Ae Fond Kiss by Robert Burns

Ae Fond Kiss by Robert Burns

Author: BBC Radio 4 April 12, 2025 Duration: 27:45

Robert Burns began a correspondence with Agnes McElhose, also known as Clarinda and Nancy, a married woman he was besotted with.

When she left Scotland to reunite with her husband he wrote Ae Fond Kiss as a heartfelt farewell.

It was later set to music and is one of his most famous 'songs' along with Auld Lang Syne and My Love Is Like A Red Red Rose.

Karen Matheson, the singer with Capercaillie, talks about its meaning to her and how performing it at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014 was a very special moment.

Joan Donaldson from Michigan grew up with Scottish music and has called her latest historical novel Ae Fond Kiss. She says she channelled her grief into the characters as a way of dealing with a devastating loss.

Sir Geoff Palmer discovered the song when he arrived in Edinburgh in the 1960s. He has traced Burns' and the song's connection to his home country of Jamaica and feels proud of the links he discovered.

For film maker Karen Guthrie from Ayrshire - Burns' birthplace - coping with and caring for her estranged parents meant long drives home through the countryside he inhabited. It was a journey of rediscovering Scotland's national poet and relating her family's story to Ae Fond Kiss.

Musician Seonaid Aitken plays both versions of the song on the violin and explains how the music conveys the feelings of longing after an unresolved love affair.

Producer: Maggie Ayre

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in April 2025.


There’s a certain piece of music that, when you hear it, seems to stop time. It might be a melody from your childhood, a song that played at a pivotal moment, or a composition that simply reaches into your chest and grips your heart. Soul Music, from BBC Radio 4, is built around that very phenomenon. This isn’t a program about genres or charts; it’s an intimate exploration of why specific pieces of music carry such profound emotional weight. Each episode focuses on a single, iconic work-from classical adagios to folk ballads, from film scores to pop anthems. The podcast weaves together the voices of people whose lives have been indelibly marked by that music: listeners share personal, often moving stories of grief, joy, love, and remembrance, while composers and performers might shed light on the piece’s creation. You’ll hear the music itself, of course, but framed in a way that reveals its deeper resonance in human experience. It’s a quiet, thoughtful series that reminds us how soundtracks our inner lives. Tuning into this podcast feels like being part of a conversation about the invisible threads that connect us all through notes and rhythms, exploring how a sequence of sounds can become a vessel for collective memory and feeling.
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