Gie me ae spark o’ Nature’s fire,
That’s a’ the learning I desire.

These lines are spoken by the character “Davie” in Robert Burns’s epistolary poem “Epistle to a Young Friend” (addressed to Andrew Aiken), first published in the Kilmarnock edition of 1786. Burns, a largely self-educated poet from rural Ayrshire, often weighed “book learning” against lived experience, moral sense, and native genius. In the poem he offers practical counsel to a younger man about conduct, independence, and the value of character over social pretension. The couplet crystallizes Burns’s preference for innate vitality and authentic feeling—“Nature’s fire”—as the true foundation for wisdom and artistry.

Burns contrasts formal education with an inner, animating force: a “spark” of natural fire. The Scots phrasing (“Gie me ae…That’s a’…”) underscores plainspoken authenticity, suggesting that instinct, imagination, and moral intuition matter more than accumulated schooling. The line can be read as a credo of Romantic-era sensibility: genius and genuine feeling outrank pedantry. It also carries a democratic edge—talent and insight are not the monopoly of the formally educated. Burns is not rejecting learning outright so much as insisting that without native energy and sincerity, learning becomes sterile and socially performative.