Burns's first written production was the song ‘O Once I Lov'd’ (PS 1), composed in 1774 when the poet was 15. It was a response to being partnered in the communal harvest gathering with another teenager, Nelly Kilpatrick, a girl who charmed Burns with her singing. Later he wrote of his song that it emerged from a time ‘when my heart glowed with honest warm simplicity; unacquainted, and uncorrupted with the ways of a wicked world’.1 What is interesting in both Burns's remark here and in the song itself is the genesis of Burns's expression not in some purely primitive ‘folk’ context but in a rather ‘genteel’ (to take a word from ‘O Once I Lov'd’) folk idiom that was part of the literary mainstream during the eighteenth century. The song's sentiments are identifiably part of a tradition of British pastoral writing found in the work of John Gay and Allan Ramsay, which presents peasants who are impeccably morally conservative:

Burns, of course, was a naive and love-struck young man when he wrote such idealistic words, but the song-writing in which he dabbled for the next ten years was essentially of the same sentimental kind. His first two dozen pieces include versions of the Psalms, pieces forged from the most fashionable sensibility such as ‘Song, Composed in August’ (PS 2) – including the following description of shooting birds:

which might seem rather overwrought in sensitivity for a working farmer – and highly innocent love songs of standard emotion. Only one of these early pieces, ‘Song: It Was upon a Lammas Night’ (PS 8) comes anywhere near sexual realism while remaining (albeit beautifully) euphemistic: