The Canongate Burns
Page 35
‘Where Guilt and poor Misfortune pine!
‘Guilt, erring Man, relenting view!
‘But shall thy legal rage pursue
85 ‘The Wretch, already crushed low
‘By cruel Fortune’s undeservèd blow?
‘Affliction’s sons are brothers in distress;
‘A Brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss!’
I heard nae mair, for Chanticleer no more
90 Shook off the pouthery snaw, powdery snow
And hail’d the morning with a cheer,
A cottage-rousing craw. crow
But deep this truth impress’d my mind —
Thro’ all His works abroad,
95 The heart benevolent and kind
The most resembles GOD.
Given that in successful poetry form and content are always mutually expressive, this poem has been seen as a puzzling failure because of its apparently disparate elements. Beginning with an epigraph from King Lear, the poem moves to five vernacular stanzas in the ‘Habbie Simpson’ form brilliantly detailing the impact of a stormy winter night on the exposed beasts and birds. We then, in standard English, having another linking ‘Habbie Simpson’ stanza which introduces an internal voice which, in the form of a Pindaric Ode, presents a hellish vision of a society overwhelmed by corruption and predatory sexuality manifest in the relation of the aristocratic rich to the destitute poor. Finally, the poem switches back to two ‘Habbie Simpson’ vernacular stanzas which reassuringly suggest the whole thing should be viewed as a dream from which we have wakened to find ourselves in the presence of a benevolent God.
On the face of it this seems a ‘mixtie maxie’ well beyond The Brigs of Ayr. However, the thread of King Lear leads us through this apparent maze. In the Kilmarnock edition Burns has already used Shakespearean allusion with telling effect in, for example, A Dream/ Henry IV and Epistle to a Young Friend/Hamlet. Despite making no comment on the Lear epigraph Kinsley picks up this and another bitter Shakespearean echo in ll. 37–43 of A Winter Night:
Blow, blow ye Winds, &c. Cf. King Lear, III. ii, 1–9, ‘Blow windes … all germaines spill at one/That makes ingrateful Man; the song in As You Like It, II. vii:
Blow, blow, thou winter winde,
Thou art not so unkinde, as mans ingratitude …
Freize, freize, thou bitter skie that does not
Bight so night as benefitts forgot …
Unfortunately, however, Kinsley, despite his enormous erudition expressed in the allusory density he brings to Burns’s poetry, consistently identifies Burns’s relationship to other writers in an apolitical way. In the 1790s, King Lear was the most politically loaded and relevant of Shakespeare’s plays. First, it was, given a contemporarily, if transiently, mad king on the throne, another mad one could not be provocatively put on stage. Second, what is revealed in King Lear is the utter failure of an allegedly patriarchal ruling class so demonically selfish that, in a hellish, a hallucinatory night scene, the terrible condition of the common people is revealed in their uprooted homelessness, naked hunger and alienated grief bordering on madness.
King Lear, at the heart of Shakespeare’s darkness, reveals what happens when ‘natural’ man becomes a creature of unbridled predatory, libidinous appetites. In Burns’s ‘night’ poem the animals are, as always, empathetically treated, and, unlike the wolfish humanity of the Pindaric section, even the barn-robbing vernacular fox is seen more as victim than villain.
It is further characteristic of Kinsley that having not explored this sort of poetic terrain, he further denies such an obvious political reading by means of arguments based on aesthetic deficiency. He describes this particular instance of his sense of Burns’s chronic general incapacity to write in the Pindaric form thus:
Burns’s strophes have rhythmical strength—though that is not always sustained—rather than exalted energy; his images are too predictable, his diction too conventional. The success of the opening scene, in his familiar style … only emphasized his failure to rise above the commonplace in the Pindaric part.
Two things need to be said about this. First, if Burns failed with the Pindaric Ode he was not alone in this. As Geoffrey Hartman noted: ‘The sublime or greater or Pindaric ode flourished in the eighteenth century like a turgid weed.’ (The Fate of Reading (Chicago: 1975), p. 138.) The criticism levelled at Burns by Kinsley could be easily replicated dealing with Coleridge’s dissident poetry of the 1790s with its terminal, apocalyptic sense of communal breakdown due to established economic, military violence unchecked by either the duty or compassion of the ruling class.
Kinsley has no patience with Burns’s radically dissenting poetry because he is wilfully ignorant of its radical context. He makes little of Burns’s multiple connections with other radical writers of the period or, as in the case of Dr Walcot (Peter Pindar), a still deeply underestimated political satirist, he dismisses him, quite ignoring Burns’s own high evaluation of him (Letter 578) with a crass Boswellian put-down: ‘a contemptible scribbler (who), having disgraced and deserted the clerical character … picks up in London a scanty livelihood by scurrilous lampoons under a feigned name (Vol. III p. 1423)’. Missing the unjustly forgotten, if lesser, radical writers, Kinsley compounds his mistake by not perceiving how close the now canonical Romantic poets were in theme and form to Burns in the mid-1790s. As well as the now better-understood complexity of Wordsworth’s relationship to Burns, we should contemplate the proximity of Coleridge to Burns as political satirist and commentator (Perry, as noted, wanted them both on the London staff of The Morning Chronicle) and poet of the mid-1790s’ radical apocalypse. Consider, for example, Coleridge’s Fire, Famine, and Slaughter with its ferocious, catastrophic sense of the consequences of the unnamed Pitt’s policies in Ireland and against the French Revolution by supporting the monarchists in the terrible civil war raging in the Vendé e. This poem, written the year after Burns’s death, is not subjective hysteria but at the core of a national nightmare of unrewarded blood, toil and tears. Coleridge was horrified by the Scottish sedition trials of 1793–4 and hated and feared ‘brazen-faced’ Dundas, but it was Pitt (‘Letters four do form his name’) for whom, in this poem, he reserved his most savage assault:
Slau. Letters four do form his name—And who sent you?
Both. The same! the same!
Slau. He came by stealth, and unlocked my den,
And I have drunk the blood since then
Of thrice three hundred thousand men.
Both. Who bade you do’t?
Slau. The same! the same!
Letters four do form his name.
He let me loose, and cried Halloo!
To him alone the praise is due.
Fam. Thanks, sister, thanks! the men have bled,
Their wives and their children faint for bread.
I stood in a swampy field of battle;
With bones and skulls I made a rattle,
To frighten the wolf and carrion-crow
And the homeless dog—but they would not go.
So off I flew: for how could I bear
To see them gorge their dainty fare?
I heard a groan and a peevish squall,
And through the chink of a cottage-wall—
Can you guess what I saw there?
Both. Whisper it, sister! in our ear.
Fam. A baby beat its dying mother:
I had starved the one and was starving the other!
Both. Who bade you do’t?
Fam. The same! the same!
Letters four do form his name.
He let me loose, and cried, Halloo!
To him alone the praise is due.
Fire. Sisters! I from Ireland came!
Hedge and corn-fields all on flame,
I triumph’d o’er the setting sun!
And all the while the work was done,
On as I strode with my huge strides,
I flung back my head and I held my sides,
It was so rare
a piece of fun
To see the sweltered cattle run
With uncouth gallop through the night,
Scared by the light of his own blazing cot
Was many a naked Rebel shot:
The house-stream met the flame and hissed,
While crash! fell in the roof, I wist,
On some of those old bed-rid nurses,
That deal in discontent and curses.
Both. Who bade you do’t?
Fire. The same! the same!
Letters four do spell his name.
He let me loose, and cried Halloo!
To him alone the praise is due.
All. He let us loose, and cried Halloo!
How shall we yield him honour due?
Fam. Wisdom comes with lack of food.
I’ll gnaw, I’ll gnaw the multitude,
Till the cup of rage o’erbrim:
They shall seize him and his brood—
Slau. They shall tear him limb from limb!
Fire. O thankless beldames and untrue!
And this is all that you can do
For him, who did so much for you?
Ninety months he, by my troth!
Hath richly catered for you both;
And in an hour would you repay
An eight years’ work?—Away! away!
I alone am faithful! I
Cling to him everlastingly.
As noted, the instigator of this barbarism (‘Letters four do form his name’) is William Pitt. As we shall see in the Anonymous & Pseudonymous section, the multiple consequences of Pitt’s warmongering were to become also the objects of Burns’s satire in the 1790s. Not even he was, however, prepared to speak so directly about Irish matters as Coleridge. Ireland was, in fact, the epicentre of the intended radical insurrection of the 1790s, trying and failing to provoke similar militant resistance in England and Scotland. In 1798 30,000 dissident Irish were to pay with their lives at Wicklow. (See Roger Wells, Insurrection: The British Experience, 1795–1803 (Gloucester: 1983).)
Like Burns, Coleridge’s poetry is impregnated with Biblical allusion; not least Revelations. Like Burns he also saw in King Lear another text which strengthened his sense of apocalypse now. As he wrote of III.iv., Lear’s despair and growing madness in the storm:
What a world’s convention of agonies! Surely never was such a scene conceived before or since. Take it but as a picture for the eye only, it is more terrific than any a Michelangelo inspired by a Dante could have conceived, and none but a Michelangelo could have executed. Or let it have been uttered to the blind, the howlings of convulsed nature would seem converted into the voice of conscious humanity.
The ‘howlings of convulsed nature’ is what Fire, Famine and Slaughter, A Winter Night and Guilt and Sorrow; or Incidents upon Salisbury Plain are about. Further, these convulsions are elemental and political. Writing to John Thelwall, one of the chief radicals of the day and a keen enthusiast for Burns’s poetry, Coleridge remarked that he would send him Guilt and Sorrow from the as yet unknown Wordsworth who ‘thinks that the lines from 364 to 375 & from 403 to 428 the best in the Volume—indeed worth all the rest— And this man is a Republican & at least a Semi-atheist.—’ Indeed the poem is so radical that it was not published in full till 1842. Its dreadful nightscape is replete with the economically uprooted and militarily press-ganged, in Hazlitt’s bitter term, the redundant part of the population. Mary Jacobus had found echoes of King Lear in it but it is surely a Lear partly mediated through Burns’s A Winter’s Night; a world where animals but not men have a place to lay their heads. Even more singular is Wordsworth’s evolution of Burns’s theme of guilt in the poem: ‘Think on the dungeon’s grim confine … By cruel Fortune’s undeserved blow?’
A final fact about this interpretation of A Winter’s Night is that Burns chose, as we shall see in the Anonymous & Pseudonymous section in The Gentleman’s Magazine for August 1794, to update the poem and print it under a new title, Humanity: An Ode. It is partially identified by his initials and is stripped of its vernacular opening and its falsely consolatory vernacular ending with some other significant changes to the intervening Pindaric poem. Burns must have felt its scream of rage even more politically relevant to 1794 than to 1787. Thus, ironically, the poem which was arguably its partial genesis, reappears the year following The Female Vagrant section of Guilt and Sorrow.
Stanzas Written in Prospect of Death
First published in the Edinburgh edition, 1787.
Why am I loth to leave this earthly scene?
Have I so found it full of pleasing charms?
Some drops of joy with draughts of ill between;
Some gleams of sunshine mid renewing storms:
5 Is it departing pangs my soul alarms?
Or Death’s unlovely, dreary, dark abode?
For guilt, for guilt, my terrors are in arms;
I tremble to approach an angry GOD,
And justly smart beneath his sin-avenging rod.
10 Fain would I say, ‘Forgive my foul offence!’
Fain promise never more to disobey;
But, should my Author health again dispense,
Again I might desert fair Virtue’s way;
Again in Folly’s path might go astray;
15 Again exalt the brute and sink the man;
Then how should I for Heavenly Mercy pray,
Who act so counter Heavenly Mercy’s plan?
Who sin so oft have mourn’d, yet to temptation ran?
O Thou, Great Governor of all below! —
20 If I may dare a lifted eye to Thee,
Thy nod can make the tempest cease to blow,
Or still the tumult of the raging sea:
With that controuling pow’r assist ev’n me,
Those headlong furious passions to confine;
25 For all unfit I feel my pow’rs to be,
To rule their torrent in th’ allowed line;
O, aid me with Thy help, Omnipotence Divine!
The title is normally Stanzas on the Same Occasion, to follow A Prayer, in the Prospect of Death. Composition is thus during the same period, or as the poet was recuperating from illness. The Stair Ms. has the title ‘Misgivings of Despondency on the Approach of the Monarch of the Grave’. It is clearly evident in these early illness-inspired works that Burns employed his introspective thoughts in trying to comprehend the tensions between his own impulsive character traits and what he deemed the proper religious behaviour expected in the wider society. It is hard to disagree with Daiches that this and the following four poems, ‘show Burns writing in conventional neo-classic English with no spark of genius or originality’ (p. 218). He may have retrieved these very early, orthodoxly pious poems simply to pad out the Edinburgh edition. Or, it may have been as cover against the persistent complaints of the Hugh Blairites against his, at best, deeply unorthodox sallies into Old Testement exegesis.
Prayer: O Thou Dread Power
Lying at a Reverend Friend’s House one Night, the author left the following verses in the room where he slept: -
First printed in the Edinburgh edition, 1787.
O Thou dread Pow’r, who reign’st above!
I know Thou wilt me hear;
When for this scene of peace and love,
I make my pray’r sincere.
5 The hoary Sire — the mortal stroke,
Long, long be pleas’d to spare:
To bless his little filial flock,
And show what good men are.
She, who her lovely Offspring eyes
10 With tender hopes and fears,
O bless her with a Mother’s joys,
But spare a Mother’s tears!
Their hope, their stay, their darling youth,
In manhood’s dawning blush;
15 Bless him, Thou God of love and truth,
Up to a Parent’s wish.
The beauteous, seraph Sister-band,
With earnest tears I pray,
Thou know�
��st the snares on every hand,
20 Guide Thou their steps alway.
When soon or late they reach that coast,
O’er Life’s rough ocean driven,
May they rejoice, no wand’rer lost,
A Family in Heaven!
As the subtitle records, the poet composed and left these verses in the home of the Rev. Dr George Lawrie (1722–99), who was minister at Loudon, near Galston (by Kilmarnock). Currie quotes confirmation of this (Vol. III, p. 386) from Gilbert Burns who states that his brother first heard the spinnet played at Dr Lawrie’s home when he visited there a few months after the publication of the Kilmarnock edition in the Autumn of 1786. George Lawrie’s son Archibald became a friend of Burns.
Paraphrase of the First Psalm
First printed in the Edinburgh edition, 1787.
The man, in life wherever plac’d,
Hath happiness in store,
Who walks not in the wicked’s way,
Nor learns their guilty lore!
5 Nor from the seat of scornful Pride
Casts forth his eyes abroad,
But with humility and awe
Still walks before his GOD.
That Man shall flourish like the trees
10 Which by the streamlets grow;
The fruitful top is spread on high,
And firm the root below.
But he whose blossom buds in guilt
Shall to the ground be cast,
15 And like the rootless stubble tost
Before the sweeping blast.
For why? that GOD the good adore
Hath giv’n them peace and rest,
But hath decreed that wicked men
20 Shall ne’er be truly blest.
A summation of the sentiments in the First Psalm placed in rhyme, this work is generally dated from the 1781–2 period. While mainly employing Biblical language, Burns neatly employs some 18th century phraseology to give the verses a contemporary context. The terms ‘guilty lore’, ‘scornful pride’, ‘stubble’, ‘sweeping blast’ and ‘truly blest’ are not found in the original Psalm.