Yestreen I wed a lady fair,
An ye wad believe me,
On her cunt there grows nae hair,
That's the thing that grieves me.
It vex'd me sair,
it plagu'd me sair.
It put me in a passion,
To think that I had wed a wife,
Whose cunt was out o' fashion.
This poem is quite vulgar even by modern standards and seems positively scandalous by eighteenth-century standards.
Did Burns face any consequence or criticism for this poem?
"Nae Hair On'T" was part of the book "The Merry Muses of Caledonia" published 1799, while Burns died 1796. So he didn't see any direct criticism or consequence.
Merry Muses includes other famous bawdy songs / poems "Nine Inch will Please a Lady" and "Madgie cam to my Bedstock". It was a collection of songs sung at the local pub with Burns' friends, a convivial club called "Crochallan Fencibles".
Individual songs may or may not be Burns work, as he was both collector and writer. Someone (likely Alexander Smellie, the son of one of the other members) published songs known from the pub. The original (one in Burns' handwriting, if it existed) doesn't survive, but there are two copies of the printed version in the Lord Rosebery library and G. Ross Roy collection. There are two letters in which he mentions a volume of bawdy songs he has been working on collecting for a long time, but not saying they are his own work.
However after his death, the book was published and many bad imitations were made. His publisher refused to admit his involvement in Merry Muses for 100 years.
editor-printer of the original Merry Muses of 1799 was probably Alexander Smellie, the son of one of Burns’s wittiest carousing companions. Watermarks indicate that the paper upon which The Merry Muses was printed comes from the same batches that Alexander used for two of his father’s posthumous works, the Characteristical Lives and volume two of the Philosophy of Natural History, which we know with certainty were produced in his shop in 1799. Furthermore, Alexander was a Crochallan himself and had in his possession his father’s “disreputable” correspondence with Burns, as well as his own memories of the songs that he had sung as a young man in Douglas’s tavern with his father’s trusted and distinguished friends. The volume Alexander Smellie printed is a fellow performer’s enduring testimony to the good times that song afforded the Crochallans and that Alexander had enjoyed in the company of a father he appears to have worshipped. -Stephen Brown
As a follow-up, I’m curious as to the reference to a hairless vulva being “out of fashion.” How much of a consensus on the hairy/hairless debate was there at the time of this poem’s writing? I had believed the shaved look to have been proprietary to the turn-of-the-millennium.