By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘John Anderson, My Jo’ is one of Robert Burns’s finest love poems or love songs. A brief note; ‘jo’ is Scots dialect for ‘sweetheart’, and the speaker of the poem is a woman addressing her ageing husband, reassuring him that although his hair may be greying (what remains of it), he is still her ‘jo’ and they will go ‘hand in hand’ together through life.