Robert Burns

Auld Lang Syne

“Please, don't ever become a stranger / Whose laugh I could recognize anywhere”

Community readers hear the New Year standard standing behind a song set on New Year's Day. The plea never to let a loved one become a stranger twins with Auld Lang Syne's "should auld acquaintance be forgot", and "hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you" carries the same keeping-faith with days gone by. The arc from young revelry to the morning-after clean-up mirrors a song traditionally sung, hand in hand, as a gathering breaks up — one reader notes the Danish custom of closing a party by singing it together.

A Red, Red Rose

“A red rose grew up out of ice frozen ground”

Community readers hear a possible nod to Robert Burns's "A Red, Red Rose" in the image of the red rose, the best known red rose in the song tradition and a touchstone of the Scottish Romantic-era songbook the lakes otherwise steeps itself in. Offered as a reader's association rather than a stated source; the line's primary work in the song remains the winter-bloom paradox the hosts read, a rose improbably alive in frozen ground.

To a Mouse

“And all of those best laid plans”

Angela & Uncle Jerry identify 'best laid plans' as a direct literary allusion to Robert Burns' poem 'To a Mouse,' in which a farmer plowing his field destroys a mouse's home and reflects that all plans, of mice and men, end in grief and pain. Uncle Jerry argues the allusion is perfect for the song: the man has torn apart the speaker's world and left her to die like the mouse whose home cannot be rebuilt before winter. He notes that Taylor hits the allusion with just three words, and that the subtlety is characteristic of how allusions create community, 'if you know, you know.'