An' bar the doors wi' drivin' snaw,
though in this last case it is skilfully used to introduce the theme. These introductions are probably less imitations of the traditional opening landscape which had been a convention since the early Middle Ages, than the natural result of a plowman's daily consciousness of the weather.
For whether related organically to his subject or not, Burns's descriptions of external nature are to a high degree marked by actual experience and observation. Even remembering Thomson in the previous generation and Cowper and Crabbe in his own, we may safely say that English poetry had hardly seen such realism. Its quality will be conceived from a few passages. Take the well-known description of the flood from The Brigs of Ayr.
When heavy, dark, continued, a'-day rains, all-day
Wi' deepening deluges o'erflow the plains;
When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil,
Or stately Lugar's mossy fountains boil,
Or where the Greenock winds his moorland course,
Or haunted Garpal draws his feeble source,
Arous'd by blust'ring winds an' spotting thowes, thaws