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.