Why is Robert Burns’ classic novel considered a masterpiece?

Nannie and her colleagues are not happy to hear it: Tam has to flee on horseback with a horde of witches screaming in hot pursuit, “Wi ‘mony an eldritch skriech and hollo.” Fortunately for him, witches cannot cross running water, and the River Doon is located nearby. Tam managed to race over the bridge to safety, but Maggie the horse wasn’t quite so lucky. Nanny grabs her tail as soon as she steps into Brigadier O’Don, and — spoiler alert — she’s only left with a “rare stump.”

Rude jokes and chilling pictures

Carruthers calls it “a rather hackneyed ghost story plot”, but the way Burns tells his story means that “there is no other poem like it in Scottish literature”. MacKay told the BBC that Tam O’Shanter is “incredibly rich, very visual, very carefully crafted and very well paced”. “There’s so much in this book: everything from the way Burns took in and absorbed the landscape and folklore of Ayrshire where he was born, and Dumfriesshire where he was writing the poem, to his keen interest in the supernatural, to the various comments he makes about the complexities of human relationships and sex. It’s all quite fascinating.”

There are lines in Scottish and others in English. There are rude jokes, and there are shocking, bone-chilling images. There’s a tribute to the joys of drinking with friends in a cozy bar: “Kings may be blessed, but tam was glorious. / Oh, the ills of life triumphant!” There are wistful philosophical musings on how fleeting those joys are: “But pleasures are like the spreading poppy, / If you catch the flower, its blossoms fall.” Sometimes Tam’s narrator addresses himself: “O Tam, if you were wise, / As Kate’s wife’s advice you are!” Other times, he addresses another character or the reader/listener—one reason, Irvine says, why the poem “fits performance,” and became a staple of Burns’ dinners.

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In fact, there’s not much Burns doesn’t do in Tam O’Shanter – and he does it all in iambic tetrameter. “He’s showing off,” Irvin says. “He does one thing, and says, ‘Look, I can do this other thing, too.’ In his first collection of poems, he does this between one poem and another. It adopts different poetic genres, shifts from Scots to English, and borrows from all sorts of different traditions—whether what we now think of as the folk tradition, or the literary traditions of England and Scotland. It’s an iconic display of all the different things it can do. And in Tam O’Shanter, he does it all in one poem.”