by Robert Burns
L.7 again echoes Burns’s obsession with the sufferings and response of Job. ‘Amalthea’s horn’ (l. 30) was the horn of Zeus’s nurse-goat which became a cornucopia unlike the more probably worn cuckold horns of the married (Hymen is the goddess of marriage) poet. Ll. 39–40 brilliantly extend a medical joke probably triggered by Pope’s reference in Imitations of Horace, Ep.II.ii, l. 70 where he refers to James Monro, the physician of Bedlam: ‘Sure I should want Care of ten Munroes’. Burns’s Monro is Alexander Munro (1733–1817) part of a great Edinburgh medical dynasty who took up that city’s first chair in surgery in 1777 in a world of amputation without anaesthetics.
1 In adapted form, lines 17–36 are found erroneously attributed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the Oxford edition of Coleridge, under the Latin title ‘Habent Sua Fata – Poetae’. See p. 587, Appendix 1, ‘First Drafts, Early Versions’. The lines were found in a Coleridge letter, dated January 1796. They were first ascribed to Coleridge in Cottle’s Early Recollections (1839). Coleridge evidently identified strongly with Burns’s view on critics and the fate of poets. It is surely a compliment to Burns’s ability to write verse in English that this piece has been mistakenly attributed to one of England’s finest poets.
Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn
First printed in the Edinburgh edition, 1793.
The wind blew hollow frae the hills, from
By fits the sun’s departing beam
Look’d on the fading yellow woods
That wav’d o’er Lugar’s winding stream;
5 Beneath a craigy steep, a Bard, craggy precipice
Laden with years, and meikle pain, much
In loud lament bewail’d his lord,
Whom Death had all untimely ta’en. taken
He lean’d him to an ancient aik, oak
10 Whose trunk was mould’ring down with years;
His locks were bleached white with time,
His hoary cheek was wet wi’ tears;
And as he touch’d his trembling harp,
And as he tun’d his doleful sang, song
15 The winds, lamenting thro’ their caves,
To echo bore the notes alang! along
‘Ye scatter’d birds that faintly sing
The reliques of the vernal quire;
Ye woods that shed on a’ the winds
20 The honours of the aged year!
A few short months, and glad and gay,
Again ye’ll charm the ear and e’e; eye
But nocht in all revolving time nothing
Can gladness bring again to me.
25 ‘I am a bending aged tree,
That long has stood the wind and rain;
But now has come a cruel blast,
And my last hold of earth is gane: gone
Nae leaf o’ mine shall greet the spring, no
30 Nae simmer sun exalt my bloom; no
But I maun lie before the storm, must
And ithers plant them in my room. others
‘I’ve seen sae monie changefu’ years, so many
On earth I am a stranger grown:
35 I wander in the ways of men,
Alike unknowing and unknown:
Unheard, unpitied, unreliev’d,
I bear alane my lade o’ care, alone, load
For silent, low, on beds of dust,
40 Lie a’ that would my sorrows share. all
‘And last (the sum of a’ my griefs!) all
My noble master lies in clay;
The flower amang our barons bold, among
His country’s pride, his country’s stay:
45 In weary being now I pine,
For a’ the life of life is dead,
And hope has left my aged ken, orbit
On forward wing for ever fled.
‘Awake thy last sad voice, my harp!
50 The voice of woe and wild despair!
Awake! resound thy latest lay —
Then sleep in silence evermair! evermore
And thou, my last, best, only friend,
That fillest an untimely tomb,
55 Accept this tribute from the Bard
Thou brought from Fortune’s mirkest gloom. darkest
‘In Poverty’s low barren vale,
Thick mists, obscure, involv’d me round;
Though oft I turn’d the wistful eye,
60 Nae ray of fame was to be found: no
Thou found’st me, like the morning sun
That melts the fogs in limpid air,
The friendless Bard and rustic song
Became alike thy fostering care.
65 ‘O why has Worth so short a date?
While villains ripen grey with time;
Must thou, the noble, gen’rous, great,
Fall in bold manhood’s hardy prime!
Why did I live to see that day?
70 A day to me so full of woe!
O had I met the mortal shaft
Which laid my benefactor low!
‘The bridegroom may forget the bride,
Was made his wedded wife yestreen; yesterday evening
75 The monarch may forget the crown
That on his head an hour has been;
The mother may forget the child
That smiles sae sweetly on her knee; so
But I’ll remember thee, Glencairn,
80 And a’ that thou hast done for me!’
James Cunningham (1748–91), 14th Earl of Glencairn was Burns’s most important actual and potential patron. His premature death, dying at Falmouth on 30th January, 1791, after, like Henry Fielding, an unsuccessful winter in the Portuguese sun to regain his health, was a blow from which Burns never recovered. Burns went into deep mourning and for the Kilmarnock funeral proposed to ‘cross the country and steal among the croud, to pay a tear to the last sight of my ever-revered Benefactor’ (Letters 438, 439 467).
Despite De Quincey’s scepticism about all Burns’s patrons, Glencairn does seem to have been of tangible support. The letter of introduction that Burns carried to Edinburgh from Dalrymple of Orangefield, his wife was the Earl’s sister, was sufficient to persuade Glencairn, an enthusiast for the Kilmarnock edition, that his Ayrshire compatriot deserved his influential support. Due to Glencairn, the aristocratic Caledonian Hunt subscribed to a man, making the first Edinburgh edition a runaway success.
There is a particular warmth in the three extant letters from Burns to Glencairn. Like Lord Daer, Glencairn appears to have been one of those very few Whig Friends of the People, who, theoretically politically sympathetic, were not driven by condescending egotism and anti-Tory ambition and not real commitment to the common people. Unlike, say, the Riddells, there is little ambivalence in Burns towards Glencairn as the following anecdote from Kinsley reveals:
Glencairn was the only nobleman who offended the poet’s social sensibilities without incurring irrational abuse. On one occasion in Edinburgh, says Burns, he showed ‘engrossing attention … to the only blockhead at table, as there was none but his Lordship, the Dunderpate and myself, that I was within half a point of throwing down my gage of contemptuous defiance, but he shook my hand and looked so benevolently good at parting – God bless him! Though I should never see him more, I shall love him until my dying day! I am pleased to think I am so capable of throes of gratitude, as I am miserably deficient in some other virtues’ (2CPB, p. 5).
It is, of course, absolutely typical of Kinsley that satirical dissent from Burns’s socially inferior position always tends to the irrational. Kinsley had neither adequate knowledge nor sympathy for the radical politics of the late eighteenth century. Thus he does not bring to our attention the fact that Glencairn was a Foxite, supporting the India Bill, or, more crucially, that he possibly belonged to that still largely submerged radical network so that the spy-administrator, Home Office Under-Secretary Spottiswood, dared to ‘send Sheriffs against… such an august personage as the Earl of Glencairn’ (See Robert Thornton’s William Maxwell to Robert Burns, John
Donald, Edinburgh: 1979, p. 65).
Like his Lament for Mary, Queen of Scots, the regular ballad-like metre (two sets of long-line couplets broken into tetrameters) is formally the reverse of MacPherson’s Ossianic epic. The tone and language of the poem, including Biblical echoes, as Kinsley notes, to Ecclesiastes and Job, is, however, deliberately pervaded by the tone and verbal imagery of that work. To some extent, though the poem grows increasingly personal, this simultaneously distances Burns from his pain and invokes enormous Ossianic power of a world irretrievably lost and existing only in Bardic lament.
Lines, Sent to Sir John Whiteford
with the Foregoing Poem
First printed in the Edinburgh edition, 1793.
Thou, who thy honour as thy God rever’st,
Who, save thy mind’s reproach, nought earthly fear’st,
To thee this votive off’ring I impart,
The tearful tribute of a broken heart.
The Friend thou valued’st, I the Patron lov’d;
His worth, his honour, all the world approv’d.
We’ll mourn till we too go as he has gone,
And tread the shadowy path to that dark world unknown.
Sir John Whitefoord (1734–1803) was a friend of James Cunningham, Earl of Glencairn. Burns composed these brief lines in October 1791. Whitefoord’s reply, written from Maybole, 16th October 1791, in acknowledgement of the Lament and lines addressed to himself, remarked ‘Let us cherish this hope for our departed friend, and moderate our grief for that loss we have sustained, knowing he cannot come to us, but we may go to him’. (See Scott Douglas’s edition, Vol. I, p. 348 headnote.)
Prose Introduction to Tam o’ Shanter
Prompted by the antiquarian Francis Grose, a friend of Robert Riddell of Glenriddell, Burns was asked to provide any ghost stories concerning Alloway church that might be utilised in Francis Grose’s forthcoming book on Scottish antiquities. The result was a prose recollection, eventually honed into the comic-epic masterpiece, Tam o’Shanter. The poet’s remarkable ability to translate prose into poetry is apparent in examining his comments to Grose and because they provide the genesis of the poem, we give them here as introduction:
Among the many Witch Stories I have heard relating to Alloway Kirk, I distinctly remember two or three. Upon a stormy night, amid whirling squalls of wind and bitter blasts of hail, in short on such a night as the devil would chuse to take the air in, a farmer or farmer’s servant was plodding and plashing homeward with his plough-iron on his shoulder, having been getting some repairs on them at a neighbouring smithy. His way lay by the Kirk of Aloway, and being on the anxious look-out in approaching a place so well known to be a favourite haunt of the devil and the devil’s friends and emissaries, he was struck aghast by discovering through the horrors of the storm and stormy night, a light, which on his nearer approach, plainly shewed itself to proceed from the haunted edifice. Whether he had been fortified from above on his devout supplication, as is customary with people when they suspect the immediate presence of Satan; or whether, according to another custom, he had got courageously drunk at the smithy, I will not pretend to determine; but so it was that he ventured to go up to, nay into the very kirk. As good luck would have it, his temerity came off unpunished. The members of the infernal junto were all out on some midnight business or other, and he saw nothing but a kind of kettle or caldron, depending from the roof, over the fire, simmering some heads of unchristened children, limbs of executed malefactors, &c. for the business of the night. It was, in for a penny in for a pound, with the honest ploughman: so without ceremony he unhooked the caldron from off the fire, and pouring out the damnable ingredients, inverted it on his head, and carried it fairly home, where it remained long in the family a living evidence of the truth of the story.
Another story which I can prove to be equally authentic was as follows. On a market day in the town of Ayr, a farmer from Carrick, and consequently whose way lay by the very gate of Alloway Kirk-yard in order to cross the river Doon at the old bridge, which is about two or three hundred yards further on than the said gate, had been detained by his business, till by the time he reached Alloway, it was the wizard hour, between night and morning. Though he was terrified, with a blaze streaming from the kirk, yet as it is a well-known fact that to turn back on these occasions is running by far the greatest risk of mischief, he prudently advanced on his road. When he had reached the gate of the kirk-yard, he was surprised and entertained, through the ribs and arches of an old gothic window which still faces the highway, to see a dance of witches merrily footing it round their old sooty blackguard master, who was keeping them alive with the powers of his bag-pipe. The farmer stopping his horse to observe them a little, could plainly descry the faces of many old women of his acquaintance and neighbourhood. How the gentleman was dressed, tradition does not say; but the ladies were all in their smocks: and one of them happening unluckily to have a smock which was considerably too short to answer all the purpose of that piece of dress, our farmer was so tickled that he involuntarily burst out, with a loud laugh, ‘Well luppen Maggy wi the short sark!’ and recollecting himself, instantly spurred his horse to the top of his speed. I need not mention the universal known fact, that no diabolical power can pursue you beyond the middle of a running stream. Lucky it was for the poor farmer that the river Doon was so near, for notwithstanding the speed of his horse, which was a good one, against the odds he reached the middle of the arch of the bridge, and consequently the middle of the stream, the pursuing, vengeful, hags, were so close at his heels, that one of them actually sprung to seize him; but it was too late, nothing was on her side of the stream but the horse’s tail, which immediately gave way to her infernal grip, as if blasted by a stroke of lightning; but the farmer was beyond her reach. However, the unsightly, tailless condition of the vigorous steed was to the last hour of the noble creature ‘s life, an awful warning to the Carrick farmers, not to stay too late in Ayr markets …. (Letter 401).
Tam o’ Shanter: A Tale
First printed in The Edinburgh Herald, 18th March, 1791; then The Edinburgh Magazine, March 1791; followed by publication in Francis Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland, Vol. II, April 1791 before inclusion in the Edinburgh edition, 1793.
Of Brownyis and of Bogillis full is this Buke.
GAWIN DOUGLAS.
When chapman billies leave the street, pedlar friends
And drouthy neebors, neebors meet, thirsty neighbours
As market-days are wearing late,
An’ folk begin to tak the gate; road/go home
5 While we sit bousing at the nappy, drinking, ale
And getting fou and unco happy, full/drunk, mighty
We think na on the lang Scots miles, not, long
The mosses, waters, slaps, and styles, bogs, pools, stiles
That lie between us and our hame, home
10 Whare sits our sulky sullen dame, where
Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.
This truth fand honest Tam o’ Shanter, found
As he frae Ayr ae night did canter, from, one
15 (Auld Ayr, wham ne’er a town surpasses who/that
For honest men and bonie lasses). pretty
O Tam! had’st thou but been sae wise, so
As taen thy ain wife Kate’s advice! taken, own
She tauld thee weel thou was a skellum, told, well, rogue
20 A blethering, blustering, drunken blellum; chattering, babbling, idle talker
That frae November till October, from
Ae market-day thou was nae sober; one, not
That ilka melder, wi’ the miller, every meal grinding
Thou sat as lang as thou had siller; long, money
25 That ev’ry naig was ca’d a shoe on, horse, shod
The smith and thee gat roaring fou on; got, full/drunk
That at the Lord’s house, even on Sunday,
Thou drank wi’ Kirkton
Jean till Monday.
She prophesied that late or soon,
30 Thou would be found deep drown’d in Doon;
Or catch’d wi’ warlocks in the mirk, wizards, dark
By Alloway’s auld, haunted kirk. old
Ah, gentle dames! it gars me greet, makes, weep
To think how mony counsels sweet, many
35 How mony lengthen’d, sage advices, many
The husband frae the wife despises! from
But to our tale: — Ae market-night, one
Tam had got planted unco right; mighty
Fast by an ingle, bleezing finely, fire, blazing
40 Wi’ reaming swats, that drank divinely foaming ale
And at his elbow, Souter Johnny, cobbler
His ancient, trusty, drouthy crony; drinking pal
Tam lo’ed him like a very brither — loved, brother
They had been fou for weeks thegither! full/drunk, together
45 The night drave on wi’ sangs and clatter drove, songs, chat
And ay the ale was growing better:
