The Canongate Burns

by Robert Burns

  Makes countless thousands mourn!

  See yonder poor, o’erlabour’d wight,

  So abject, mean, and vile,

  Who begs a brother of the earth

  60 To give him leave to toil;

  And see his lordly fellow-worm

  The poor petition spurn,

  Unmindful, tho’ a weeping wife

  And helpless offspring mourn.

  65 If I’m design’d yon lordling’s slave,

  By Nature’s law design’d,

  Why was an independent wish

  E’er planted in my mind?

  If not, why am I subject to

  70 His cruelty, or scorn?

  Or why has Man the will and pow’r

  To make his fellow mourn?

  Yet let not this too much, my Son,

  Disturb thy youthful breast:

  75 This partial view of human-kind

  Is surely not the last!

  The poor, oppressed, honest man

  Had never, sure, been born,

  Had there not been some recompence

  80 To comfort those that mourn!

  O Death! the poor man’s dearest friend,

  The kindest and the best!

  Welcome the hour my aged limbs

  Are laid with thee at rest!

  85 The great, the wealthy fear thy blow,

  From pomp and pleasure torn;

  But, Oh! a blest relief to those

  That weary-laden mourn!

  This was written sometime during the summer of 1785. It is entered in the FCB under August 1785. In his commentary on l. 5 of this poem Kinsley remarks that a ‘meeting with a didactic sage is common in eighteenth-century poetry down to the time of Wordsworth. Burns’s immediate model was apparently the white-haired “grateful form” encountered “on distant heaths beneath autumn skies” by Shenstone (Elegies, vii)’. It is characteristic of Kinsley that as a commentator on Burns’s poems his eye is always fixed on the rear-view mirror hardly ever the road ahead. His commentary is eruditely, densely allusive to Burns’s sources; he rarely has anything to say about Burns’s seminal capacity to influence others, especially if the influence is of a political nature. Burns profoundly influenced Wordsworth. This poem, with its mixture of the elemental and political pains of existence, is probably the single best example of that influence. The depth of Burns’s political passion in the poem can be gauged from Gilbert’s account of its genesis when he noted that several of his brother’s poems were written to ‘bring forward some favourite sentiment of the author. He used to remark to me, that he could not well conceive a more mortifying picture of human life, than a man seeking work. In casting about in his mind how the sentiment might be brought forward, the elegy Man was Made to Mourn was composed’ (Currie, iii. 384). Ll. 57–64 are this sentiment turned into poetry.

  Mary Jacobus is particularly astute in her awareness of the degree to which Wordsworth creativity derived from the Scottish poet’s sense of the terrible injustices of the rampant agrarian revolution. As she remarks:

  The Last of the Flock confronts, not death, but destitution – the plight of the labouring poor. Burns’s Man was Made to Mourn: A Dirge was clearly in Wordsworth’s mind during the spring of 1798, and its lament for the human condition shapes his poem (Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads 1798 (Oxford: 1976), p. 202).

  Wordsworth’s Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman is, if anything, even closer to Burns’s dirge. Simon Lee, a tragic version of Tam Sampson, is faced with not only the increasingly severe symptoms of geriatric decline but the brutal redundancy of, no longer useful, being cast into helpless destitution. This combination of age and political injustice exactly follows Burns and his poem is deliberately echoed in the last lines of Wordsworth’s:

  I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds

  With coldness still returning;

  Alas! The gratitude of men

  Hath oftener left me mourning.

  The Dirge is also echoed in Wordsworth’s Lines Written in Early Spring: ‘Have I not reason to lament/ What man has made of man?’, (ll. 23–4). The Leech Gatherer in Resolution and Independence, a poem in which Burns (ll. 45–9) makes an unnamed appearance, is also partly derived from the Dirge. Wordsworth’s poem perhaps postulates a more spiritual consolation than Burns’s Dirge with its vision of that ultimate and absolute democratic equaliser, Death itself.

  Winter, a Dirge

  Tune: MacPherson’s Farewell

  First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.

  The Wintry West extends his blast,

  And hail and rain does blaw;

  Or, the stormy North sends driving forth

  The blinding sleet and snaw: snow

  5 While, tumbling brown, the Burn comes down,

  And roars frae bank to brae: from

  While bird and beast in covert, rest,

  And pass the heartless day.

  ‘The sweeping blast, the sky o’ercast,’1

  10 The joyless winter-day,

  Let others fear, to me more dear

  Than all the pride of May:

  The Tempest’s howl, it soothes my soul,

  My griefs it seems to join;

  15 The leafless trees my fancy please,

  Their fate resembles mine!

  Thou POW’R SUPREME, whose mighty Scheme

  These woes of mine fulfill,

  Here, firm I rest, they must be best,

  20 Because they are Thy Will!

  Then all I want (Oh, do Thou grant

  This one request of mine!):

  Since to enjoy Thou dost deny,

  Assist me to resign.

  This song is ‘The eldest of my printed pieces’ Burns told Dr Moore (Letter 125). In the FCB the poet records the influence upon him of Nature during the most inclement of winter weather: ‘There is scarcely any earthly object gives me more – I don’t know if I should call it pleasure, but something which exalts me, something which enraptures me – than to walk in the sheltered side of a wood or high plantation, in a cloudy winter day, and to hear a stormy wind howling among the trees & raving o’er the plain. – It is my best season for devotion …’ The imagery of winter desolation cast in a melancholy vein runs through the poetry of Burns as a motif for individual loss, or resignation to a person’s fate.

  1 Dr Young, R.B.

  A Prayer, in the Prospect of Death

  First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.

  O THOU unknown, Almighty Cause

  Of all my hope and fear!

  In whose dread Presence, ere an hour,

  Perhaps I must appear!

  5 If I have wander’d in those paths

  Of life I ought to shun;

  As Something, loudly, in my breast,

  Remonstrates I have done.

  Thou know’st that Thou hast formed me,

  10 With Passions wild and strong;

  And list’ning to their witching voice

  Has often led me wrong.

  Where human weakness has come short,

  Or frailty stept aside,

  15 Do Thou, ALL-GOOD, for such Thou art,

  In shades of darkness hide.

  Where with intention I have err’d,

  No other plea I have,

  But, Thou art good; and Goodness still

  20 Delighteth to forgive.

  This was almost certainly composed while the poet was at Irvine during the winter of 1781. The original title is, according to the copy in the FCB, ‘A Prayer when fainting fits and other alarming symptoms of a pleurisy or some other dangerous disorder, which indeed still threatens me, first put Nature on the alarm’. Writing to his father, 27th December, 1781, Burns revealed his gloomy illness: ‘The weakness of my nerves has so debilitated my mind that I dare not, either review past events, or look forward into futurity; for the least anxiety, or perturbation in my breast, produces most unhappy effects on my whole frame … I am quite transported at the thought that ere long, perhap
s very soon, I shall bid an eternal adieu to all the pains, & uneasiness & disquietudes of this weary life; for I assure you I am heartily tired of it’ (Letter 4). The poem is partly derived from the content of Pope’s Universal Prayer, although the form is that of the Scottish metrical psalms.

  To a Mountain Daisy

  On Turning One Down, with the Plough, in April, 1786

  First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.

  Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow’r, small

  Thou’s met me in an evil hour;

  For I maun crush amang the stoure must, among, dust

  Thy slender stem:

  5 To spare thee now is past my pow’r,

  Thou bonie gem. pretty

  Alas! it’s no thy neebor sweet, not, neighbour

  The bonie Lark, companion meet! handsome

  Bending thee ’mang the dewy weet! wet

  10 Wi’ spreckl’d breast,

  When upward-springing, blythe, to greet

  The purpling East.

  Cauld blew the bitter-biting North cold

  Upon thy early, humble birth;

  15 Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth

  Amid the storm,

  Scarce rear’d above the Parent-earth

  Thy tender form.

  The flaunting flow’rs our Gardens yield,

  20 High shelt’ring woods and wa’s maun shield; walls shall

  But thou, beneath the random bield shelter

  O’ clod or stane, turf, stone

  Adorns the histie stibble-field, dry, stubble

  Unseen, alane. alone

  25 There, in thy scanty mantle clad,

  Thy snawie bosom sun-ward spread, snow white

  Thou lifts thy unassuming head

  In humble guise;

  But now the share uptears thy bed, ploughshare/blade

  30 And low thou lies!

  Such is the fate of artless Maid,

  Sweet flow’ret of the rural shade!

  By love’s simplicity betray’d,

  And guileless trust;

  35 Till she, like thee, all soil’d, is laid

  Low i’ the dust.

  Such is the fate of simple Bard,

  On Life’s rough ocean luckless starr’d!

  Unskilful he to note the card chart

  40 Of prudent Lore, wisdom

  Till billows rage, and gales blow hard,

  And whelm him o’er!

  Such fate to suffering Worth is giv’n,

  Who long with wants and woes has striv’n,

  45 By human pride or cunning driv’n

  To Mis’ry’s brink;

  Till, wrench’d of ev’ry stay but HEAV’N,

  He, ruin’d, sink!

  Ev’n thou who mourn’st the Daisy’s fate,

  50 That fate is thine — no distant date;

  Stern Ruin’s plough-share drives elate,

  Full on thy bloom,

  Till crush’d beneath the furrow’s weight

  Shall be thy doom!

  Henry Mackenzie, a frequent kiss of death for twentieth-century critical taste, waxed as eloquently about this poem as ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’:

  I have seldom met with an image more truly pastoral than that of the lark in the second stanza. Such strokes as these mark the pencil of the poet, which delineates Nature with the precision, yet with the delicate colouring of beauty and taste. (Low, Critical Heritage, p. 69).

  Burns’s own account of the poem in a letter to John Kennedy in April 1786 seems to suggest that he had produced a mawkish poem compatible with Mackenzie’s cloying response:

  I have here … inclosed a small piece, the very latest of my productions. I am a good deal pleased with some sentiments in it myself, as they are just the native querulous feelings of a heart which, as the elegantly melting Gray says, “Melancholy has marked for her own” (Letter 27).

  Certainly this is what Daiches (pp. 154–6) believes and he is also correct in saying that the inherent danger of sentimentality in animal poetry is even more extreme when dealing with plant life. Burns (Letter 56) could certainly descend to terrible bathos in this branch of his endeavours as he not infrequently set out his sentimentally-baited traps for socially superior women: ‘Even the hoary Hawthorn twig that shot across the way, what heart at such a time, must have been interested in its welfare, and wished it to be preserved from the rudely browsing cattle, or the withering eastern Blast?’

  This poem, however, is not self-promotingly narcissistic. Nor is it a mere piece of lyric natural description as Mackenzie, probably deliberately, certainly imperceptively, remarked. It is as political as its ‘Mouse’ and ‘Louse’ companion pieces. Like the mass of men, the daisy has to eke out its dangerously exposed existence outwith the walled security of the aristocratic garden flowers. The specific analogies of the daisy with the human world are all recurrent archetypes of suffering in Burns’s imagination: the sexually violated woman; the imprudently overwhelmed poet; the Job-like, ruined but honest farmer. The poem has a dark, even apocalyptic tone partly derived from Young’s Night Thoughts, IX, ll. 167–8: ‘Stars rush; and final ruin fiercely drives/her ploughshare o’er creation!’ which Burns amends to ‘Stern Ruin’s plough share drives elate’. It is definably sentimental but in the honourable sense that the sentimental poetry of the late eighteenth century, at its best, embodies a tragically irreconcilable sense that the great Enlightenment impulse towards the recognition of all human worth will not lead to a just, fearless democratic society. In 1802, his radicalism diminished, Wordsworth wrote his To the Daisy. It is, not least in metrical form, significantly influenced by Burns’s version:

  Methinks that there abides in thee

  Some concord with humanity,

  Given to no other flower I see

  The forest through.

  To Ruin

  First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.

  All hail! inexorable lord!

  At whose destruction-breathing word,

  The mightiest empires fall!

  Thy cruel, woe-delighted train,

  5 The ministers of Grief and Pain,

  A sullen welcome, all!

  With stern-resolv’d despairing eye,

  I see each aimed dart;

  For one has cut my dearest tye,

  10 And quivers in my heart.

  Then low’ring and pouring,

  The Storm no more I dread;

  Tho’ thick’ning and black’ning

  Round my devoted head.

  15 And thou grim Pow’r, by Life abhorr’d,

  While Life a pleasure can afford,

  Oh! hear a wretch’s pray’r!

  No more I shrink appall’d, afraid;

  I court, I beg thy friendly aid,

  20 To close this scene of care!

  When shall my soul, in silent peace,

  Resign Life’s joyless day?

  My weary heart its throbbings cease,

  Cold-mould’ring in the clay?

  25 No fear more, no tear more

  To stain my lifeless face,

  Enclasped and grasped

  Within thy cold embrace!

  This was probably written in the winter of 1781–2. This melancholic work in the bob-wheel stanza of the old Scots poem The Cherry and the Slae, reveals the poet’s holistic view that a God of Nature influences both the pleasure and the woes of life from the fall of historic Empires to individual experience. It is a distinctive brush-stroke of Burns to move from universal comment to a specific incident. The hardship of eighteenth-century rural existence on a leased farm, particularly during winter periods, energises the poem. The subtext is the poet’s rejection by a lover who is believed to be Alison Begbie.

  Epistle to a Young Friend May, 1786

  First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.

  I lang hae thought, my youthfu’ friend, long have

  A Something to have sent you,

  Tho’ it should serve nae ither end no other

 
Than just a kind memento;

  5 But how the subject-theme may gang, go

  Let time and chance determine;

  Perhaps it may turn out a Sang; song

  Perhaps, turn out a Sermon.

  Ye’ll try the world soon, my lad;

  10 And, ANDREW dear believe me,

  Ye’ll find mankind an unco squad, strange crowd

  And muckle they may grieve ye: much

  For care and trouble set your thought,

  Ev’n when your end’s attained;

  15 And a’ your views may come to nought,

  Where ev’ry nerve is strained.

  I’ll no say, men are villains a’:

  The real, harden’d wicked,

  Wha hae nae check but human law, who have no

  20 Are to a few restricked; restricted

  But, Och, mankind are unco weak very

  An’ little to be trusted;

  If Self the wavering balance shake,

  It’s rarely right adjusted!

  25 Yet they wha fa’ in Fortune’s strife, who fall

  Their fate we should na censure, not

  For still, th’ important end of life

  They equally may answer:

  A man may hae an honest heart, have

  30 Tho’ Poortith hourly stare him; poverty, look over him

  A man may tak a neebor’s part, neighbour’s

  Yet hae nae cash to spare him. have no

  Ay free, aff han’, your story tell, always, off hand/casual

  When wi’ a bosom crony; close friend

  35 But still keep something to yoursel

  Ye scarcely tell to ony: any

  Conceal yoursel as weel’s ye can well as

  Frae critical dissection: from

  But keek thro’ ev’ry other man look