POEM OF THE WEEK

Born in 1766, Lady Nairne would be furious to see her name at the top of this column. Her best poems – written as lyrics for Scottish folk melodies – were as good as Burns’s (and sometimes misattributed to him). But her authorship was a secret. Not even her husband knew. In 1842, she was aghast when a fellow Scot dared, “among perfect strangers, to denounce me as the origin of “The Land o’ the Leal!” I… very much dislike as ever any kind of publicity.” When, after much pleading, she agreed to meet her publisher, she went disguised as an old woman called “Mrs Bogan of Bogan”.

Nairne grew up in a fiercely Jacobite family, who named her Carolina – the female version of Charles – in tribute to Bonny Prince Charlie, and many of her lyrics are Jacobite rallying songs. But this song finds her in a more intimate mood.

“The Land o’ the Leal” piles sorrow on sorrow. The land to which “the leal” (the loyal) will go is death. The narrator is already on her way, as we know from the extraordinary opening lines – she’s wearing away, like snow-wreaths in thaw. In the second stanza, we learn her child awaits her there. Life tragically imitated art – Nairne outlived her only son, William, who died in 1837 aged 29. She went off to the land o’ the leal herself in 1845.

Burns has a spot in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, dozens of statues of himself across the world, and, of course, Burns Night. But Nairne – once celebrated as “the Flower of Strathearn” – has nothing. As far as I can tell, there’s only one memorial to her: a crater on Mercury, named after her by a PhD student last year. In photos, it looks a little like a flower. Tristram Fane Saunders