QUIZ: Burns Night facts aplenty but can you identify revered Rabbie's poems from quotes?
But before bagpipes blow their last and Auld Lang Syne strains signal close of suitably dram-drenched Bard of Ayrshire festivities, here's timely poetry quotation quiz, accompanied by well and little known facts aplenty about Ploughman Poet's short-lived life and lasting legacy.
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Hide Ad#1 Asked what had been the source of his greatest inspiration, corncrake-voiced warbler Bob Dylan said it was Burns’ 1794 song “Red, Red Rose”.
#2 Astronaut Nick Patrick carried a volume of Burns’ poetry with him on a 2010 space mission which saw him travel 5.7 million miles while orbiting the Earth 217 times. It’s not explained why.
#3 The oldest existing statue of Burns is thought to be in Camperdown, Australia. Carved by one John Greenshields, it was shipped there during the 1850’s.
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Hide Ad#4 The late Michael Jackson had reportedly worked on an album in which some of Burns’ poems were to be set to music.
#5 John Steinbeck’s 1937 novel “Of Mice and Men” takes its title from a famous line in Burns’ “To a Mouse”: “The best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang oft agley”.
#6 Mosgiel, a town near Dunedin, New Zealand, is named after Burns’ farm in Ayrshire.
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Hide Ad#7 The former Soviet Union was the first country in the world to honour Burns with a commemorative stamp marking the 160th anniversary of his death in 1956.