Read The Canongate Burns Online
Authors: Robert Burns
The Canongate Burns (107 page)
First printed in the Aldine edition, 1893.
What Man could esteem, or what woman could love,
      Was He who lies under this sod:
If Such Thou refusest admittance above,
      Then whom wilt Thou favour, Good God!
This was written for Robert Muir (1758â88) of Loanfoot, near Kilmarnock, who died on 22nd April, 1788. He was a friend of the poet and sold 72 copies of the Kilmarnock edition and 40 of the first Edinburgh edition.
First printed by Cunningham, 1834.
In this strange land, this uncouth clime,
A land unknown to prose or rhyme;
Where words ne'er crost the Muse's heckles,
crossed, hackles
Nor limpet in poetic shackles;
limped
5
A land that prose did never view it,
Except when drunk he stacher't thro' it;
staggered
Here, ambush'd by the chimla cheek,
chimney side
Hid in an atmosphere of reek,
smoke
I hear a wheel thrum i' the neuk,
spin, corner
10
I hear it â for in vain I leuk. â
look
The red peat gleams, a fiery kernel,
Enhusked by a fog infernal:
Here, for my wonted rhyming raptures,
I sit and count my sins by chapters;
15
For life and spunk like ither Christians,
spirit, other
I'm dwindled down to mere existence,
Wi' nae converse but Gallowa' bodies,
no, people
Wi' nae kend face but Jenny Geddes.
no known
Jenny, my Pegasean pride!
20
Dowie she saunters down Nithside,
sad, wanders
And ay a westlin leuk she throws,
westward look
While tears hap o'er her auld brown nose!
cover, old
Was it for this wi' canny care,
cautious
Thou bure the Bard through many a shire?
bore
25
At howes or hillocks never stumbled,
hollows
And late or early never grumbled? â
O, had I power like inclination,
I'd heeze thee up a constellation,
lift
To canter with the Sagitarre,
30
Or loup the ecliptic like a bar;
Or turn the Pole like any arrow;
Or, when auld Phoebus bids good-morrow,
old
Down the zodiac urge the race,
And cast dirt on his godship's face;
35
For I could lay my bread and kail
bet, broth
He'd ne'er cast saut upo' thy tail. â
salt
Wi' a' this care and a' this grief,
And sma', sma' prospect of relief,
small
And nought but peat reek i' my head,
smoke
40
How can I write what ye can read? â
Tarbolton, twenty-fourth o' June,
Ye'll find me in a better tune;
But till we meet and weet our whistle,
wet, mouth
Tak this excuse for nae epistle.
no
Robert Burns.
This little-known poem is as bitter an account of his life in a bothy at Ellisland prior to his long delayed farm house being built there as the sense of physical privation in the early stanzas of
The Vision
. He felt almost completely cut off at Ellisland from compatible company with Jean and the children still in Ayrshire, hence his horse's tears for a lost western world. Almost all nineteenth-century critics, as we have seen, disguised the true nature of Burns's rural experience. Anotable, formidable exception is the great American writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, as a devotee of the poet, visited Mossgeil and Dumfries in the early 1850s and was astonished at the claustrophobic, squalid conditions he saw. Having utopianly attempted to be a farmer himself, Hawthorne had found the nature of the work akin to crucifying and could not understand the level of energy Burns required to engage simultaneously as poet and farmer.
The customary combination of horse-riding and creativity runs through the poem with, of course, the ironic joke that his beloved âJenny Geddes' (named after the stool-hurler of St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh) is no Pegasus. The latter part of the poem changes gear, as so often in the letters, to a fantasy release in the zodiac from an all too tangibly, restricting reality. It was addressed and sent to Hugh Parker, a friend of the poet and brother of Major William Parker, the Kilmarnock banker. Mackay errs in his headnote, stating Hugh Parker was a banker.
Tune: Gilliecrankie
First printed by Cunningham, 1834.
O wha will to Saint Stephen's House,
who, House of Commons
      To do our errands there, man;
O wha will to Saint Stephen's House
who
      O' th' merry lads of Ayr, man?
5
Or will ye send a Man-o'-law,
      Or will ye send a Sodger?
soldier
Or him wha led o'er Scotland a'
who
      The meikle URSA-MAJOR?
Great Bear
Come, will ye court a noble Lord,
10
       Or buy a score o' Lairds, man?
For Worth and Honor pawn their word
      Their vote shall be Glencaird's, man?
Ane gies them coin, ane gies them wine,
one gives
      Anither gies them clatter;
another, talk
15
Annbank, wha guess'd the ladies' taste,
who
      He gies a Fête Champetre. â
When Love and Beauty heard the news,
      The gay green-woods amang, man,
among
Where gathering flowers and busking bowers
dressing
20
       They heard the blackbird's sang, man;
song
A vow they seal'd it with a kiss
      Sir Politicks to fetter,
As theirs alone, the Patent-bliss,
      To hold a Fête Champetre. â
25
Then mounted Mirth, on gleesome wing,
      O'er hill and dale she flew, man;
Ilk wimpling burn, ilk chrystal spring,
each winding
      Ilk glen and shaw she knew, man:
each, wood
She summon'd every SOCIAL SPRITE,
30
       That sports by wood or water,
On th' bonie banks of Ayr to meet,
      And keep this Fête Champetre. â
Cauld Boreas, wi' his boisterous crew,
cold, North Wind
      Were bound to stakes like kye, man;
cattle
35
And Cynthia's car, o' silver fu',
full
      Clamb up the starry sky, man:
climbed
Reflected beams dwell in the streams,
      Or down the current shatter;
The western breeze steals through the trees,
40
       To view this Fête Champetre. â
How many a robe sae gaily floats!
so
      What sparkling jewels glance, man!
To HARMONY's enchanting notes
      As moves the mazy dance, man!
45
The echoing wood, the winding flood,
      Like Paradise did glitter,
When Angels met, at Adam's yett,
gate
      To hold their Fête Champetre. â
When Politics came there, to mix
50
       And make his ether-stane, man,
amulet
He circl'd round the magic ground,
      But entrance found he nane, man:
none
He blush'd for shame, he quat his name,
quit
      Forswore it every letter,
55
Wi' humble prayer to join and share
      This festive Fête Champetre. â
This semi-political song is a mock celebration of a âfête' organised by William Cunninghame, when he came of age, on inheriting the estates of Annbank and Enterkin, near Tarbolton, from his grandfather. It was publicly assumed this event was his prelude to canvassing the wealthy landowners and aristocrats of Ayrshire â who were invited to the dinner and ball â to become a Member of Parliament, which was soon to be dissolved. The song records the way in which âwine' and âcoin' were used to buy votes among the almost exclusively aristocratic voters of the period. Appearing to celebrate the event, Burns gives ironic assent to what he is targetting, the sham of aristocratic âpolitics' and burlesquely describes the hyper-importance of the event as such that not only does Love, Beauty and Mirth appear but even the forces of nature and every âsocial Sprite' attend.
The allusion to Dr Samuel Johnson as âUrsa-Major' (l. 8) points to James Boswell of Auchinleck, who toured âo'er Scotland' with Johnson. (Crawford, p. 210, comments in a footnote that Boswell's wife had said âshe had seen many a bear led by a man, but never ⦠a
man led by a bear' referring to seeing her husband going off with Johnson.) Boswell and Sir John Whitefoord (Glencaird's man) were seen as the two other contenders for parliament. Cunninghame's conspicuous, glittering ball came to nothing as he was not chosen as a candidate. The last two stanzas mockingly compare, from
Paradise
Lost,
Politics to Satan attempting to penetrate Eden.
Ellisland, July 27th, 1788.
First printed in Chambers, 1851.
My godlike Friend ânay do not stare,
no
      You think the praise is odd like;
But, âGod is Love,' the Saints declare,
      Then surely thou art Godlike.
5
And is thy Ardour still the same?
      And kindled still at Anna?
Others may boast a partial flame,
      But thou art a Volcano. â
Even Wedlock asks not love beyond
10
       Death's tie-dissolving Portal;
But thou, omnipotently fond,
      May'st promise Love Immortal. â
Prudence, the Bottle and the Stew
      Are fam'd for Lovers' curing:
15
Thy Passion nothing can subdue,
      Nor Wisdom, Wine nor Whoring. â
Thy Wounds such healing powers defy;
      Such Symptoms dire attend them;
That last great Antihectic try,
20
       Marriage, perhaps, may mend them. â
Sweet Anna has an air, a grace,
      Divine magnetic touching!
She takes, she charms â but who can trace
      The process of BEWITCHING?
Alexander Cunningham (circa 1763â1812) was an Edinburgh lawyer who eventually through marriage owned a share in Robertson's
jewellers in the city. When Burns met him in Edinburgh he was a law student and engaged to Anne Stewart, who jilted him for an Edinburgh surgeon. The poet wrote
Anna, Thy Charms
for his jilted friend. Cunningham was a close friend to Burns until the bard's death and became a chief player in promoting the subscription for the Burns family after 1796. There are nineteen extant letters to Cunningham.
Stanza four is dropped in Henley and Henderson, probably because it mentions âwhoring'. It is also missing in Mackay.
Tune: Deil Flee o'er the Water
First printed in S.M.M., 1803.
As I was walking up the street,
      A barefit maid I chanc'd to meet,
barefoot
But O, the road was very hard
      For that fair maiden's tender feet.
Chorus
5
Mally's meek, Mally's sweet,
      Mally's modest and discreet,
Mally's rare, Mally's fair,
      Mally's ev'ry way compleat.
It were mair meet, that those fine feet
more
10
       Were weel lac'd up in silken shoon,
well, shoes
An' 'twere more fit that she should sit
      Within yon chariot gilt aboon.
above
            Mally's meek, Mally's sweet, &c.
Her yellow hair, beyond compare,
      Comes trinkling down her swan white neck,
15
And her two eyes like stars in skies
      Would keep a sinking ship frae wreck.
from
            Mally's meek, Mally's sweet, &c.
Burns sent this song with others, including O,
Were I on Parnassus
Hill,
to Johnson in August 1788, from Mauchline. It was not printed until 1803. The manuscript is now part of the Law Collection.
With a request for an Excise Division.
Ellisland, September 8th 1788.
First printed by Currie, 1800.
WHEN Nature her great Masterpiece designed,
And framed her last, best Work, the Human Mind,
Her eye intent on all the mazy Plan,
She forms of various stuff the various Man. â
5
The USEFUL MANY first, she calls them forth,
Plain, plodding Industry, and sober Worth:
Thence Peasants, Farmers, native sons of earth,
And Merchandise' whole genus take their birth:
Each prudent Cit a warm existence finds,
citizen
10
And all Mechanics' many-apron'd kinds. â
Some other, rarer Sorts are wanted yet,
The lead and buoy are needful to the net. â
The
caput mortuum
of Gross Desires,
Makes a material for mere knights and squires:
15
The Martial Phosphorus is taught to flow;
She kneads the lumpish Philosophic dough;
Then marks th' unyielding mass with grave Designs,
Law, Physics, Politics, and deep Divines:
Last, she sublimes th' Aurora of the Poles,
20
The flashing elements of Female Souls. â
   The order'd System fair before her stood,
Nature, well pleased, pronounced it very good;
Yet ere she gave creating labour o'er,
Half-jest, she tryed one curious labour more. â
25
Some spumy, fiery,
ignis fatuus
matter,
Such as the slightest breath of air might scatter,
With arch-alacrity and conscious glee,
(Nature may have her whim as well as we;
Her Hogarth-art perhaps she meant to show it)
30
She forms the Thing, and christens it â A POET. â
Creature, tho' oft the prey of Care and Sorrow,
When blest today, unmindful of tomorrow;
A being form'd t' amuse his graver friends,
Admir'd and praised â and there the wages ends;
35
A mortal quite unfit for Fortune's strife,
Yet oft the sport of all the ills of life;
Prone to enjoy each pleasure riches give,
Yet haply wanting wherewithal to live;
Longing to wipe each tear, to heal each groan,
40
Yet frequent all un-heeded in his own. â
   But honest Nature is not quite a Turk;
She laught at first, then felt for her poor Work:
Viewing the propless Climber of mankind,
She cast about a Standard-tree to find;
45
In pity for his helpless wood-bine state,
She clasp'd his tendrils round THE TRULY GREAT:
A title, and the only one I claim,
To lay strong hold for help on generous GRAHAM. â
   Pity the tuneful Muses' hapless train,
50
Weak, timid Landsmen on life's stormy main!
Their hearts no selfish, stern, absorbent stuff
That never gives â tho' humbly takes enough;
The little Fate allows they share as soon,
Unlike sage, proverbed Wisdom's hard-wrung boon:
55
The world were blest, did bliss on them depend,
Ah, that the FRIENDLY e'er should want a FRIEND!
   Let Prudence number o'er each sturdy son
Who life and wisdom at one race begun,
Who feel by reason, and who give by rule,
60
(Instinct's a brute, and Sentiment a fool!)
Who make poor, âWill do' wait upon, âI should,'
We own they're prudent â but who owns they're good?
Ye Wise Ones, hence! ye hurt the social eye;
God's image rudely etch'd on base alloy!
65
But come, ye who the godlike pleasure know,
Heaven's attribute distinguish'd, â to bestow,
Whose arms of love would grasp all human-race;
Come, thou who givest with all a courtier's grace,
Friend of my life! (true Patron of my rhymes)
70
Prop of my dearest hopes for future times. â
   Why shrinks my soul, half-blushing, half-afraid,
Backward, abashed, to ask thy friendly aid?
I know my need, I know thy giving hand,
I tax thy friendship at thy kind command:
75
But, there are such, who court the tuneful Nine,
Heavens, should the branded character be mine!
Whose verse in manhood's pride sublimely flows,
Yet vilest reptiles in their begging prose.
Mark, how their lofty, independant spirit
80
Soars on the spurning wing of injured Merit!
Seek you the proofs in private life to find? â
Pity, the best of words should be but wind!
So to Heaven's gates the lark's shrill song ascends,
But grovelling on the earth the carol ends. â
85
In all the clam'rous cry of starving Want
They dun Benevolence with shameless front:
Oblidge them, patronize their tinsel lays,
They persecute you all your future days. â
   E'er my poor soul such deep damnation stain,
90
My horny fist, assume the Plough again;
The pie-bald jacket, let me patch once more;
On eighteenpence a week I've liv'd before. â
Tho', thanks to Heaven! I dare even that last shift,
I trust, meantime, my boon is in thy gift:
95
That, plac'd by thee upon the wished-for height,
Where Man and Nature fairer in her sight,
My Muse may imp her wing for some sublimer flight. â
Burns did not choose to publish this 1788 epistle to Robert Graham of Fintry because it is certainly a lesser poem than the 1791 poem printed in the second Edinburgh edition. He may also have considered the seeking of Fintry's favour too overt. Certainly it was, like its successor, driven by deep economic need. In September of that year he wrote to Graham that his Ellisland farm âdoes by no means promise to be such a Pennyworth as I was taught to expect. â It is in the last stage of worn out poverty, and will take some time before it pays the rent'. Kinsley is not sensitive to such matters and is wholly condemnatory of the poem, seeing in it, particularly Mrs Dunlop's specific enthusiasm for it, genteel Scotland's wrong-headed encouragement for Burns to write derivative, outmoded English verse:
This kind of response did Burns no good; it encouraged him, as some of his criticism he had got in Edinburgh had done, in a vain attempt to write âAugustan' poetry. The weakness of the epistle does not lie only in loose-strung couplets and conventional notions; the description of the poet (ll. 21â40) is a mask
unnatural to Burns (contrast
Epistle to
J. Lapraik,
ll. 49â78); and the conjunction of flattery â to a patron he hardly knew and owed little as yet â with an equally insincere posture of independence (ll. 89â97) is absurd (Vol. III, p. 1279).
Burns certainly did not disguise his debt to Pope in this poem. On September 16th, 1788, he wrote to Margaret Chalmers that he had âsince harvest began, wrote a poem not in imitation, but in the manner of Pope's
Moral Epistles
. It is only a short essay, just to try the strength of my Muse's pinion in that way' (Letter 272). This is, of course, echoed in the last line: âMy Muse may imp her wing for some sublimer flight'. If the poem is a product of Burns's âprentice hand' in this genre, it was also one to which he gave deep attention. Writing to Henry Erskine, the great radical lawyer and one of his heroes, he enclosed a copy, while also discussing the iniquitous agony of seeking favour from the great and the specific necessity for securing Graham's patronage:
I have no great faith in the boasted pretensions to intuitive propriety and unlaboured elegance. â The rough material of Fine Writing is certainly the gift of Genius; but as I firmly believe that the workmanship is the united effort of Pains, Attention & Repeated â trial. â The piece addressed to Mr. Graham is my first essay in that didactic epistolary way; which circumstance I hope will bespeak your indulgence (Letter 299).
Kinsley's refusal to indulge him should certainly not be seen as mandatory. Burns was attempting to educate Graham in these two English language epistles as to his complex, educated vision of the role and fate of the poet in society in order to receive his understanding and patronage. The complexity of the vision is the necessary product of his synthesis of his knowledge of Robert Fergusson's fate with examples taken from Pope, Swift, Dr Johnson and, contemporaneously, Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper and the peculiarly self-destructive Charles Churchill.
Ll. 1â20 denote a world more feudal than democratic whereby everything has its place. It is perhaps derived from his friend William Smellie's evolutionary vision of life ascending by a law of refinement. Thus the female soul is the highest earthly form. Smellie further argued that the highest of human life forms, such as the creative poet, might attain to states which made earthly reality incompatible to his spirit. Indeed, Burns's vision here would arguably make him more compatible with Ezra Pound than Pablo
Neruda. Burns, partly jokingly, sees Nature as a Hogarth-like power which (ll. 21â40) creates the poet as a sort of incompatible freak. Burns's letters are filled with self-analysis of his eccentric, agonised creative relationship with the world: âIt is not easy to imagine a more helpless state than his whose poetic fancy unfits him for the world' (Letter 61). If this is seen as self-indulgent Romantic agony slightly before the event, it also went in Burns with a spiritually derived agony that he had not power to give succour to the pain of the world: â â Oh, how often had my heart ached to agony, for the power, To wipe away all tears from all eyes!' (Letter 491). If he had a tendency to endorse the Devil, or at least Milton's version of him, he was also tempted to imitate Christ. This, too, is not without its spiritual perils. In terms of the worldly appetites, Burns also believed the poet to have a particularly keen sensuality which was never accompanied by the fiscal capacity to indulge: âTake a being of our kind; give him a stronger imagination and more delicate sensibility, which will ever between them engender a more ungovernable set of Passions, than the usual lot of man⦠curse him with a keener relish than any man living for the pleasures that only Lucre can bestow ⦠and you have created a wight nearly as miserable as a Poet' (Letter 413). If this sounds somewhat like Keats before the event, Keats thought so, too, as his Ayrshire letters recording Burns's victimage by the repressive forces of the Scottish church, contain a chilling premonition of his own sensual thwarting and premature death.
The poem then argues for a compensatory element in Nature (ll. 41â8) where the poet's lack of worldly strength is compared to a climbing plant moving upwards supported by the tree-trunk provided by the benevolent, if rare, great man. Burns then makes a characteristic comparison, often also found in his letters, between the altruistic, empathetic poetic personality, emotions on which a just world could be erected, and the prudential, self-absorbed, materialists who actually run the world.
Ll. 65â70 are, as Kinsley suggests, far beyond the reality, present or subsequent, with regard to Graham's patronage. Ll. 71â88 have, however, a quality worthy of the best Augustan verse in their analysis so common in eighteenth-century verse of the caninely sycophantic poet whose apparently divine song masks degenerate self-seeking. The poem ends with an assertion, again very common in the Ayrshire vernacular epistles, of retaining his independence by, if necessary, returning to the plough. Kinsley rather tartly remarks that l. 92 is an exaggeration as the
day
rate for an Ayrshire labourer was around eighteen pence.