On Burns Night, 25 January 2025, there will will be a rare celestial alignment of the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn in the same section of the sky. Alignments like these are relatively rare and bring an aura of mystery and fascination. Some ancient cultures associated such alignments with pivotal changes or as portents of great significance.
Below you will find work by Scottish poets taking the stars and planetary exploration as their inspiration. For example, Kathleen Jamie writes about the dog-star/dug-stern Sirius; our new national Makar Peter Mackay has Pluto as his muse; and Sheena Blackhall recounts when a book of Burns’ poems and songs travelled to the International Space Station.
With the discovery of Uranus in 1781, six planets were known when Burns was alive – Neptune was later identified in 1846, and the dwarf planet Pluto in 1930. John Campbell Brown, Astronomer Royal for Scotland, and poet Rab Wilson reflected that Robert Burns and his friend Alexander Naysmith must surely have talked of numerous hot topics at that time related to cosmic objects. These included events like:
– The return of Halley’s Comet in 1759 – the year of Burns’ birth
– Lomonosov’s 1761 discovery of the atmosphere of Venus
– Messier’s 1771 catalogue of diffuse astronomical objects
– William Herschel’s discovery of the new planet Uranus, “expanding the known boundaries of the Solar System for the first time in history.” (source: Oor Big Braw Cosmos, Brown & Wilson, Luath Press, 2019).
In a letter to his paramour Clarinda (Agnes Maclehose) on 20 January 1788, Robert Burns wrote of his dream of their escaping to a love nest on a remote planet by taking a cosmic trip beyond the near planets:
Don’t you see us hand in hand, or rather my arm around your lovely waist, making our remarks on Sirius, the nearest of the fixed stars; or surveying a comet flaming inoxious by us, as we just now would remark the passing pomp of a travelling Monarch?: or, in a shady bower of Mercury or Venus, dedicating the hour to love; in mutual converse, relying honor and revelling endearment – whilst the most exalted strains of Poesy and Harmony would be the ready, spontaneous language of our souls!
