Robert Burns, or the Ploughman Poet, is the national poet of Scotland. Employing a blend of English and Scots, the supreme lyricist of Scottish literature composed this week’s poem in 1785. A desultory read to anyone unaccustomed to Burns’s wider work might require a few word searches on google, but it remains an iconic poem of the Halloween genre and is often sung on Halloween by those who have committed the verse to memory.