me still fummlin, It wasnae ony muckle thing, We had it oot across this bar. Its vocabulary is the working vocabulary of a farm: yett, sneck, dyke, park, hairst, stibble, lowsin-time, cairt. English forms appear where Scots itself uses them, as they do throughout Burns.
The song stanza
Burns wrote most of his love poetry as songs, to be sung to existing Scottish airs, and his lines are shaped for the breath and the tune. The six-line stanza here extends the common ballad measure of alternating eight- and six-syllable lines by one further pair of lines, so that each stanza has room for a small scene and a turn. Only the short lines rhyme, as in the traditional ballad, which keeps the rhymes sparse and emphatic and lets the long lines move freely. Metrical variations follow natural Scots stress rather than a counted pattern, as they do in the songs.
Comedy inside tenderness
Burns rarely lets a love poem become purely solemn. His women and men tease, quarrel, laugh and misbehave, and the tenderness is the more convincing for it. Isa’s joke about the latch crying for its tea, likening it to a hungry farmhand at the end of the day, is exactly this kind of domestic comedy, and so is the speaker’s dry verdict on the joke and her snort of laughter in reply.
Sympathy for ordinary lives
In Burns the lives of ploughmen, servants and mill workers are worth a song as they are. The poem’s people are a farm worker, a mill girl and a cooper’s wife; its turning points are a harvest, a pinched finger, a choice between factory and farm. The economic fact behind the parting, the pull of the growing mill towns away from the land, is a Burnsian subject in its own right, and the poem registers it without polemic.
Direct address and restraint
Burns often speaks straight to the person he loves or has lost. The poem allows itself one such moment, Ye’d lauch, if ye could see me, lass, and places it late, after seven stanzas of reported memory. The address is affectionate and wry rather than declarative. In this the poem follows the side of Burns that trusts suggestion and silence as much as open statement.

Meaning and Distinctiveness
The poem asks what remains of a love when the person is gone from one’s life but still alive, well and elsewhere. Its answer is neither consolation nor regret. What remains is located in things and in the body: a sound in an iron latch, a way of opening a gate, a word that once was mockery. The relationship could not survive a disagreement about where to live; the gesture has survived thirty years without either of them intending it.
Several choices distinguish the poem within the tradition of the lost-love song. The beloved is not dead, not idealised and not recovered: she has a full life of her own, and the poem is glad of it. The speaker is not young: his memory is mature, a little rueful and honest about his own slowness. There is no reunion, no moral and no statement of lasting feeling. The emotional climax is an unconscious movement of a knee.
The poem is also distinctive in the way it lets one object carry its whole structure. The gate is where the poem begins, where every memory takes place, where the lovers parted and where the poem ends. By the final stanza the speaker has done what Isa once did and left the gate open behind him, and it is the gate, moved by the wind, that has the last word. The meaning of that word is left to the reader.