Why Robbie Burns wrote poetry in the sound of spoken Scottish dialect?
In comparison with many other languages, English notoriously lacks rhymes. The position was well put by Edward Bysshe (Art of English Poetry, 1702): I dare almost affirm, that the Difficulty of finding Rhymes, has been the unlucky Cause that has frequently reduc’ d even the best of our Poets to take up with Rhymes that have scarce any Consonance, or Agreement in Sound 1. And yet the evidence is that, until comparatively recently, English poets have generally managed to connect words whose syllabic peaks and codas sounded at least approximately the same. As H.C.Wyld put it many years ago, … it is hardly too much to say that the vast majority of the rhymes of Sackville, Spenser, and Shakespeare are not merely such as would pass muster now, but are of a kind in which the most careful ear could find no flaw 2. And despite recent research which suggests that assonance – so-called ‘near-rhyme’ – was rather more common in Middle English verse than has been allowed hitherto, the impression r
