Family and Poetic Affinities of Bulmer, Burns, and Cleghorn

Abstract This article yokes family stories about Robert Burns as a literary, cultural, and amicable influence upon the Bishop and Cleghorn families. It delves into Burns’s Scotland as lived with the article author’s ancestor Robert Cleghorn; they shared verses, sung and dined together, and exchanged letters about poetry and farming in Edinburgh and Dumfries. The Cleghorn and Bishop families brought Burns’s poetic culture to Canada. Elizabeth Bishop’s grandfather, William “Pa” Bulmer, read Burns and the Bible in the Great Village family parlor during evenings, and Bishop inherited stories of Burns being read during the Maritime seafaring adventures of William Hutchinson, the brother of her grandmother “Gammie.” Bishop’s childhood absorption of Burns influenced her oft-expressed wanderlust, her use of ballad forms, and her unflinching inclusion of abjection in poetry. Bishop’s Bulmer family hailed from Yorkshire and sailed to Nova Scotia in the 1740s. Bulmer/Boomer migrations to Canada continued in the early 1800s, including the author’s Boomer ancestors, Michael and his daughter Mary Boomer, who married my great-great-grandfather Andrew Cleghorn. Boomer genealogy from the Bulmer and surrounding villages in Yorkshire extends back to the clan’s historical roots as Huguenots in France exiled by Louis XIV. These 500-year-old circuits reveal diasporic culture at work.