Help decipher an 18th century peom

"Cock" had the same meanings then that it does now (and I don't think "penis" was very common yet in everyday speech). I don't think "beaver" had any dirty connotations until later, but it sure sounds like it should in this ditty.

wtf? Someone sent me this poem in my email just yesterday.

"Turn up the bill of your hat," I'd wager

Hm...what's the exact provenance of this poem? I'm a touch suspicious!

It was written by Robert Burns.

Rabbie, d'ye ken.

http://www.bartleby.com/6/335.html

(Oh, and DO bookmark Bartleby.com)

Um, doesn't it mean to put a feather in your cap? S'what it seems to be from the couplet: "But now he has gotten a hat and a feather, Hey, brave Johnie lad, cock up your beaver!" As in a cock's feather. Oh dear, this is just getting worse.

If "beaver" doesn't mean "hat" in the poem, I'm sure "hat" doesn't either. But "feather" could still be "feather."

Scottish literature people to thread!

cock up your beaver = adjust your beaver-skin hat

Yeah it's about hats. It's also asking Jonny to be a bit more of a lad -- all the double meanings you could possibly want are present and correct -- and stop putting on airs and graces, and go bash the English. It may be written by Burns, or freely adapted by him from a popular ballad. The ballad form, especially addressed to an absent soldier by a female speaker, was particularly important for Burns because of its various ideological resonances: implying a lost (ie made-up) idea of oral culture; or carrying strong Jacobite overtones; sometimes democratic associations. cf 'Love and Liberty: A Cantata'. Here the implications seem to be a sexually demonstrative and demanding female speaker who is unsatisfied with the manliness of her beau; at least as far as the first stanza goes. The second one is more complex -- since 'we'll' be teaching the Southrons a lesson together, there is a slide between male-female desire and male-male companionship. 'Brave' might be an Anglicisation of 'braw': which would imply 'bonnie' as much as 'courageous', so the ironic implication of 'how brave are you really, man' becomes more pronounced: look how pretty you are, big boy, but can you fight like the best of them. Easy to read this as a lament for a lost Scottish independent identity post-Union, but since 'Scotland' only emerges in its modern form post-Union, the artifice of the poem reminds us that such an identity is always crafted rather than discovered, invented rather than found.

wee sleekit cowerin timorous deconstruction!!

obv it is still to do with hats, but the sex thing is surely in there also viz "sometimes a cock is just a cock" — freud

why does it remind me of "chuck out your chintz"?

Further level of interpretation:

The poem also implies that what we need is proper Scottish and braw poesy, none of this effete English trash: the poem thus enacts what it demands, supplying a manly national oral verse: but obv. Burns is kidding us, since he is as much neo-classically trained as he is an oral poet.