Ken Nordine, Master of Radio

 

 

     Primarily an appreciation, this essay seeks as well to provide a personal context for the reception of Word Jazz.  I have consulted neither secondary sources nor histories of radio but mention only what survives in my own memory.  I have been listening to the albums again, which is surely the best way to get a fix on any artist.

 

 

     Works of art vary in the extent to which they exploit the specific resources of their genre.  Some films, for example, are particularly cinematic with extensive use of montage [1] while others feature camera work less prominently.  Some poetic lyrics foreground sound effects and emotional power; others may sound more prosy or conversational and offer a more cerebral appeal.  An artist’s attentiveness to the qualities most characteristic of the medium, of course, plays no necessary part in evaluation which depends not on the artist’s goals, but on how well those ends are achieved. 

     Radio’s day as a major form of entertainment has already come and gone, though for more than a generation its programming, specific shows for the most part (not just a format the listener might turn on and off at any time) vied with films for people’s attention.  Many radio performers deployed substantial skills equally useful on stage or in print.  Humphrey Bogart appeared (with Greer Garson) in the Lux Radio Theatre version of The African Queen and Dylan Thomas read for BBC radio just as he did with a live audience.  The airwaves were simply a means of transmission for news reporters reading from wire services, while announcers played recorded music, often remaining inconspicuous as many classical hosts do today.

     With the arrival of rock and roll, radio disk jockeys gained new influence and Wolfman Jack and Casey Kasem became celebrities for their spirited and distinctive patter, largely improvised.  A few radio personalities created shows in which any individual iteration was less significant than the pattern  created by the whole, often including considerable repetition.  Outstanding among these was Franklin McCormack whose All Night Showcase on WGN included music, poetry [2], and talk.  Another Midwesterner, Jean Shepherd, working for a series of stations (ultimately WOR in New York), read poetry [3], and told stories, some of which continue to be rebroadcast.  Marshall McLuhan noted his originality, commenting that Shepherd "regards radio as a new medium for a new kind of novel that he writes nightly." [4]

     Ken Nordine’s art was specific to radio.  He exploited the possibilities of the medium in his Word Jazz broadcasts on WBEZ for over forty years, while collections on LPs have been a cult favorite for years.  Nordine had developed an altogether idiosyncratic form which he perfected throughout his career.  He delivered his monologues in his extraordinary rich voice which, apart from his art, served him well in making a good living doing voice-overs and narrations in advertisements and movie trailers.  One need scarcely even know what he is saying, his sound alone carries such beauty, authority, and conviction.  He was a master at tone and timing, and his musical backgrounds were basically jazz with a willingness to stray into sounds rarely heard before, often provided by the Fred Katz Group [5].  The narrations may be funny in the metaphysical style of Piet Hein’s Grooks or spooky and quasi-metaphysical like Rod Serling at the start of The Twilight Zone.  Poignance might turn in a moment to irony.  Nordine was unpredictable.  He became a favorite of the friends of cannabis well before the advent of the Firesign Theatre.

     My first experience was when I was perhaps fourteen years old and a friend a few years older, a student at Antioch (which I understood then to rank with Reed as the hippest campuses in America), offered to play me a record he had just purchased: Ken Nordine’s Word Jazz.  “This one is something else,” he said. “We have to turn out the lights first.”  And in the semi-darkness as his parents shuffled by outside I heard something that struck me as really new.  It wasn’t a series of short stories or stand-up comedy or poetry exactly.  It utilized jazz music and the sort of sound effects used on radio dramas and, most impressively, a voice that seized one’s attention and would not let go.

     Few others have utilized the medium of radio more effectively.  Depending on suggestion as they do, his routines would be less compelling if visual images were included.  Like situation comedies on television, the impact of one individual broadcast depends more on the listener’s familiarity with the conventions of his program in general than on characteristics unique to a single iteration.  His relation to radio drama, many of which were still being produced when Word Jazz debuted, is dialectic: the “realer-than-real” sound effects, each creaking door or splash of water perfect and distinct, resembled those on Johnny Dollar or Inner Sanctum, but his tales were far less predictable than those highly conventionalized programs.  He was hip and existential when those qualities were all but unavailable on mass media.

     Nordine occupies the liminal space between poetry and prose, the popular and the hermetic, the absurd and the profound.  Listening to a single track of Word Jazz is enough to make some listeners cue up the next while others determine to waste no more time.  In contrast to Del Close and John Brent’s How to Speak Hip (1961) (which I did find amusing) or  – Lord help us! – Maynard Krebs (who first appeared on The Dobie Gillis Show in 1959) (whom I did not), Nordine operated, like Lenny Bruce, from within the counter-culture.  He was assuredly a cousin to the Theater of the Absurd and an ancestor to the cerebral comedy of George Carlin and Steven Wright.

     Those who do not know his work are advised to turn out the lights, lie back in bed, and follow the timeless advice of Gus Cannon in 1929, seconded by the Rooftop Singers in 1962, “Daddy, let your mind roll on.”  Even public radio today is dominated by talk and news and music with virtually no poetry or drama and little attention to the specific potential of the medium.  Nordine was one of a kind.  He seems to have come from nowhere and to have left no imitators.

 

 

1.  Mamoulian is an example of a popular studio director in whose work montage in the manner described by Eisenstein in Film Form and Film Sense figures prominently.

2.  In 1936 MacCormack hosted one of the very few broadcast poetry shows with the title Poetic Melodies.

3.  He was particularly fond of Robert Service. 

4.  In Understanding Media, “Radio: the Tribal Drum,” p. 148.  McLuhan goes on to say “It is his idea that, just as Montaigne was the first to use the page to show his reactions to the new world of printed books, he is the first to use radio as an essay and novel form for recording our common awareness of a totally new world of universal human participation in all human events, private or collective.”

5.  Chico Hamilton played drums under an assumed name. 

Fela’s Pidgin English Eloquence

 

 

 

     Fela tended always toward extravagance.  His oeuvre is very large, amounting to at least sixty-four albums, many of which I have not heard.  Ignorant of Yoruba and imperfect in my understanding even of pidgin, I can here do no more than encourage others with even less acquaintance with Fela to listen to this remarkable artist who expressed the thoughts of millions in his country and elsewhere and recorded songs that speak to even a bourgeois American suburbanite.

 

 

     Slightly less than fifty years ago, Patricia and I embarked on a study of West Arican history and culture in contemplation of teaching in Nigeria.  We read about Nok terra cottas and Benin bronzes, about the Middle Passage and the Berlin Congo Conference of 1885.  We got an inkling at least of the complex and, I think, comprehensive pantheon of Yoruba orishas well as some sense of the contemporary meaning of juju and witches.  We investigated Nigerian cuisine, as well as one might when limited by the resources of a 1970s American supermarket. 

     And we listened to music popular in Nigeria: King Sunny Adé, the Juju master, Prince Nico Mbarga  (who was actually Cameroonian), and, of course, Fela.  The musician Fela Kuti was born Ransome-Kuti, and for a time used the name Anikulapo, Yoruba for “one who has death in his purse,” though he is most often called simply Fela.  He died in 1997, having established himself as the preeminent figure in Nigeria’s musical scene during the second half of the twentieth century.

     During the last century, the significance and, at times, the beauty of popular culture has been recognized.  Since the term popular implies acceptance by the masses, largely independent of the trends occurring among the elite, one might argue that it registers specific moments in social history more precisely than high art.  Once in Mumbai I watched a film at a gigantic cinema palace, grander than any movie theater I know in America, where every seat was occupied by boisterous expressive fans, cheering, laughing, singing, and gasping while balancing trays of snacks.  The experience of watching a Bollywood musical in that setting surely revealed more about India today than visiting a museum or reading a novel by Arundhati Roy.  Similarly, acquaintance with anime characters, the haunting melodies of Um Kulthum, or the comedy of George Formby can reveal the taste and received ideas of a given place and time [1].  This is emphatically true in the case of Fela who constantly engaged topical themes. 

     The musician, whose birth name was Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, grew up in an affluent and influential family.  His parents had been leaders in the struggle for independence, his mother as a leading feminist and socialist organizer and his father as head of the teachers’ union.  Nobel-winning writer Wole Soyinka is his cousin.  Though himself a relatively privileged member of his country’s small educated middle class, he was brought up to fight for progressive causes, a tendency that accelerated after his visit to the United States in 1969 when he became acquainted with Black Panther Sandra Smith who gave him a copy of Malcolm X’s Autobiography.

     His American influences were musical as well as political.  When young he had performed with trumpeter Victor Abimbola Olaiya who had in turn been influenced by James Brown, but Fela’s own musical style came to be called Afrobeat.  His distinctive arrangements include elements of highlife and Yoruba folk music, but also blues, jazz, and funk, often featuring lengthy repetitious jams with strong horn sections and frequent call and response passages.  He sang sometimes in Yoruba, but quite often used pidgin English [2] in order to seek a mass audience across tribal groups.

     Those fond of Fela’s music, even those most sympathetic to the singer’s anti-imperialist stance, might be given pause by other elements of his politics.  Though he died of complications from AIDS, he considered the condition a “white man’s disease.”  In 1978 he married twenty-seven women in a single ceremony.  His Afrocentrism considered ethnicity (rather than power or wealth) the most essential and definitive characteristic in social relations.  His cultural nationalism was evident as well in his use of Yoruba ritual.  Still Fela was a significant voice of protest against post-colonial oppression and domestic authoritarianism and his frequent use of pidgin, a dialect most used by the powerless, underlines his advocacy for the poor and working class.

     He began, however, with the group Koola Lobitos doing love songs like “My Lady Frustration” (1968): “Everybody knows how much he meant to you, baby/ But you still insist that your heart's alright.”  Other tracks are dance music and focus on the night club scene, such as “Its Highlife Time” (1968):

Jump for joy

At this freaky club

He’s brand new craze

that makes me craze

 

      From 1969 on, however, his dominant themes were regularly political and cultural.  His Nigerian and international antagonists are identified in his “yab” (ridicule) of Moshood Abiola, “I. T. T. (International Thief Thief” (1980) and his political ally Olusegun Obasanjo.  As Abiola had been appointed a vice-president of I. T. T. he might represent multinational corporations as well as oppressive forces within the country.  Identifying such exploiters as stealing the people’s money, he blames them for “oppression,” “inflation,” “confusion, and  “corruption.”  

     Asking “Why Black Man Dey Suffer” (1986) his answer is clear.

 

Our riches them take away to their land

In return them give us their colony

Them take our culture away from us

Them give us them culture we no understand

Black people we no know ourselves

We no know our ancestral heritage

We dey fight each other everyday

We are never together, we are never together at all

 

     Just as the British colonialists had practiced “indirect rule,” selecting local traditional leaders who would collaborate with the European program, today’s ruling class rewards a few Nigerians to ensure their support.  These Africans then reinforce outside domination by building their own support by passing some monies down the line.

 

Them get one style wey them dey use

Them go pick one African man

A man with low mentality

Them go give am million naira breads

To become of high position here

Him go bribe some thousand naira bread

 

     Similarly, in  “Colonial Mentality” (1977) he notes that some Africans have adopted the European view as superior, leading them to look down on their own people.

 

De ting wey black no good

Na foreign things them dey like

 

E be so them dey do, them dey think

Dey say dem better pass them brothers

 

In “Underground System” (1992) he praises Nkrumah but attacks Obasanjo. 

 

When one good man want rise for Africa

Today Bad leaders dey go wan finish am o

When one good man want rise for Africa

Today Useless people dey go wan finish am o

 

     Fela’s attitude toward the Nigerian government, always critical, was brought to a head with his creation of the Kalakuta Republic, a commune of his family and entourage in Lagos which he declared to be an independent nation [3].  He complained of the military and police authority’s frequent raids in “Zombie” (1976): "Zombie no go walk unless you tell am to walk."  The following year the compound was destroyed by the military in an attack during which the singer’s mother was thrown from  a second story window ultimately dying from  her injuries.  It is unsurprising, then, that for Fela the security forces bring only “Sorrow, Tears and Blood” (1977). 

     Fela had meanwhile changed his group’s name from Nigeria 70 first to Africa 70 and then to Africa 80 reflecting his Nkrumahism, pan- Africanism, and socialism.  In 1979 he founded a political party, the Movement of the People supporting the artist himself as a presidential candidate, but the organization soon folded under heavy political repression [4].

     Fela’s Afrocentrism is consistent.  Rejecting European culture, he declares in “I no be gentleman at all o/ I be Africa man original” (“Gentlemen,” 1973).  During the Biafran War in 1970, Fela released “Viva Nigeria” which pleads “Lets join hands Africa, we have nothing to lose but a lot to gain.”  In “Expensive Shit” (1975) he declares “Me I be Fela, I be Black Power man”  “I no go agree make my brother hungry.”  In “Mr. Grammarticalogylisatitionalism Is the Boss” (1976) he criticizes the emphasis on English language proficiency in the educational system.  Even in the matter of toilet etiquette he prefers the traditional practice. 

 

Don't worry about my nyash ooh

I dey use water to clean my nyash when I shit finish

Yes, I dey use water because anytime way I use

Toilet paper, my nyash still dey smell, ahhhhh

My fore Father's teach me for Africa the correct way

                           “Don’t Worry About my Mouth-o” (1977)

 

     He is equally hostile to all organized religion [5], denouncing priests and imams alike as exploiters tied to the ruling class. 

 

Na the best friend to Bishop na him be director

 

Pastor's house na him dey fine pass

My people them dey stay for poor surroundings

 

           “Coffin for Head of State”

 

My people them go dey follow Bishop

Them go follow Pope

Them go follow Imam

Them go go for London

Them go go for Rome

Them go go for Mecca

Them go carry all the money

 

put your minds into any goddamn church

Any goddamn mosque

Any goddamn Celestical

Including Seraphoom and Cheruboom

 

We now have to carry our minds

Out of those goddamn places

               

                                “Shuffering and Shmiling”

 

      Apart from resisting authoritarian action by the state, Fela protests class stratification.  In “Alagbon Close” (1974) he speaks for the poor, including those called agbepo, who, in a country where most areas (even in Lagos and Abuja) lack sewage systems, carry human waste away from residential areas.   

 

I dey do my part

I be human being like you like you

 

     Using similar imagery in “Expensive Shit” (1975) he combines his own arrest for possession of cannabis when he swallowed his joint and was detained and his excrement regularly searched (though he managed to substitute another prisoner’s) with a general image of citizens who prefer to walk away from the shit, i. e. the corruption and repression of the rulers.

 

Him go bend the yash, him go shit

Him go comot away from him shit

Him shit go be the last thing wey him go like to see

Because why, oh? (Because the shit dey smell)

 

     He comments on issues other than repression from the point of view of the general population, the availability of safe water, for instance, in “Water No Get Enemy” (1976).  In “Opposite People” (1977) he complains about those who act contrary to the people’s interests. 

 

Everyone dey dance, him go push

Everyone dey talk, him go shout

Everyone dey hear, him go sleep

Everyone dey think, him go drink

 

In “Go Slow” (1972) the traffic jams of Lagos, then the capital, become an image for the country’s stagnation under selfish and tyrannical leadership.  He insists that the country should belong to the common people, saying “Man must be man for him land o.”

     Fela became the leading entertainer of his country while maintaining a vigorously adversarial attitude toward its rulers.  The listener to his recordings is overwhelmed by the full orchestrations and spellbound by his hypnotic repetitions.  His music remained primarily dance music (as the stage show emphasizes).  Fela is always hosting a party, however serious the theme of his lyrics.  Like the blues, his oeuvre indicates that art can transmute suffering, redeeming human experience by recasting it in aesthetically pleasing, even celebrative, forms without denying the pains it may describe.  His unstoppable plucky defiance, his art, renders his opponents fatuous and often ludicrous in spite of their holding the stronger hand.  Whereas the fans of artists like Victor Jara from Chile, José Afonso in Portugal, or Woody Guthrie in America were likely to be engagé even before encountering the music, many of Fela’s listeners were drawn first by his sound even before discovering that the man strutting on stage was not simply a romantic but remote show business idol, but rather was speaking their language and representing their interests, creating a body of work that found admirers far beyond West Africa.

 

 

 

 

1.  Some works are sufficiently admired by critics to be considered simultaneously popular and “high” art.  Among them are Homer, Dickens, Mark Twain, George Herriman, Walt Kelly, Louis Armstrong, and Bob Dylan. 

2.  The low prestige associated with pidgin is implied by the common term “broken English.”  Of course, blues, jazz, reggae, rebetiko, and fado all developed not in concert halls but in the low dives of the lumpenproletariat.

3.  When I arrived in Lagos in 1979 with my wife and five-year-old daughter, I wanted to attend a show at his compound, but in the end did not venture there, having been told that the music would not begin until after midnight and that audience members had to strip to their underwear.  As I did not go there, I cannot confirm if these conditions were real. 

4.  It was revived by Kuti’s youngest son Seun Kuti in 2020. 

5.  Fela makes no distinction, for instance, between the British and thus colonial Anglican church and the indigenous Christian cult of the Cherubim and Seraphim. 

Every Reader's Burns

 

by Alexander Nasmyth (1828)

 

     Like others in the Every Reader’s Poet series (of which this is the twenty-second), this essay assumes no knowledge of literature among its readers and aims simply at acquainting people with a few poems by canonical authors while eschewing scholarly jargon and footnotes.  Since Americans will require some annotation due to Burns’ dialect, I am including none of the poems’ texts here.  All are, of course, readily available online, often with glosses for the Scots words.

     Even in this poetry-starved age, virtually all English speakers know four or five poems by Robert Burns: "Auld Lang Syne,” certainly, and very likely “For A’ That and A’ That,” “A Red. Red Rose,” “Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled” and perhaps “Address to a Haggis” or “To a Mouse” as well.  Some of his lyrics are popular songs: “Green Grow the Rashes, O” and “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye.”  Several of his lines are known by many who may even be unaware of their origin. 

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

                        from “To a Louse”

 

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men

Gang aft a-gley.

            from “To a Mouse”

     This penetration into the general culture would doubtless have pleased the poet who was himself a working man who espoused a radically democratic political view.  Here, however, the reader will find those favorites neglected in favor of comment on several of Burns’ somewhat less-known poems.  He may have been less pleased to learn that he has drawn scant attention among academic critics, though his general popularity and his reputation as Scotland’s national poet are undiminished.

     Conscious of this role and loyal to the land of his birth, Burns commonly employed Scots dialect, though did write some poems in standard English.  Upon first opening a book of his poetry, the language presents an immediate obstacle.  Any persistent reader will find that the difficulty soon vanishes.  At first, one should by all means find an edition with convenient glosses (ideally on the same page), but soon these will be consulted only occasionally.  For Scots people the reward is to hear artful poetry couched in the sounds of home, and for the rest of us a glimpse of yet another way to be human.

     When Burns was active, many Britons held anti-Scots prejudices.  In spite of the considerable intellectual history of the country, including the Scottish Chaucerian poets in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment which produced writers like David Hume and Adam Smith, many considered the Scots backward.  Samuel Johnson asked "What enemy would invade Scotland, where there is nothing to be got?" and dismissed it as a tourist destination, saying "Seeing Scotland, Madam, is only seeing a worse England.”  An extreme popular expression of the English attitude is the widespread but ill-documented story of Sawney Bean, the supposed cannibal.  Highlanders were considered particularly barbaric and likely traitorous -- the wearing of kilts was outlawed for political reasons in 1746, effectively ending their use in everyday dress.

     However, with the coming of attitudes associated with the Romantic movement, many values were inverted and “primitivism” became fashionable. Macpherson’s Ossian, which purported to be translated from Scots Gaelic, enjoyed a considerable vogue (though to Johnson it was simply "another proof of Scotch conspiracy in national falsehood").  Folk songs as well as unlettered poets like Stephen Duck became objects of curious interest to the reading public and Thomas Percy’s collection of traditional songs, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, inspired Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Sir Walter Scott.  At the same time Burns’ outspoken radical political views, including support for the American and French Revolutions, were more or less consistent with those of many of the Romantic writers, though they continued to attract criticism as well.

     Burns had been struggling as a farmer and was contemplating moving to Jamaica when he published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786 with the idea of raising funds for his passage, but the book was so successful that the poet never emigrated.  He found that he had sufficient success as an author to decline job offers as an editor and as a professor of agriculture, and was eventually given a post as excise supervisor which, while no sinecure, provided a stable income. 

    “The Twa Dogs” is a beast fable, a form familiar from such medieval examples as Reynard the Fox, The Owl and the Nightingale, and Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules.  Caesar, who, as his name suggests, is a dog owned by a rich man, speaks with Luath (a Scots Gaelic name meaning swift or nimble) whose master is a working man.  Caesar, a dog “o’ high degree” of an exotic non-native breed, is “keepit for his Honour’s pleasure.”  He is, nonetheless, no snob and is willing to frisk even with a “tinkler-gipsy’s” mutt.  Luath, on the other hand, is a working dog, "a plough-man’s collie” and thus a Scots native.  Yet the two are great friends, as Burns says, “thick thegither.”

     Caesar describes how the landlord who lives on rents has every luxury, to the point of ”downright wastrie” and asks how the poor can live, saying “I own it’s past my comprehension.”  Luath replies that, though it is true that they are often hard put to hold off “cauld and hunger,” unaccountably they are “moistly wonderfu’ contented.”  The clear-sighted master’s dog notes the attitude of the ruling class.

 

Lord, man!  Our gentry care sae little

For delvers, ditchers and sic cattle;

They gang as saucy by poor folk

As I wad by a stinking brook.

      

    Luath explains what pleasure the poor take in their families, “their gushies weans an’ faithfu’ wives,” though noting that, when they have a bit of leisure and can take a drink or two such that they feel “unco [uncommonly] happy,” their complaints emerge. 

 

They'll talk o' patronage an' priests,

Wi' kindling fury i' their breasts,

Or tell what new taxation's comin,

An' ferlie at the folk in Lon'on.

 According to Luath they are “decent, honest, fawsont [respectable] folk” who are “riven out baith root and branch” “some rascal’s pridefu’ greed to quench.”  Surely, he thinks, the wealthy who have no material want, must be free form care.

      Caesar replies that anyone who truly knows them “wad ne’er envy ‘em.”  Having “no real ills” of which to complain, “they make now themselves to vex them.”  He observes the working people, when labor is done, feel “unco weel” whereas the idle rich are “curst” by “want o’ wark,” and neurotically “loiter, lounging, lank, and lazy,” ”their days unquiet, lang, and restless,” leading many to succumb to “drink and whoring.”  In the end both friends “rejoice they werena men but dogs.” 

     Just as in “For A’ That and A’ That” Burns manages to portray the very real suffering of the laborers and the injustice of the economic system while ridiculing the masters and claiming defiantly that the worker has the better life, feeling the satisfaction of a job well done while, unlike the corrupt ruling class, exemplifying widely accepted moral and family values.  The dogs are a clever rhetorical device, serving as objective observers whose comments are trustworthy and a natural standard against which to measure human society.  Burns proposes replacing the hierarchy of the "great chain of being" with a more natural and democratic order.

     Burns was something of a romantic in the common meaning of the word as well as in its literary usage.  He had a daughter with his mother’s servant, at the same time as he was sleeping with Jean Arthur who bore him twins, shocking her family, though they did marry.  Before long he was in love with Mary Campbell to whom he wrote a number of lyrics such as "The Highland Lassie O."  His poem “Ae fond kiss and then we sever" was written for another woman, Agnes Maclehose, with whom  he had, as far as is known, a warm relationship without physical intimacy.  Written on the occasion of their parting as she sailed to join her husband in Jamaica.

     Burns is often described as simple, direct, and emotional.  He does not shrink from leaning toward sentiment, but then probably most people have moments when sentimentality sems appropriate.   The strength of his love poetry is not in ingenuity (like Donne) or spirituality (like Dante), but rather in the purity and power of simple emotion as experienced by all people.  Reading Burns’ poem, however, and thinking of his biography, one might well think that he is enjoying the display of his loss at parting nearly as much as he might welcome another day spent together.   

     “To a Louse, on Seeing one on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church,” like the poems to a toothache, a mouse, and a haggis comically focuses on a “low” theme, here exaggerated by the insect’s crawling about on a lovely lady at church, while the pest better belongs “in some beggar’s haffet squattle” (“squatting in  some beggar’s ‘temple’”).  While amusement is the primary intention of the piece, it satirizes the woman’s pretensions at the same time as praising her, with the noxious louse indicating first, that, whatever her charms, she occupies the same world as those with less status.  She is slightly ridiculous for her failure at self-awareness ("To see oursels as ithers see us!") which leads her to “mony a blunder” and “foolish notions,” due to her putting on “airs in dress and gait.”   

     The language is lively and conversational from the opening “Ha!”  The metric form is close to ballad measure, a pattern also prominent in nursery rhymes, alternating three-beat lines with four beat ones and knitting them with rhymes.  Thus Burns poems, which employs four and two (rather than three) beat lines for variety, sounds more casual and popular than the sustained five beat line of Shakespeare or Milton.  He rhymes AAABAB, intensifying the melody to resemble a dance tune at a village festival.

     His conversational tone is appropriate for poems in the form of letters of which he composed many.  His amiability is evident in his “Epistle to John Rankine," in which the poet’s friend is celebrated for a sometimes raucous conviviality in which the poet is glad to join.  While celebrating their high spirits and occasional frolics, Burns also criticizes the hypocritical moralists who would condemn them.  In the end, the greater part of his verse letter is concerned with the poet’s being apprehending poaching and subsequently fined.  The tone is evident in the first stanza.

 

O Rough, rude, ready-witted Rankine,

The wale o' cocks for fun an' drinkin!

There's monie godly folks are thinkin,

Your dreams an' tricks

Will send you, Korah-like, a sinkin,

Straught to auld Nick's.

 

Notice that the meter and rhyme scheme are the same as in the poem to a louse.

     One need not have Scots ancestry to find Burns one of the most approachable of poets (apart from his dialect).  His poems are generally transparent enough to be understood at first hearing and sufficiently musical to please the ear.  Those uncomfortable with more learned or elite art may enjoy the lyrics of this poet who, like Whitman, thought of himself as a man of the people, and those of us who have bristled at the world’s injustice appreciate his ridicule of the ruling class and praise for the workers.  Finding himself out of the mainstream of English literary tradition, Burns was able to contribute novel sounds and sentiments that continue to capture the imagination of readers far from the fields of his Ayrshire upbringing.