Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is New Year's Day, January 1st, 2024.

Appropriately then, today's poem is an old folk song that was adapted, written down, into lyrical form by the great Scots poet, Robert Burns.

And it's called Ald Lang Zine.

This is a familiar song, probably to everybody in the Western world who has ever lived through any observance of New Year's Eve.

It is the New Year's Eve song.

How that came to be is a long story that we might not have time for here.

But how the song itself came to be is easier to explain.

It grew up in a Scotsfolk oral tradition over probably a number of years or centuries until in 1788 Robert Burns wrote down and worked out his own

lyrical version of the song and really standardized it at that time. And so most encounters you have now

with Alden-Zine, though there are variations by other poets and songwriters, most encounters

you have are with Burns version, which by all historical accounts or the accounts of many historians,

seems to be a fairly faithful rendition.

I'm not fluent in Old Scots language myself, so I can't say for sure,

but that's what the authorities say.

It is a song about old times, fitting for New Year's Eve and the coming of the new year,

when we both look back and look forward, and those two actions sort of join hands in a

rare way that has us contemplating whether we will leave behind the things that we're looking

back on or whether we will look back in order to take

them with us into the future and into the new year. And this poem and song makes a fitting

meditation on that question then. The title translates to roughly old long since, but in

English colloquially, it'd be more like old times or for old times sake.

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