The Last Sark
"The Last Sark" is a dialect poem, written in the Scots language. As Florence S. Boos notes: "The everyday speech of all classes of Victorian Scotland was probably some version of Scots" (55). While it was common for Scottish authors to write in Standardized English, dialect poetry tended to be looked down upon and efforts of Scottish poets to write in traditionally English poetic forms, such as blank verse, removed them from the common Scot (54). As such, Scottish (and especially Glaswegian) working-class poets "expected no wider English audience" (56) and instead wrote more towards an audience of their peers.