The Canongate Burns
Page 18
And ev’ry star that blinks aboon, above
Ye’ve cost me twenty pair o’ shoon, shoes
10 Just gaun to see you; going
And ev’ry ither pair that’s done, other
Mair taen I’m wi’ you. more taken
That auld, capricious carlin, Nature, hag
To mak amends for scrimpit stature, make, stunted
15 She’s turn’d you off, a human-creature
On her first plan;
And in her freaks, on ev’ry feature
She’s wrote the Man.
Just now I’ve taen the fit o’ rhyme, taken
20 My barmie noddle’s working prime, excited head/brain
My fancy yerket up sublime, pulled together
Wi’ hasty summon:
Hae ye a leisure-moment’s time have
To hear what’s comin?
25 Some rhyme a neebor’s name to lash; neighbour
Some rhyme (vain thought!) for needfu’ cash;
Some rhyme to court the countra clash, country gossip
An’ raise a din;
For me, an aim I never fash; think of
30 I rhyme for fun.
The star that rules my luckless lot,
Has fated me the russet coat, poor man’s coat
An’ damn’d my fortune to the groat; smallest coin
But, in requit, as compensation
35 Has blest me with a random-shot
O’ countra wit. country
This while my notion’s taen a sklent, taken a turn/bend
To try my fate in guid, black prent; good, print
But still the mair I’m that way bent, more
40 Something cries, ‘Hoolie! halt
I red you, honest man, tak tent! warn, heed
Ye’ll shaw your folly: show
‘There’s ither Poets, much your betters, other
Far seen in Greek, deep men o’ letters, well versed
45 Hae thought they had ensur’d their debtors, have
A’ future ages;
Now moths deform, in shapeless tatters,
Their unknown pages.’
Then farewell hopes o’ Laurel-boughs
50 To garland my poetic brows!
Henceforth, I’ll rove where busy ploughs
Are whistling thrang; busily/at work
An’ teach the lanely heights an’ howes lonely hills and dales
My rustic sang. song
55 I’ll wander on, wi’ tentless heed carefree
How never-halting moments speed,
Till Fate shall snap the brittle thread;
Then, all unknown,
I’ll lay me with th’ inglorious dead,
60 Forgot and gone!
But why o’ Death, begin a tale?
Just now we’re living sound an’ hale; strong
Then top and maintop croud the sail, crowd
Heave Care o’er-side!
65 And large, before Enjoyment’s gale,
Let’s tak the tide.
This life, sae far’s I understand, so
Is a’ enchanted fairy-land,
Where Pleasure is the Magic-wand,
70 That, wielded right,
Maks Hours like Minutes, hand in hand, makes
Dance by fu’ light.
The magic-wand then let us wield;
For, ance that five-an’-forty’s speel’d, once, climbed/reached
75 See, crazy, weary, joyless, Eild, old age
Wi’ wrinkl’d face,
Comes hostin, hirplan owre the field, coughing, limping over
Wi’ creepin pace.
When ance life’s day draws near the gloamin, once, twilight
80 Then fareweel vacant, careless roamin; farewell
An’ fareweel chearfu’ tankards foamin,
An’ social noise:
An’ fareweel dear, deluding Woman,
The joy of joys!
85 O Life! how pleasant, in thy morning,
Young Fancy’s rays the hills adorning!
Cold-pausing Caution’s lesson scorning,
We frisk away,
Like school-boys, at th’ expected warning,
90 To joy an’ play.
We wander there, we wander here,
We eye the rose upon the brier,
Unmindful that the thorn is near,
Among the leaves;
95 And tho’ the puny wound appear,
Short while it grieves.
Some, lucky, find a flow’ry spot,
For which they never toil’d nor swat; sweated
They drink the sweet and eat the fat,
100 But care or pain; without
And haply eye the barren hut
With high disdain.
With steady aim, some Fortune chase;
Keen Hope does ev’ry sinew brace;
105 Thro’ fair, thro’ foul, they urge the race,
And seize the prey:
Then cannie, in some cozie place, quietly, snug
They close the day.
And others, like your humble servan’,
110 Poor wights! nae rules nor roads observin, no
To right or left eternal swervin,
They zig-zag on;
Till, curst with Age, obscure an’ starvin,
They aften groan. often
115 Alas! what bitter toil an’ straining —
But truce with peevish, poor complaining!
Is Fortune’s fickle Luna waning?
E’en let her gang! go
Beneath what light she has remaining,
120 Let’s sing our Sang. song
My pen I here fling to the door,
And kneel, ye Pow’rs, and warm implore,
‘Tho’ I should wander Terra o’er, world
In all her climes,
125 Grant me but this, I ask no more,
Ay rowth o’ rhymes. abundant
‘Gie dreeping roasts to countra Lairds, give dripping, country
Till icicles hing frae their beards; hang from
Gie fine braw claes to fine Life-guards give, handsome clothes
130 And Maids of Honor;
And yill an’ whisky gie to Cairds, ale, give, tinkers
Until they sconner. are sick of it
‘A Title, DEMPSTER merits it;
A Garter gie to WILLIE PIT; symbol of Knighthood, give
135 Gie Wealth to some be-ledger’d Cit, give, accounting citizen
In cent per cent;
But give me real, sterling Wit,
And I’m content
‘While ye are pleas’d to keep me hale, healthy
140 I’ll sit down o’er my scanty meal,
Be’t water-brose or muslin-kail, gruel, meatless broth
Wi’ cheerfu’ face,
As lang’s the Muses dinna fail long, do not
To say the grace.’
145 An anxious e’e I never throws eye
Behint my lug, or by my nose; behind, ear
I jouk beneath Misfortune’s blows dodge/duck
As weel’s I may; well as
Sworn foe to sorrow, care, and prose,
150 I rhyme away.
O ye douce folk that live by rule, serious/sober
Grave, tideless-blooded, calm an’ cool, no rise & fall of passions
Compar’d wi’ you — O fool! fool! fool!
How much unlike!
155 Your hearts are just a standing pool,
Your lives, a dyke! stone wall
Nae hair-brained, sentimental traces no
In your unletter’d, nameless faces!
In arioso trills and graces
160 Ye never stray;
But gravissímo, solemn basses
Ye hum away.
Ye are sae grave, nae doubt ye’re wise; so, no
Nae ferly tho’ ye do despise no wonder
165 The hairum-scairum, ram-stam boys, wild, headlong
The rattling squad:
I see ye upward cast your eyes —
Ye ken the road! know
Whilst I — but I shall haud me there, hold
170 Wi’ you I’ll scarce gang ony where — go any
Then, Jamie, I shall say nae mair, no more
But quat my sang, quit, song
Content wi’ YOU to mak a pair, make
Whare’er I gang. go
James Smith (1765–1823) was initially a linen-draper in Mauchline who eventually emigrated to Jamaica after his business partnership in printing near Linlithgow collapsed. He was younger brother to one of the ‘Mauchline Belles’. Smith is the recipient of several letters from Burns.
This is the first of a series of epistles written by Burns to either Ayrshire intimates or intended intimates. This phase of his life, energised by Masonic membership, is intensely social and, as we will see in The Vision, a central aspiration, despite so many influences to the contrary, was to put creative tap-roots into Ayrshire soil and anoint himself the Bard of its fertile but, as yet, poetically fallow terrain. Historically this meant, beginning with Wallace, a resurrection of Ayrshire heroes. In terms of his own life he looked to surround himself with fraternal like-minded spirits. Hence this sequence of significant poetic epistles to James Smith, David Sillar, Gavin Hamilton, John Lapraik, William Simpson and John Rankin.
The epistolary form derives, of course, from classical poetry and was heavily used in Augustan verse, most happily by Pope. The genre had been domesticated, however, by an exchange of epistles between Alan Ramsay and William Hamilton of Gilbertfield which were instrumental in reactiving Scottish vernacular poetry in the eighteenth century. As McGuirk has noted, these epistles were ‘a means of interchange between patriotic Scots poets’ which ‘also incorporated Horatian themes: country pleasure, disdain of ‘greatness’, praise of friendship, discussion of current issues and (especially) the state of Scottish poetry’. The proper use of the genre entails a degree of creative, technical parity between the correspondents. This was denied Burns, but his desire for the comforts of a poetic coterie was so strong that he often seriously overemphasised the talents of his correspondents. Sillars, for example, was a fine fiddler but a less than mediocre poet. Lapraik very likely plagiarised the song for which he achieved local fame. Later in life Burns was to show absolutely no patience with poetic inferiors who clung to his coat-tail in terms of social identity but not creative ability. He was as creatively hierarchical as Swift or Pope.
While the surface and formal, linguistic energy of these early Ayrshire epistles is cheerful and, even, boisterous, almost all of them are marked with a degree of black anxiety about not only the external social, economic and political forces acting on his achieving identity and recognition as a true poet but the often anarchic, even chaotic, internal forces which, while creatively necessary, were incompatible with the prudence and self-restraint necessary for a secure existence. Or, as he brilliantly defined it, in The Vision:
Had I to guid advice but harket,
I might, by this, hae led a market,
Or strutted in a Bank and clarket
My Cash-Account;
While here, half-mad, half-fed, half-sarket,
Is a’ th’ amount.
This epistle was written in the winter of 1785–6. Smith was (ll. 163–74) a key member of the ‘ram-stam boys’. This testosterone charged group, especially Gavin Hamilton, were in constant conflict with the ministry. Burns’s comment on Smith being small but perfectly formed (ll. 13–18) may be partly a response to clerical condemnation of his friend. The extent of Smith’s friendship also extended to Jean Armour. Burns was to order from Smith, then a partner in a Calico works, his first present for Jean: ‘ ’tis my first present to her since I have irrevocably called her mine, and I have a kind of whimsical wish to get it from an old and much valued friend of hers and mine, a Trusty Trojan, on whose friendship I count myself possessed on a life-rent lease’ (Letter 237). The ‘Trusty Trojan’ was his sole Mauchline friend as the dispute with the Armour family deepened.
McGuirk (‘Loose Canons: Milton and Burns, Artsong and Folk-song’, Love and Liberty, pp. 317–20) has drawn attention to parallels between this poem and Milton’s Lycidas as a poem which not only ‘addresses issues of friendship and bereavement, fame and obscurity, poetic immortality and premature death’ but also includes a harsher satire on corrupt religiosity (ll. 151–68) and on the capricious, lethal intrusions of blind fate into human life.
The central dialectic of the poem is based on Burns’s chronic anxiety, equally pervasive in his letters, about the problematic nature of forging a poetic identity for himself. At this particular point in his life he was considering trying ‘fate in guid, black prent’ and the poem charts his disbelief that even the printed page will grant him the laurel bow of poetic immortality so that the poem celebrates the compensatory, rural, russet-coated anonymous rhyming funster (ll. 31–6). The black star of ill-luck, his sense of being under a Job-like curse, is, however, not so easily dismissed. The pervasive melancholy of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard alluded to in ll. 59–60, ‘I’ll lay me with th’ inglorious dead,/Forgot and gone!’ suggests also Gray’s line ‘Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest’ as his own fate. Also, as in contemporary English sentimental poetry, Burns makes the equation between the inability of the poet to become socially visible with the similar fate of the mass of the common people not to appear as individually identifiable in the stream of history. Thus the poem links Burns the invisible poet, with not only Burns the impoverished, unknown farmer but the mass of the people who are neither to be identified nor rewarded by history. Life is appallingly ill-divided between the poor and the over-rewarded rich (ll. 127–38). Dempster (l. 133) known as ‘Honest George’ Dempster was a Whig M.P. for Forfar Burghs 1761–90 and an agricultural improver. Pitt, at this stage in his prime-ministerial career, was the object of Burns’s approval; it was he in the darkening 1790s, not Burns, who was to change political identity. As well as this fatalistic sense in the poem of political and economic forces too strong to be resisted, Burns in ll. 109–14 mentions his own Shandean proclivities for eccentric forward motion wholly unconducive to making a prosperous, if not a poetic, life.
A Dream
First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
Thoughts, words, and deeds, the Statute blames with reason;
But surely Dreams were ne’er indicted Treason.
On reading, in the public papers, the Laureate’s Ode with the other parade of June 4th, 1786, the Author was no sooner dropt asleep, than he imagined himself transported to the Birth-day Levee; and, in his dreaming fancy, made the following Address: —
GUID-MORNIN to your MAJESTY!
May Heaven augment your blisses,
On ev’ry new Birth-day ye see,
A humble Poet wishes! (changed from Bardie in 1793)
5 My Bardship here, at your Levee,
On sic a day as this is, such
Is sure an uncouth sight to see,
Amang thae Birth-day dresses among they
Sae fine this day. so
10 I see ye’re complimented thrang, busily
By monie a lord an’ lady; many
‘God Save the King’ ’s a cuckoo sang song
That’s unco easy said ay: mighty
The Poets, too, a venal gang,
15 Wi’ rhymes weel-turn’d an’ ready, well-
Wad gar you trow ye ne’er do wrang, would make, think, wrong
But ay unerring steady,
On sic a day. such
For me! before a Monarch’s face,
20 Ev’n there I winna flatter; will not
For neither Pension, Post, nor Place,
Am I your humble debtor:
So, nae reflection on YOUR GRACE, no
Your Kingship to bespatter;
25 There’s monie waur been o’ the Race, many worse
And aiblins ane been better maybe one
Than You this day.
’Tis very true, my sovereign K
ing,
My skill may weel be doubted; well
30 But Facts are chiels that winna ding, fellows, will not be upset
And downa be disputed: cannot
Your royal nest, beneath Your wing,
Is e’en right reft and clouted, torn & patched
And now the third part o’ the string,
35 An’ less, will gang about it go
Than did ae day. one
Far be’t frae me that I aspire from
To blame your Legislation,
Or say, ye wisdom want, or fire
40 To rule this mighty nation:
But faith! I muckle doubt, my SIRE, much
Ye’ve trusted ’Ministration
To chaps wha in a barn or byre who
Wad better fill’d their station,
45 Than courts yon day.
And now Ye’ve gien auld Britain peace, given old
Her broken shins to plaister; plaster
Your sair taxation does her fleece, sore
Till she has scarce a tester: sixpence
50 For me, thank God, my life’s a lease, a tenant farm lease
Nae bargain wearin faster, no
Or faith! I fear, that, wi’ the geese,
I shortly boost to pasture must
I’ the craft some day.
55 I’m no mistrusting Willie Pit,
When taxes he enlarges,
(An’ Will’s a true guid fallow’s get, good, breed
A Name not Envy spairges), bespatters
That he intends to pay your debt,
60 An’ lessen a’ your charges;
But, God sake! let nae saving fit no
Abridge your bonie Barges handsome
An’ Boats this day.
Adieu, my LIEGE! may Freedom geck sport
65 Beneath your high protection;
An’ may Ye rax Corruption’s neck,
And gie her for dissection! give
But since I’m here I’ll no neglect,