He gave us love... isn’t that what we all want?

OH, to be a red, red rose. Was there ever a poet who loved women as much as Robert Burns? Wordsworth was wishy-washy, Byron a bit of a cad, and the less said about Philip Larkin the better.

But Burns? Now you’re talking. Because not only did he love women, he loved love.

His romantic streak is sewn into much of his work, never more evident in that most famous of his poems, A Red, Red Rose.

It is there in the erotic symbolism (‘newly sprung in June’), in the gentle innocence in which he professes ‘so deep in luve am I’, and in the heart-bursting timelessness of the proclamation: ‘I will luve thee still, my dear, Till a’ the seas gang dry’.

So why, exactly, is Burns to be cancelled? Because he held the same societal attitudes towards women as most men of the late 18th century?

Because he didn’t spend his days off attending men’s groups, advocating the need for women’s safe spaces and campaigning for transgender rights?

In that case you might as well cancel the entirety of humanity up until around 2017.

Like many Scottish children I was taught Burns at school and sang a number of his songs, too.

One I always adored was the Lament of Mary, Queen of Scots, on the Approach of Spring.

There he beautifully encapsulates Mary’s fate, her despair as both a Queen and a mother at being shut away from country and son, and her rage towards her cousin Elizabeth, whom he describes as ‘thou false woman’.

Then there is A Mother’s Lament, about the heartbreak of a mother whose son has been killed in war, where in just a few words he perfectly frames the unique loss of a mother grieving a child: ‘So fell the pride of all my hopes, my age’s future shade.’

My point, I suppose, is that Burns’s poetry is not just about that superficial love that lust inspires, but about human love that touches the soul at its deepest points.

He understood grief, and longing, and misery, what it means to be truly despairing and heartbroken, which is why, I think, he was able to write so eloquently about life’s high points.

No, Burns is not a women’s poet (the phrase sends unwelcome shivers, quite frankly) but a poet who wrote of the human condition.

He wrote well about women, and men. His words are universal, penned for us all, so much so that when a dear friend of mine died a few years back, one of his poems, Epitaph on My Own Friend, was adapted to reflect the fact she was a woman.

Its last lines, ‘If there’s another world, she lives in bliss; If there is none, she made the best of this’, brought the congregation to tears.

He didn’t spend his days off campaigning for trans rights

And this, too, is my point. Poetry, like all art, is subjective. We take from it what we like, and leave the bits we don’t.

We don’t have to enjoy an artist’s entire body of work, never mind approve of their lifestyle away from the pen and ink, to appreciate a good poetry stanza.

It’s a view that often seems lost on today’s woke generation, who appear to be believe that in order to enjoy a writer’s work, you must also believe they led a PC, blemishfree life.

Burns’s poems are messy, confusing, contradictory and at times, less than edifying. Why? Because that is the human condition.

All of us are striving for a path through it all, among the love and heartbreak, the good times and the sorrow. Burns, with his sharp pen and keen eye, encapsulated that better than most. In short, he gave us red, red roses.

And isn’t that what we, women or men, want from our poets?