Seamus Perry
speaker
386 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 31 Aug
Seamus Perry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Anku is a word that's going to recur in the poem and it means something like very or remarkably or it's all sorts of different resonances that we can come back to.
And Tam is settling into the pub.
And then there's this rather kind of striking representation, isn't there, of his wife back home.
Yes, I mean, he had a high old time, I think, in all sorts of ways, in which this is, I suppose, a kind of slightly sort of fantastical version.
It's interesting, isn't it, that the, as it were, the wifely warning
is there.
She prophesied that late or soon I would be found deep drowned in Dune, which is a river in Ayrshire, or catch with warlocks in the murk by Alloway's old haunted kirk.
So she at least has the gift of accurate prophecy.
Yeah.
Also, I mean, if you were, as it were, to read a translation of this in French or something, which is quite hard to imagine, but if you were, you wouldn't be in any uncertainty, would you, about what the moral of the poem is.
The moral of the poem is you should listen to your prudent wives and not get drunk.
But anyone who reads this poem as Burns has written it and took that away as the moral would be completely misunderstanding the nature of the poem, which actually celebrates Tam and the imaginative
you know, excess and expansiveness that getting foo leads him into.
They seem quite saucy, don't they?
And he's got a track record here, doesn't he?
Because the wife also holds it against him that he drinks with Kirkton Jean, who seems, you know, quite a lively girl.
Yes, exactly.
Then in the pub, he's with Johnny, the suitor.
That's a cobbler.
his ancient trusty drouthy crony, who Tam loves like a brother.
Showing 321–340 of 386 · page 17 of 20
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