Millions of people sing it at midnight every year in a language most of them do not speak, to a tune that was attached to the words eleven years after they were written, by a poet who said he did not write them.
Here is what the phrase means, what the song is actually asking, and how a Scottish drinking song became the sound of New Year in North America.
The Short Answer
Auld lang syne is Scots for old long since. In practice it means days gone by, times long past, or for old times’ sake. The first verse asks a rhetorical question: should old friends be forgotten and never thought of again? The answer, obviously, is no, so let us have a drink to the old days.
The Story Behind the Song
Robert Burns wrote the words down in 1788 and sent them to the Scots Musical Museum. He was explicit about where they came from, describing it as an old song of the olden times that had never been printed or even written down until he took it down from an old man.
Whether that is literal or a poet’s modesty is unresolved. The text bears a clear resemblance to “Old Long Syne,” a ballad printed by James Watson in 1711, so what exists today is some mixture of an older folk song and Burns’ own additions. Most of the drinking lines appear to be his.
Burns was doing this systematically. After the union of Scotland and England he travelled the country collecting Scots poetry and songs in order to preserve a language and a culture that were under pressure.
Is the tune the original one?
No. The words were first published shortly after Burns died in 1796, and the melody everyone now sings was attached later, at the suggestion of the publisher George Thomson. The words and that tune appeared together for the first time in 1799.
The melody derives from a tune by the English composer William Shield, from his comic opera Rosina, first performed in 1782. An older, more traditional folk setting of the same words exists and is still performed, though rarely.
So the definitive version of Scotland’s most famous song pairs words a Scottish poet says he collected from someone else with a melody adapted from an English opera.
What is a cup of kindness?
A drink shared with someone, and the gesture that goes with it. The line proposes that the two old friends in the song take one together for the sake of the days gone by.
That is the whole scene. The song is not a general statement about time. It is two specific people meeting after a long separation, agreeing that they have drifted, and buying each other a drink about it.
Why is it sung at New Year?
Because of Hogmanay. Through the nineteenth century the song became part of the Scottish New Year celebration, and the tradition developed of singing it in a circle with hands joined, crossing arms at a set point in the verse.
Scots emigration carried it worldwide. English speakers outside Scotland gradually smoothed the dialect into the version now sung, which loses a certain amount and is considerably easier to manage at midnight.
How did it reach America?
Through a Canadian. The bandleader Guy Lombardo, who came from a part of western Ontario with a large Scottish population, played it with his Royal Canadians at the turn of the new year on a broadcast on 31 December 1929, and then kept doing it for more than thirty years on radio and later television.
That is the entire reason Americans associate the song with the moment the clock strikes. Before Lombardo it was a Scottish custom. After him it was a fixture of the American calendar.
Where else is it used?
Almost anywhere something ends. It is sung at funerals and graduations, at the close of Scouting jamborees, at the end of sporting events in Thailand, and at school graduation ceremonies in Japan, where it carries a completely different set of associations.
The reason it travels is that the sentiment is portable and specific to no religion, no country and no year. Any ending can use it.
What gets lost in translation?
The communal weight of the phrase. Murray Pittock, a literary historian at the Centre for Robert Burns Studies in Glasgow, has explained that the literal English does not convey what it means to a Scots speaker, where it refers to a shared past underpinning the present relationships of a family, a community or an association.
Old long since is accurate and flat. The Scots phrase is doing something closer to invoking the history that makes a group a group, which is why it works at midnight in a room full of people who have decided to be together.
Why it lasted
Because almost nobody knows the words past the first verse, and it does not matter. There are five verses. Most people sing one and the chorus, hum the rest, and get the point anyway.
A song that survives being mumbled by drunk strangers in a circle at midnight for two hundred years is doing something that better-known lyrics cannot. It is not there to be performed. It is there to be joined.
Songs learned by ear at parties and ceremonies are the ones people know without ever seeing written down; when a fragment is all you have, our song lyrics search will name it.