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.  

Gamelyn: An Outlaw’s Ethics

     The master storyteller Chaucer himself seems to have fancied the story of Gamelyn. Literary scholars have also traced its relations to Robin Hood tales, Shakespeare’s As You Like It and to the William Tell legend. Variously described in terms of its affinities to balladry and romance, studied for what it reveals about medieval law, the primary appeal of the plot is its action. The righteous hero moves from one crisis to another and, though he is sufficiently vulnerable to keep the audience engaged like a character of Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, he is usually capable of vanquishing any number of foes.
     An outlaw’s ethics must be problematic. Someone who has been judged criminal, who has been ousted from civil society for misbehavior, has appearances at any rate against him. Yet Robin Hood’s status as hero is known to everyone, and there were in his day many comparable figures, Adam Bell and Earl Godwin among them. The greenwood may have been dangerous for travelers, but it was also an arena of freedom beyond the reach of unjust feudal authorities. Some outlaws in the English Middle Ages as well as in other times and places have become heroes, “social bandits,” in Hobsbawm’s phrase, seen as allied with the people in opposing an oppressive regime.
     Gamelyn’s perspective is governed by his audience’s socio-economic class. While Robin Hood was regularly identified as a yeoman, neither aristocrat nor peasant, Gamelyn is a member of the land-owning gentry. He is nonetheless as a younger brother vulnerable to exploitation by a coalition including his own brother, the most prominent clerics of the region, and a corrupt legal system. Elements of explicit social protest include criticism of such central pillars of feudalism as the nobility, the church, and the law, but the king’s own judgement is approved, and, in the end, Gamelyn’s reconciliation with the throne sets everything to rights. [1]
     The social order is in question from the very opening when the dying John of Boundes finds that his neighbors, men whom he calls “good men that lawe conne of londe,” (63) mean to controvert his wish to leave property to each of his sons. The sheriff later supports the younger John with concern for neither the law nor ethics. When the younger John binds Gamelyn to a post in his hall, claiming he is insane, he appeals in vain to the clerics feasting there who respond with gratuitous asperity, interested only in currying favor with his wealthy brother. Gamelyn declares “Cursed mote he worth both flesshe and blood,/ That ever doth priour or abbot eny good!" (487-8) Most dramatically, in the scene of the trial of his brother Ote, he realizes the fantasy of the revolutionist and literally brings his elder brother, now become sheriff, the judge, and all twelve jurymen into the role of defendants and summarily executes the lot, declaring by the way “sorwe have that rekke!” [“Sorrow to any who are sorry about it!”] (877)
     Once the outlawed Gamelyn gains access to the King, however, his problems are over. The king not only pardons him and the other outlaws, but awards them “good offices.” (890) The author is not indicting the whole feudal system, only the wicked who must be brought into line by the crown.
     In contrast to the widespread corruption the poet describes in Gamelyn’s neighborhood, the outlaw chief is presented in wholly positive terms. Though his initial words “I am ware of gestes God send us goode” (635) may be taken as either sincerely hospitable or as an ironic welcoming of victims, when Gamelyn tests his host’s courtesy, anticipating “He wil yeve us mete and drink and do us som gode.” (659) the outlaw chief does proceed to treat Adam and Gamelyn most civilly. He “bad hem ete and drink and that of the best.” (676) In this open-hearted generosity in hospitality rituals, the outlaw king recalls Gamelyn’s own extravagant hosting in Fitt 3.
     The sympathetic reader who is not thinking in terms of action movie conventions is likely to be taken aback by the summary killing of the porter at the outset of Fitt III. Gamelyn wreaks angry vengeance, fundamentally opposing his dishonest brother, but incidentally leading him to break the doorkeeper’s neck and toss him in a well. While the action may seem excessive in view of the porter’s trivial and ineffective attempt to keep him out, it is most expressive of his uncontrollable might when roused. Like an old-fashioned swashbuckler or a more recent martial arts adept, he scatters his foes on either side. This is perhaps the earliest form of hero.
     When his elder brother proves impossibly selfish and deceitful, and the local ecclesiastics collude in his wrongdoing, Gamelyn enthusiastically shouts “Save wel the crownes and do hem no harmes,/ But breke both her legges and sithen her armes" (519-20) after which he and Adam pummel the churchmen. Gamelyn proceeds to break his brother’s neck with a single blow, callously telling him "’Sitte ther, brother,’ . . . ‘For to colen thi body as I did myn.’" (535-6)
     His final outburst of violence occurs when at the trial where his brother Ote is being held in his place, when he summarily convicts and executes the judge and jurymen as well as his long-offending brother John. So far is the narrator from considering any of this violence to be excessive or unnecessary, he interjects (passionately if parenthetically) “(sorwe have that rekke!)” (877) (“misery to anyone who cares!}.
     This emphasis on the hero’s strength and fighting abilities is wholly consistent with the king’s eventually not only pardoning him and his outlaw band but awarding them enviable positions. Such muscle is more usefully hired than fought. As a hero of popular culture, Gamelyn excels in scenes of dramatic if almost unbelievable unreflecting action. His ethics are those of the common man: an unthinking acceptance of social norms under most circumstances, a wish to regard oneself as honorable, an honor undamaged, indeed magnified by extravagant violence. The morality is based on the social controls of pride and shame rather than on prescriptive mandates. Gamelyn, one feels certain, would never have turned outlaw had he not been wronged, but his titanic energy must make him seem a somewhat unpredictable associate. The pleasure of those following his story arose perhaps in part from admiration for a strong warrior and in part relief that one need not deal with such a one.
     Gamelyn has a fully happy ending, complete with “a wyf bothe good and feyr” (898), as do most popular works, because this story is meant to be light entertainment, as reassuring as tragedy is unsettling. [2] In fact the heroes of neither action narratives nor tragedies is likely to be concerned with moral choices. A work like Gamelyn simply reaffirms people’s prejudices while one like Oedipus Tyrannos looks beyond right and wrong into the abyss of existence itself. Gamelyn is neither a moral paragon nor an evil-doer as much as he is a regular guy, albeit more daring and capable than his admirers.


1. The reader will recall how the masses who joined in Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in 1381allowed themselves to be deceived by King Richard. Similarly, in the twentieth century, the crowds assembled outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg confident that the beneficent Czar would hear their pleas until his troops opened fire.

2. Thus often the Hollywood adaptations of plays and novels tend to rosier denouements as in almost all the generally excellent films made of Tennessee Williams plays during the 1950s.

Two Early Ballad Tales of Robin Hood

     The story of Robin Hood is remarkable for its longevity. The films and television shows based on the medieval outlaw have proliferated to the present day, not to mention such phenomena as the Robin Hood Foundation (whose goal is to “end poverty in New York”), Robinhood (a “zero-commission stock broker”), the Robin Hood Brewing Company, and the like. These latter-day uses of his name only emphasize the unsurprising fact that the meanings of stories about him have varied over the years.
     Some of those that might appear to be firmly rooted in history are in fact of fairly recent origin. For instance, the association of Robin Hood with the virtuous King Richard against the villainous John and with the Saxon nobility who resent domination by tyrannical Norman lords gained currency only with Scott’s immensely popular Ivanhoe (1820). [1] Late versions often credit him with noble birth (such as the 17th century broadside of “Robin Hood and Maid Marian” which calls Robin the Earl of Huntington), though the earlier texts regularly exhibit hostility to the gentry. Two of the earliest ballad tales, “Robin Hood and the Monk” and “A Gest of Robyn Hode,” both extant in manuscripts dated to the mid-fifteenth century but recording older songs, suggest an archaic background of myth, ritual, and magic against which complaints arise against the wealthy aristocracy and clergy.
     The stories are, like all folk tales, first of all entertainment. They regularly feature suspense and reversals while, in the popular manner, always ending in the defeat of the bad guys. Robin’s role as a trickster figure resembles countless figures worldwide. Disney was not only complying with “funny animals” conventions when he portrayed Robin Hood as a fox in his 1973 film. Readers had long noticed similarities between the tales of Renard and those of Robin Hood. The most popular trickster figure of the Middle Ages is particularly appropriate for the subversive elements of Robin Hood’s story. As an outlaw guile and cunning are essential to his cause. Disguise and trickery play a markedly greater role than force. In “Robin Hood and the Monk,” Robin behaves rather churlishly toward Little John, refusing to pay a bet which he had himself proposed. When he is captured after attending mass alone, [2] his party manages to free their leader by impersonating the monk and page (whom they had killed) before the king and then acting as the king’s emissaries toward the sheriff. In “A Gest of Robin Hood” the entire tone is light-hearted (in spite of deaths) and several characters employ subterfuges. Robin anticipates a victim as though he were awaiting a dinner guest. (“Gest,” 24) Little John manages to find service with the sheriff and later the king himself (named as Edward) dresses as a monk to locate the band of thieves and finds himself striking Robin after besting him at archery.
     Robin Hood, like Renard, provided a vehicle for social protest. In many ways he is a prime example of what Hobsbawn called “social bandits.” [3] The “Gest” concludes with the lines “For he was a good outlawe,/And dyde pore men moch god.” (1823-4) He will steal neither from yeomen nor men who have little nor from any company that includes women. He exempts as well small farmers and even knights and squires should they be “gode felawe[s].” (“Gest,” 53, 973, 39-40, 51, 55-6) Indeed, he will give or lend money to those in need. An early 15th century clerical author refers to him as “much praised," [4] yet various judicial records use his name to indicate a dangerous miscreant or a murderer. He enumerates his local foes as “bisshoppes” and “archebishoppes,” as well as “the hye sherif of Notyingham.” ( “Gest” 56, 58)
     The early ballads assume a very specific social focus. Their authors and presumably their audiences identify as yeomen, not as peasants or bourgeois. Though “yeoman” was an elastic term in the fifteenth century [5], Robin’s animus against the wealthy is evident. He demands payment from the knight (“Gest” 148) yet gives him money when he finds him poor. His sympathy multiplies when it turns out that the knight has been impoverished by a “ryche abbot.” (215) In “Monk” Robin is fingered by a “grete-hedid [i.e. arrogant] munke” (75) who later is decapitated unceremoniously in the safety of the greenwood. (203)
     Robin Hood is, however, very conventional in his piety and in his loyalty to the crown. He endows a chapel to Mary Magdelene and goes on pilgrimage. (“Gest,” 1757, 1767) In “Monk” he is described as one who “has servyd Oure Lady many a day,” (133) and he is apprehended only because he insists on attending Mass (and refusing to take an adequate company). In the “Gest” he is said to attend mass daily (32) and to be especially devoted to Mary. (35) The Marian emphasis acquires an edge in “Gest” however, when he indulges in considerable play over the concept that the loan he made to the poor knight has been cosigned by the Virgin Mary, entitling him to collect the purse from any passing monk. (“Gest,” 259, 940) Surely in his era his religiosity, if not his witty (seemingly cynical) elaboration of it, would be a natural concomitant with virtue in general.
     The Robin Hood texts are meant for a popular audience (the story-teller addresses his listeners on occasion), Robin has some courtly characteristics, though these early poems have no love interest. “Robyn coud his courteysy.” (1539) In certain ways he follows the rules of his culture more scrupulously than do his antagonists. He is captured in “Monk” only because his enemies ignored the tradition of sanctuary within a church (83-86), while the Sheriff in the “Gest” is said to violate such civilized rules as those governing hospitality (1186).
     In spite of the fact that he identified as a “traytur” (“Monk,” 91) He regularly expresses his obedience to the nation’s leader and falls to his knees when he recognizes the king. (“Gest,” 1620) Indeed, he reconciles with the crown and is pardoned. Declaring loyalty to his sovereign, he lives for a short while in town. The king even decides he would like some outfits of Lincoln green for his own men. (“1669 ff.) After a time he notices he is spending money and his archery skills are in decline. (1741) Given a week away, he does not ever return and apparently lives in the forest for twenty-two years. It is as though his essential wildness was not possible to contain for more than a short while.
     The archaic mythic layer of the Robin Hood stories is signaled by the emphasis on the wild forest setting which acquires an almost numinous quality in the tales. Robin is clearly associated with “green man” or “wild man of the woods.” [6] The “Monk” begins “In somer, when the shawes be sheyne,” and the date turns out to be Whitsun or Pentecost, an important springtime holiday for the Middle Ages closely paralleling the pagan Beltane, which included a fair, festivals, dancing, and the rule of a King and Queen of the May. [7] These figures, themselves derived from more ancient pagan deities and among the clearest vestiges of pre-Christian survivals were replaced in many villages by Robin Hood and Maid Marian. [8] The forest’s green, adopted by the band of thieves for their costume (Lincoln green, produced from woad and weld [9]) is mentioned repeatedly in an almost incantatory refrain. Surely the passage in which Robin is called a green “ryght fayre harte,” a “mayster-herte” (“Gest,” 738, 752) sounds like a reference to a theriomorphic deity obscured by time. Since Thomas Wright’s speculations in early Victorian essays, Robin Hood has been linked to the Celtic Cernunnos, the Greek Pan, even the Germanic Odin, while to Margaret Murray he was the high priest of a witches’ coven. [10] The cliché of the “merry men” was still novel in the fifteenth century. Flush with the joy of nature and the reverdie of the springtime Robin’s men are lifted by a sort semi-divine afflatus.


Hit befel on Whitson
Erly in a May mornyng,
The son up feyre can shyne,
And the briddis mery can syng.

"This is a mery mornyng," seid Litull John,
"Be Hym that dyed on tre;
A more mery man then I am one
Lyves not in Cristianté.
“Monk,” 9-16


     Surely this joyful and sensual impression of the gathering energies of the organic world about them underlies the nature introductions of a thousand medieval poems. Telling tales of such an inspiriting flush of élan vital doubtless acted as a sort of mild recreational sympathetic magic for the medieval audience.
     Though Robin Hood was yet to acquire a lover or an aristocratic pedigree, these early texts provide powerful examples of the character’s potential for expressing social discontent against the rich and criticism of the religious hierarchy not long after the era of the Peasant’s Revolt and of Wyclif. Much of the brooding, if belated, numinous glow the ancients saw in the natural world survives in these lively and colloquial tales.



1. The dating to Richard’s realm derives from William Stukeley, the eighteenth century divine and antiquary who studied Stonehenge so long he began to fancy himself a druid. Scott may also have been influenced by the Scots role in the United Kingdom (Union was hardly more than a hundred years earlier and the battle of Colloden less than that). Was it a similar sympathy for the underdog that was expressed in Ivanhoe’s highly sympathetic depiction of the Jews Isaac of York and his daughter Rebecca?

2. Robin was alone because he insisted on entering town accompanied only by Little John who left him after his leader churlishly refused to pay a bet he had proposed and lost. The hero is not portrayed as a perfect valorous and powerful fighter. His lapses in judgment often generate action and early ballads show him defeated in scuffles with random tradesmen and acting unfairly to his own followers.

3. See Eric Hobsbawm Primitive Rebels 1959 and Bandits 1969. In the introduction of the former Hobsbawm refers to “the classic Robin Hood who was and is essentially a peasant rebelling against landlords, usurers, and other representatives of what Thomas More called ‘the conspiracy of the rich.’” (page 4)

4. Andrew of Wyntoun's Orygynale Chronicle says they were “commendit gud.”

5. Deriving from the simple expression “young man,” the term originally meant an attendant on a nobleman. According to the OED, it came to be used for a “mediocre” individual, neither aristocracy nor peasant, but it was not commonly used for the bourgeois residents of cities engaged in trade or professions. I am reminded of the American phenomenon in which virtually everyone considers him or herself “middle-class.”

6. See Lady Raglan’s article in The Folklore Journal coined the term "Green Man" in her March 1939 article "The Green Man in Church Architecture"(no. 50, pages 45–57). A related figure is the “jack of the green” of May day festivities.

7. Whitsuntide was one of three week-long holidays for medieval peasants. Whit Monday continues to be a holiday in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and many other countries, as it was until 1967 in the U.K., 1973 in Ireland, and 2004 in Sweden.

8. Marian is unmentioned in the early texts. It seems clear that she was imported through the influence of Adam de la Halle’s late thirteenth century Jeu de Robin and Marion though the play is a dramatized pastourelle in which Robin is simply a shepherd. The coincidence of the name must have been irresistible, though Robin was sometimes used as a generic male name as a modern American might use Joe or Mac.

9. The color was no literary fancy. In Spenser’s Faerie Queene a “woodman” is described as "clad/ Of Lincolne Greene, belay'd with silver lace." (VI, 2, stanza 5)

10. See Essays on Subjects Connected with Literature, Popular Superstitions, and the History of England (1846). Wright had published on the topic of Robin Hood as early as 1837. Margaret Murray’s argument for Robin as god and priest is included in The God of the Witches (1937).

Foggy Dew as Symbol

     To some, the idea of literary excellence is obsolete. Over fifty years ago Northrup Frye ridiculed “odious comparisons,” noting “We begin to suspect that the literary value-judgments are projections of social ones.” [1] From a political perspective opposite to Frye’s, advocates of cultural studies have sought to reduce the text to an exhibit like an object in nature. Yet still today one may encounter the old attitude that folk music is simple, a kind of lowest common denominator in contrast to the sophistication of high art or, on the other hand, the less common notion that the collective unconscious operates like an oracle, transmitting Truth mysteriously.
     In fact any attempt to remove value from literary analysis flies in the face of every reader’s experience. One enjoys and admires some work more than others, and accounting for this subjective conclusion has long underlay criticism. Yet the fact remains that no critic has adequately rationalized the assignment of value. The old English song “Foggy Dew” is a “good” one if its popularity for centuries is any evidence. Variants have been collected across Britain as well as in Canada and the United States, and in recent times the song has often been recorded in both symphonic and folk versions. [2]
     The image of the “foggy dew” binds the song and, like a title, provides a formula for its essence. Yet critics have often expressed either uncertainty about the meaning of the image or have advanced one of a surprisingly wide range of interpretations. In the realistic reading of the narrative the dew seems simply a humorously transparent excuse, a jocular euphemism, for the singer’s true motive. Here the foggy dew plays a role similar to the weather in Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” [3]
     Within the text, though, a more complex progression is discernable. In the version used by Benjamin Britten [4] the initial reference is an exculpatory gesture with a bit of nervous iteration “And the only, only thing that I did that was wrong.” The second is more disturbing. The speaker seizes the woman, hauls her into bed and covers her head. The flimsiness of the pretext is clear, the impetuous action all the more aggressive in light of the woman’s apparent helplessness (What shall I do?) Then at last the image appears in a warm nostalgic glow as the son in his shop reminds him of his erotic joy of the past. Here the reference to “many, many” encounters highlights the artificiality of the already shameless use of “foggy dew” simply to indicate a sexual experience. One sees depicted the ordinary course of a sexual episode: first irresistible desire, then a push for mastery, followed by pleased reflection.
     In the composite of American versions by James Reeves [5], very much the same series series may be traced, from the delicately stated “I thought it my time to roll her in my arms” through a hint of coercion, this time on the woman’s part (“I’m resolved to stay with you”), to an apparently happy marriage with a large family in prospect. Reeves comments on the meaning of the title image and decides that it implies “protracted virginity.” Noting that “fogge” could be used “for coarse, rank grass of the kind that grows in marshes and bogs where the atmosphere would be damp and misty,” he concludes that this untrimmed vegetation corresponds to “protracted virginity” (as mowing might mean sex).[6] He collects references in which to him dew implies chastity, beginning with its repeated use in “I sing of a maiden that is makeles.”


He cam also stille
Ther His moder was,
As dew in Aprille
That falleth on the gras.


     Apart from the fact that reading both “fog” and “dew” as meaning virginity would make the title a reduplication, the verse clearly associates Mary not with the dew but with the grass (in the subsequent verses with a flower and with a springtime “spray”) It is the male lover, the divine Christ, who, as in a host of Biblical passages (such as Gideon’s fleece) is represented by the fructifying dew. The church fathers do not mention the obvious association of dew with semen. [7]
     The fact remains, whatever associations one infers for the foggy dew, that its use is not strictly consistent any interpretation. For all the sexual innuendo the first occurrence of the term in Britten version says that when the speaker was with his beloved he did not think of the foggy dew. A version collected in Newfoundland concludes “We'd both give up to sow no more but think on the foggy dew,” implying that the thought of the dew has displaced sexual activity. [8] On the other hand, Sharp heard one version that makes the most direct sexual meaning explicit:


And ev-er-y time she cocks her leg,
I thinks of the fo–o–ggy de-ew.


     In one of the early broadside variants the dew is realistic, simply the ground on which the two make love: “And many a night I roll’d her in my arms,/All over the Foggy dew.” [9] Another more or less rationalized version has the lover conspire with a friend to impersonate a demon and drive the woman into his room. Reeves quotes a version from Sharp in which men’s affection is said to resemble the foggy dew in its evanescence, saying that this “eliminates the essential spirit of the song.”
     Some researchers have sought to discover the meaning of the foggy dew through Celtic vocabulary and pre-Christian belief. A 1689 broadside and a number of American versions substitute “bugaboo” (or Boglemaroo, Boglebo, etc.) for “foggy dew” suggest that the supernatural aids the seduction, while in Britten’s version, in which the man is left with a son but no lover, might imply that she was herself a spirit.
     Numerous writers have pursued the decoding of this image, yet it seems clear that so single reading works. The fact is that the foggy dew is a symbol in the sense of an image whose strength derives in part from its indeterminacy. The fundamental connotation of foggy dew with fertility and mystery are exploited in most uses of the term, but it is never limited. The complex relationships between the man and the woman, between the man and the environment, and the cosmos (represented by the supernatural beings) are suggested but not determined by the image. It is carefully balanced to be attractive (fertile, sexual) and disagreeable (cold, associated with illness and danger). The very ambiguity of the dew replicates the ambivalence of each of the relationships evoked. Thus, if the woman is at once a beautiful love object and a frightening menace, so likewise is the man. If life appears unpredictable and hazardous it is also satisfying and seductive. The world is full of invitation and threat. The very fact that such propositions could be multiplied nearly without end signifies not the incoherence of the poem, but its precise correspondence to our experience of daily reality. More highly determined images will necessarily lose a good deal of the accuracy and emotional charge of this “vague” one.
     The same sort of vagueness was consciously prescribed by the Symbolist poet. Jean Moréas’ Symbolist Manifesto, while calling Zola’s Naturalism “ puerile,” goes on to say, “Symbolist poetry tries to house the Idea in a meaningful form not its own end, but subject to the Idea. The latter in its turn will never appear without the sumptuous clothing of analogy; for the essential character of Symbolist art consists in never going so far as to conceive of the Idea in itself. So this art will never show details of nature, actions of humans, concrete phenomena: for they are only the appearances destined to represent to the senses their esoteric affinities with primordial Ideas.”
     Among folklore scholars, M. J. C. Hodgart is almost unique in his recognition of this technique. “However much of the force of ballad imagery comes from our apprehension of its meaning, a great deal nevertheless comes from the very fact that the meaning is not clearly understood at all” [10]



1. Anatomy of Criticism, "Polemical Introduction."

2. Benjamin Britten set it to music and Burl Ives made a pop tune of it. This song is not to be confused with two other songs of the same name: the quite different overblown Irish song with its unlikely happy ending "Oh, a wan cloud was drawn o'er the dim weeping dawn" nor the later Nationalist anthem commemorating the Easter Rising "As down the glen one Easter morn to a city fair rode I."

3. The song was recorded by many, including Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan, Armstrong and Velma Middleton, Pearl Bailey and Hot Lips Paige all in 1949.

4. When I was a bachelor, I liv'd all alone
I worked at the weaver's trade
And the only, only thing that I ever did wrong
was to woo a fair young maid.
I wooed her in the wintertime
And in the summer, too
And the only, only thing that I did that was wrong
Was to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew.

One night she came to my bedside
When I was fast asleep.
She laid her head upon my bed
And she began to weep.
She sighed, she cried, she damn near died
She said what shall I do?
So I hauled her into bed and covered up her head
Just to keep her from the foggy foggy dew.

So, I am a bachelor, I live with my son
and we work at the weaver's trade.
And every single time that I look into his eyes
He reminds me of that fair young maid.
He reminds me of the wintertime
And of the summer, too,
And of the many, many times that I held her in my arms
Just to keep her from the foggy, foggy, dew

5. The Idiom of the People.

6. Surely it is more natural to associate such growth with public hair, particularly when presented in conjunction with the dew’s moisture.

7. Consistent with Psalm 72, 6 and Isaiah XLV. 8. See also useful material from Peter of Celle and Honorius Augustodunensis in Michael Steffes’ “‘As dewe in Aprylle’: ‘I syng of a mayden’ and the liturgy” Medium Aevum spring 2002.

8. Published in Kenneth Peacock, Songs Of The Newfoundland Outports, Volume 2, pp. 518-519.

9. From the National Library of Scotland, viewable at http://digital.nls.uk/english-ballads/pageturner.cfm?id=74896969.

10. The Ballads, p. 37.