Read The Canongate Burns Online
Authors: Robert Burns
The Canongate Burns (110 page)
First printed in
Notes and Queries
, Vol. IV, 1881.
Brownhill, Monday even:
Dear Sir,
In honest Bacon's ingle-neuk,
fireside corner
      Here maun I sit and think;
must
5
Sick o' the warld and warld's fock,
world, folk
      An' sick, damn'd sick, o' drink!
I see, I see there is nae help,
      But still down I maun sink;
must
Till some day,
laigh enough
, I yelp,
low
10
      âWae worth that cursed drink!'
Yestreen, alas! I was sae fu',
so full/drunk
      I could but yisk and wink;
burp
And now, this day, sair, sair I rue,
sore
      The weary, weary drink. â
15
Satan, I fear thy sooty claws,
      I hate thy brunstane stink,
brimstone
And ay I curse the luckless cause,
      The wicked soup o' drink. â
In vain I would forget my woes
20
      In idle rhyming clink,
For past redemption damn'd in Prose,
      I can do nought but drink. â
For you, my trusty, well-try'd friend,
      May Heaven still on you blink;
25
And may your life flow to the end,
      Sweet as a dry man's drink!
Robt. Burns.
This was composed at Brownhill Inn, several miles from Ellisland on the road towards Sanquhar. William Stewart was brother-in-law of Bacon, the landlord at Brownhill. Stewart was a close friend of Burns and is mentioned in the song
Your Welcome, Willie Stewart
(See Letter 253). For comments on drink by Burns, see Letters 467, 482, 506 and 529.
First printed in Lockhart, 1828.
As cauld a wind as ever blew;
cold
A caulder kirk, and in't but few;
As cauld a minister's ever spak;
Ye'se a' be het or I come back.
be hot [in Hell]
It has become customary for editors to accept this without manuscript evidence. It was first printed by Lockhart in 1828 from lines supposedly inscribed by Burns on a window pane of the Kirk at Lamington, which sits off the old Dumfries to Edinburgh road. It probably is by Burns.
First printed in part by Currie, 1800; completed in Aldine, 1839.
How Wisdom and Folly meet, mix, and unite;
How Virtue and Vice blend their black and their white;
How Genius, th' illustrious father of fiction,
Confounds rule and law, reconciles contradiction,
5
I sing; if these mortals, the Critics, should bustle,
I care not, not I, let the Critics go whistle!
But now for a Patron, whose name and whose glory
At once may illustrate and honor my story: â
Thou, first of our orators, first of our wits,
10
Yet whose parts and acquirements seem mere lucky hits;
With knowledge so vast, and with judgment so strong,
No man, with the half of 'em, e'er could go wrong;
With passions so potent, and fancies so bright,
No man with the half of 'em e'er could go right;
15
A sorry, poor, misbegot son of the Muses,
For using thy name offers fifty excuses. â
Good Lord, what is Man! for as simple he looks,
Do but try to develope his hooks and his crooks,
With his depths and his shallows, his good and his evil,
20
All in all, he 's a problem must puzzle the Devil. â
On his one ruling Passion Sir Pope hugely labours,
That, like th' old Hebrew walking switch, eats up its neighbours;
Human Nature 's his show-boxâyour friend, would you know him?
Pull the string
Ruling Passion,
the picture will show him. â
25
What pity, in rearing so beauteous a system,
One trifling particular, Truth, should have miss'd him!
For spite of his fine theoretic positions,
Mankind is a science defies definitions. â
Some sort all our qualities each to its tribe,
30
And think Human Nature they truly describe.
Have you found this, or t'other! there's more in the wind,
As by one drunken fellow his comrades you'll find. â
But such is the flaw, or the depth of the plan
In the make of that wonderful creature called MAN,
35
No two virtues whatever relation they claim,
Nor even two different shades of the same,
Though like as was ever twin brother to brother,
Possessing the one must imply you've the other. â
But truce with abstraction, and truce with a Muse,
40
Whose rhymes you'll perhaps, Sir, ne'er deign to peruse:
Will you leave your justings, your jars and your quarrels,
Contending with Billy for proud-nodding laurels?
(My much-honor'd Patron, believe your poor Poet,
Your courage much more than your prudence you show it;
45
In vain with Squire Billy for laurels you struggle,
He'll have them by fair trade, if not, he will smuggle;
Nor cabinets even of kings would conceal 'em,
He'd up the back-stairs and by God he would steal 'em!
Then feats like Squire Billy's you ne'er can atchieve 'em,
50
It is not, outdo him, the task is, outthieve him.) â
This poetic sketch, inscribed to Charles James Fox (1749â1806), was clearly intended as a current affairs newspaper poem in the Spring of 1789. There is, however, no evidence that it was printed during the poet's lifetime. Peter Stuart of the London
Star
would
never have printed it, given that it is not wholly laudatoty of Fox (
See Ode on the Departed Regency Bill
). An early draft was sent to Mrs Dunlop (Letter 335). The iambic-anapaestic metre, with its alliterative lines, is a form used by Prior, Swift and Goldsmith for satirical verse.
A partly comic mini-dissertation on human nature, Burns creates a light hearted, mock discussion of the struggle going on in the head of Charles James Fox, to debate whether knowledge will be overwhelmed by passion, or virtue will be victorious over vice, in the world of power and ambition. But, like the wooden show-box amusement cabinet (l. 23), found at country fairs, human nature cannot simply be shown by pulling a string. Unlike Pope's complex, lengthy
Essay on Man,
there is no panacea, âone ruling Passion' (l. 21), for Burns. Ending rather like a Punch and Judy show, the joking advice to Fox is not to contend with Billy [William Pitt] for âlaurels' but copy his dishonest career through thieving. The âHebrew walking switch' (l. 22) alludes to Aaron's rod, from
Exodus
, vii. Fox, like John Thelwall and other leading radicals of the period, admired Burns's poetry, but this would have left him perplexed.
Burns wrote to Mrs Dunlop on 4th May, 1789: âI have another Poetic whim in my head, which I at present dedicate or rather inscribe to⦠Fox⦠but how long the fancy may hold, I can't say.' This should not be again misdiagnosed as another example of Burns's political inconsistency. The difficulty was not in the poet but his subject. Fox, psychologically and politically, was and, indeed, remains an enigma. Was he a political idealist or a careerist trimmer? There was, as seen in Burns's earlier poetic treatment of him, the saturnine reckless gambler and inveterate womaniser who, until stopped by the mistress he later married, spat on the carpet till his mid-thirties (and did so in the House of Commons). There was the bibliophile and scholar who expressed the wish to withdraw from the world and write a study of Dryden. Indeed the aristocrat and ploughman shared, given Dryden's politics, a somewhat unlikely passion for his poetry. Fox, of course, had a classical training of a kind simply not available to Burns. Fox knew and admired Burns's poetry, believing him Cowper's superior, but he had no time for Wordsworth's poetry or his attempt to elicit patronage from him. As L.G. Mitchell noted in
Charles James Fox
:
With rare exceptions, English literature was a poor, grey thing, when compared to that of Europeâ¦. Pope had written some useful lines, and, among his contemporaries, Burns
and Campbell were worthy of some consideration. Even so, the list is a short one. Significantly, Fox saw no value whatever in the Lake School of poetry, and seemed indeed to be actively hostile to it â¦
⦠Poetry, in the 1790s, by its subject-matter and structure, could not avoid also being politics. Fox's rejection of Wordsworth and his friends was more than an aesthetic judgement. Foxite Whiggery felt altogether more at home in the classical world. Reading two ancient and three modern languages, Fox was not short of reading-matter that offered more pleasure and less risk than the foggy productions of the Lake District (Oxford, 1992, pp. 187â8).
Fox's response to Wordsworth takes us to the heart of his political enigma. To what degree was he a democrat or an ambitious factional leader of élite Whig power? This problem is cogently discussed by J.R. Dinwiddy in âCharles James Fox and the People' in his
Radicalism and Reform in Britain 1780â1850
(London, 1992) where he cites this incisive comment from
The Edinburgh Review
in 1838:
Of Mr. Fox it must be said that while his political principles were formed upon the true model of the Whig School, and led him when combined with his position as opposing the Government's warlike and oppressive policy, to defend the liberty of America, and the cause of peace, both in that and the French war, yet he constantly modified these principles, according to his own situation and circumstances as a party chief;âmaking the ambition of the man and the interest of his followers the governing rule of his conduct (p. 17).
Burns is characteristic of other radicals who earlier were in varying degrees sceptical of Fox but who, in the darkening 1790s, coalesced around him as the anti-war leader and the opponent of the increasing royal power which Fox saw as akin to the struggle of the 17th century against monarchical divine right. There was a particularly strong Scottish Foxite faction which included figures of the intelligence and substance of Professor John Millar and Dr Alexander Geddes. Burns never was such a Foxite hyper-enthusiast. As in the marvellous
On Glenriddell's Fox Breaking Its Chain
, there was always in him a healthy degree of scepticism about the disparity between aristocratic Whig ideals, intentions and actual conduct. What this poem does show is, however, a degree of personal
identification of Burns with Fox due, as with Charles James Stewart, to a recognition of mutual human failings. The poem also records Burns's break, by his criticism of Pope's concept of âthe one ruling Passion' (see Maynard Mack's 1950 introduction to
An
Essay on Man
), with the eighteenth century's desire to uniform, abstract clarity. Burns was always aware of the conflicting bedlam within himself and many of his ideas mirror the turning of the Romantic mind to the subconscious springs of creativity and desire. Scott Hogg was correct to note the similarities in
More Treason
, from
The Morning Chronicle
of 18th March, 1795, with the Burns poem on Fox:
To simple John Bull says imperious Pitt,
âDon't you hear my Alarm Bell? â Pray listen to it:
Thieves! thieves! Look about you: these Jacobin dogs
Will steal your Roast Beef; â and they'll feed you with Frogs!
Of their Treasons and Plots should your faith have the staggers
Burke, will show you in proof, his invisible Daggers!'
John, apt to be frighten'd at rumours like those,
Star'd round, to discover his pilfering Foes:
But while he was dreaming of Peachums and Lockits
He found the fly Premier had rifled his pockets.
With a Pound of Loundiefoot Snuff â
First printed in Cunningham, 1834.
O could I give thee India's wealth
       As I this trifle send!
Because thy Joy in both would be â
       To share them with thy Friend.
But Golden Sands, Alas, ne'er grace
      The Heliconian stream:
Then take, what Gold could never buy â
      An honest Bard's esteem. â
John McMurdo (1743â1803), worked as chamberlain to the Duke of Queensberry at Drumlanrig, north of Ellisland, where the castle still stands. The poet let McMurdo borrow his collection of bawdy verses.
First printed in Lockhart, 1828.
       Dear Peter, dear Peter,
       We poor sons of metre
Are often negleckit, ye ken;
neglected, know
       For instance your sheet, man,
       (Tho' glad I'm to see't, man),
I get it no ae day in ten.
one
Peter Stuart set up the
London Star
, an evening newspaper, in 1788 with business partners. Later, after a quarrel about the Regency affair, he set up his own, short-lived
Morning Star
, to which Burns, pseudonymously, sent two radical poems. Peter was the older brother of Daniel Stuart, also a newspaper proprietor. It is assumed the poetic note from Burns was cut away from a letter Burns sent to Stuart. Seven letters from Burns to Stuart exist, although it has been commented that âmuch of the correspondence between Peter Stuart and Robert Burns is missing' (L. Werkmeister's
Robert Burns and
the London Newspapers, Bulletin of the New York Public Library
, Vol. 65, Oct. 1961, p. 492). As Werkmeister states, Daniel claimed his younger brother offered Burns £50 per year to send a weekly poem to his newspaper. When the spurious Star collapsed, Stuart purchased
The Oracle
, a pro-Pitt paper.