The Canongate Burns

by Robert Burns

  10 To rugged rocks, where no soft verdure grows,

  While climes more grateful court the tuneful string,

  And point to vales of pleasure and repose?

  Haply thou lov’st to soothe th’ afflicting smart

  That tears the breast, by misery doom’d to mourn;

  15 To gild the gloom around the victim’s heart;

  Or bend with pity o’er the patriot’s urn.

  Or haply, where beneath the iron hand

  Of stern Oppression, youth’s fair flow’rets fade,

  Kindly, with Sympathy’s endearing band,

  20 And bright-ey’d Hope, thou cheer’st the dungeon’s shade.

  For him, who warm’d by Freedom’s genial fire,

  With soul unfetter’d, drags the Despot’s chain,

  Perhaps thy hand attunes the living lyre

  To soothe his woes by music’s magic strain.

  25 And thou, gay Fancy, bless his languid hours!

  Each flattering phantom let thy care bestow;

  To strew his lonely path with fairy flowers,

  And pluck the noxious nettles as they grow.

  Say (and, ye Powers of Truth, accordant join!)

  30 ‘The time will come — that Fate has fix’d the doom —

  ‘The Friends of suffering virtue shall combine,

  ‘And hurl each blood-stained Despot to the tomb!’

  Lysander.

  This appears in the Edinburgh Gazetteer a few weeks after the second Ghost of Bruce. The subject of the lament is the injustice of the transportation sentences to Botany Bay served upon the radical lawyer Thomas Muir and the Rev. Fysche Palmer on charges of sedition. The theme of the lament is the spirit of ‘Freedom’ departing Scotland in sorrow, but that the essential spirit of Scottish poetry, incarnated in Burns himself, gives them constant succour. This is in harmony with the bard’s plaintive language, ‘Where is the soul of freedom fled? / Immingled with the mighty dead’ from the Ode to General Washington on His Birthday, written shortly after The Scotian Muse. The title is echoed in the first line of To Miss Graham of Fintry by Burns, ‘Here, where the Scottish Muse immortal lives’. The language of this work is found in many verses by Burns, such as Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson, ‘Where haply, Pity strays forlorn’; and in A Dedication to Gavin Hamilton, ‘The last, sad mournful rites bestow’. The lamentation is similar to On the Death of Lord President Dundas, ‘Sad to your sympathetic glooms I fly’ where the expression ‘grim Oppression’ is also found. There are other echoes in Burns’s Elegy on the Death of Sir James Hunter-Blair, ‘I saw fair Freedom’s blossoms richly blow’, and ‘Her form majestic droop’d in pensive woe’, which compare to the Scotian Muses’s ‘She saw fair Genius fly his native shade’. In The Scotian Muse the description an ‘iron hand / Of stern Oppression’ (ll. 17–18) is echoed in A Winter Night, ‘See stern Oppression’s iron grip’. L. 15’s ‘gild the gloom’ is also found in Burns’s The Lament. While it may be argued that these similarities are the result of contemporary standardised elegiac language, the high number of Miltonic lexical similarities point to Burns’s hand. As in the Gazetteer ‘Bruce’ poems, this is absolutely the only Scottish published radical poetry derived from high Miltonic style.

  There is, however, in this poem and the two rediscovered Bruce poems a similar pattern of a sense of the nightmare darkness of oppression before the final dawn of freedom. This is very similar to the patttern found in Shelley’s response to the terrible events of 1819. Compare, for example, these stanzas from The Revolt of Islam, at the end of Canto ix:

  The seeds are sleeping in the soil: meanwhile

  The Tyrant peoples dungeons with his prey,

  Pale victims on the guarded scaffold smile

  Because they cannot speak; and, day by day,

  5 The moon of wasting Science wanes away

  Among her stars, and in that darkness vast

  The sons of earth to their foul idols pray,

  And gray Priests triumph, and like blight or blast

  A shade of selfish care o’er human looks is cast.

  10 This is the winter of the world; – and here

  We die, even as the winds of Autumn fade,

  Expiring in the frore and foggy air. —

  Behold! Spring comes, though we must pass, who made

  The promise of its birth, — even as the shade

  15 Which from our death, as from a mountain, flings

  The future, a broad sunrise; thus arrayed

  As with the plumes of overshadowing wings,

  From its dark gulf of chains, Earth like an eagle springs.

  The pen-name Lysander (echoing Sylvander?) may well be derived from Burns’s early schooling. As Liam McIlvanney’s forthcoming The Radical Burns will show, Burns’s school-reader, an anthology of liberal sentiment, Masson’s Collection of Prose and Verse from the Best English Authors for the Use of School had both a seminal and persistent influence on Burns. Lysander features in the book as an exemplary English gentleman of fine feeling and good works.

  New Song or A Wet Day at Walmer Castle

  First published in The Morning Chronicle, 9th September, 1793

  O! Willy is a wanton wag, reckless joker

  The blythest lad that ere I saw

  And has so well the gift of gab, conversation

  He makes John Bull his purse-strings draw. the British public

  5 He can armies raise and navies,

  He can venture on a war;

  Men and money how he levies —

  His like is neither near nor far.

  For Catskins when he went to fight,

  10 Of insults offer’d loud did bawl,

  And honest John, who thought him right, John Bull

  At last agreed to pay for all.

  But Willy then was in a passion,

  Swore he’d give John, Nootka Sound;

  15 Yet by his fam’d Negotiation

  John got ne’er an inch of ground.1

  With Russia then he would be fighting,

  For Oczakow, to please the Turks;

  But John not much in war delighting,

  20 Fox soon exposed his humbug works.2

  For Willy’s Plans are always droll,

  Nor saw he Poland in his map;

  All Liberty from Pole to Pole,

  He threw in Kate’s voracious lap.3

  25 And now he’s gone to war with France,4

  Where men and money he must send:

  In short he leads John such a dance,

  That God knows when his wars may end.

  From East to West, from South to North,

  30 O’er all Europe the sword he’ll draw,

  And not content, he’ll still hold forth,

  And quarrel with America.5

  As he can drink, and not be drunk,

  As he can fight, and not be slain,

  35 As he can speak and strike the trunk,

  That never dar’d to strike again;

  Then what cares he for thousands lost,

  Or what cares he for thousands slain?

  What cares he what wars may cost,

  40 For Widows tears, or Mother’s pain!

  And so for Sport he’s gone to Dover,

  With D[undas], R[eeves], and L[ong],6

  Tho’ bad at dashing into cover,

  They say he can do nothing wrong.

  45 And they’re a set of wanton wags, reckless jokers

  The blythest lads that e’er we saw;

  While o’er their bottle Harry brags,

  That honest John must pay for a’. all

  These footnotes are derived from Professor Lucylle Werkmeister who first attributed the song to Burns in her seminal essay Robert Burns and the London Daily Press, published in Modern Philology (1966). Werkmeister explains the appearance of the poem:

  In September, 1793, Burns reminded George Thomson: ‘For Willie was a wanton wag’ – you have a song made on purpose,

  also by Hamilton, whi
ch you will find in Ramsay’s [Tea-table] Miscellany, beginning ‘Willy, ne’er enquire what end’. Supposedly Burns did not intend to write such a ‘song’ himself, and yet there is a political version of it in The Morning Chronicle of September 9 1793, which was certainly not provided by any of the Chronicle’s usual contributors. The subject is sinecures and wars, and ‘Willy’ is the Prime Minister, William Pitt. In August 1792, Pitt had made himself Lord Warden and Admiral of the Cinque Ports and Governor of Dover Castle … on August 27 he and his intimate, Henry (‘Harry’) Dundas, Secretary of State for the Home Department, had gone to Dover to take possession of Walmer Castle. There they had remained for several ‘wet’ days, both of them being addicted to port wine. Since this was the choicest of the sinecures, assuring the holder of six country houses and an income of £4000 a year for life, Pitt’s seizure of it was still a newspaper issue in 1793 and it had often enough been charged by Fox, Sheridan, and other Opposition leaders that Pitt had deliberately involved England in a war in order to safeguard this and other emoluments (p. 324).

  Unaware of her work, it was recently re-attributed to Burns in Scott Hogg’s The Lost Poems, where Werkmeister’s research procedures and results were frequently replicated. The poem appears first in The Morning Chronicle, but a copy was also sent to The Edinburgh Gazetteer where it appears within a week of the London paper. Werkmeister goes on to argue:

  Since by 1793 the Morning Chronicle was the principal Opposition newspaper, ‘An Excellent New Song’ would have attracted some attention. But there was no sequel, and three days later (12 September, 1793) the Ministerial Public Advertiser published ‘LINES, On the BIRTH of a posthumous CHILD; Born in Peculiar Circumstances of Family Distress. By RO-BERT BURNS’. The heading ‘For the Public Advertiser’ made it clear that Burns had submitted the poem himself, and he had evidently also authorized the use of his name. If there had been any suspicion that he was responsible for ‘An Excellent New Song’ these lines in the Ministerial Public Advertiser would have dispelled it … (p. 325).

  She illustrates the fact that it was a customary tactic for Burns regularly to submit radical material to the Opposition press, while at the same time, sending non-radical verse under his own name to the pro-government Ministerial newspapers.

  Not only do we see here Burns’s unparalleled skill in turning old Scots lyrics into contemporary radical song, but his remarkable ability to compress a range of historical events into six condensed stanzas, always hitting the prime targets with satirical wit. When Guilford Good Our Pilot Stood is the perfect case in point, which meticulously chronicles the key events of the American-British war.

  The chief satirical victims here are William Pitt and his deputy Henry Dundas (l. 42), who was in charge of the Home Office spy network which existed throughout Britain and successfully infiltrated many groups such as The Friends of the People in Scotland and monitored the London Corresponding Society, the leading intellectual and propaganda arm of British radicalism. John Reeves (l. 42) set up the Association for Protecting Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, a propaganda arm of government supporters which rallied ‘men of rank’ to support the King and Constitution against the fear of invading Jacobins and their supporters at home. Charles Long (l. 42) was Secretary to the Treasury and through paying the pro-government press to speak the ministerial line, he was made a Baron. As Werkmeister comments, there is no evidence that these ‘wanton wags’ visited Walmer Castle at this time (1794) for a weekend’s drinking session, so this visit may be poetic licence. It was, though, common knowledge that when announcing Britain’s involvement in the war against Revolutionary France, both Pitt and Dundas were drunk; the latter falling and faltering at the despatch box. Burns would have been wholly aware of Dundas’s public reputation for heavy drinking. Coleridge, accordingly, called him ‘brazen faced’ and Dr Wolcot (Peter Pindar) and Professor Richard Porson also emphasised this issue in their satires on him.

  Werkmeister did not feel the need to strengthen her case with textual comparison. A few examples, though, are persuasive. The echo of Burns’s song Duncan Davidson, ll. 5–8 is apparent:

  A man may drink, and no be drunk;

  A man may fight, and no be slain;

  A man may kiss a bonie lass,

  And ay be welcome back again!

  The New Song (ll. 33–36) has virtually the same text, suitably adapted. The similarity is striking. The same poetic sentiment, mourning the death caused by war; the ‘widow’s tears, the orphan’s cry’, is found in the final stanza of Logan Braes. A further description employing the Scots-derived ‘Kate’for ‘Catherine’, referring to Catherine the Great, is also found in Burns’s Why Should Na Poor Folk Mowe, ‘Auld Kate laid her claws on poor Stanislaus,/ And Poland has bent like a bow’. The textual similarities cannot, however, be explained by another poet’s imitation of Duncan Davison and Logan Braes: the fomer was printed anonymously and the latter was yet to be published.

  Moreover, the poem contains a stylistic peculiarity of Burns, evident in his Kilmarnock edition (where he acted as publisher): an excessive use of italics, compared to other contemporaneous poetry. It is probably no coincidence that a month after Burns mentioned Willie is A Wanton Wag to George Thomson that a political version of it appeared in The Morning Chronicle. Thomson had already poured scorn on Burns’s anti-war Logan Braes and his squeamish, at best apolitical views would have warned Burns never to send him another overtly political piece.

  In recent research on interactive British radical poetry of the 1790s, we are beginning to understand not simply English-Scottish interaction, but how Burns influenced the dissenting Ulster poets. This example, signed ‘Paddy Burns’, possibly written by John Orr, shows not simply radical Ulster’s assimilation of Burns’s poetic form (as in The Holy Fair) but also the Scottish poet’s radical subject matter. Here, for example, are the first two stanzas of An Address to Mr Pitt, In Guid Braid Scotch:

  Dear Billy, I’m right wae for you;

  Ye’re in a hobble warse and warse:

  Ye bred it a’ your sell I trow,

  By pickin’ quarrels like an Ass;

  ‘Bout Nooska-Sound ye made a faird,

  Ye wadna want the Spotet Cats;

  Trouth ye might your three millions spared,

  An’ let them rin, and catch the Rats

  For mony a day.

  ‘Bout Oszacow ye fine advis’d;

  Nane maun posses’t but wha ye like:

  But Kate your meddlin’ gaits despis’d,

  An’ sent you hame wi trailin’ pike.

  In sullen mood ye broodin’ sat,

  Watchin’ whar ye might hae a chance,

  To breed a scrape: at last ye gat,

  A thick dust kicket up wi’ France

  Ae luckless day.

  We are not only indebted to Dr Liam McIlvanney’s archival retrieval of this particular poem, but to his innovative awareness of the influence of Burns’s political poetry in Ulster in the 1790s. As McIlvanney notes: ‘The common vogue for Burns’s poems is itself a symptom of this shared political culture. Burns’s egalitarian and democratic sentiments, his outspoken pro-Americanism, and his depiction of the Westminster government as a ‘system of corruption all endeared him to an Ulster Presbyterian audience, and to poets like Orr and Campbell, who were to participate in the 1798 Rising’. (‘Robert Burns and the Ulster–Scots Literary Revival of the 1790s’, Bullán, Vol. IV, No. 2, pp. 125–43).

  1 ‘The Convention with Spain of October 28, 1790, which resolved the dispute over Nootka Sound and which the Opposition regarded as a great humiliation for Pitt. The dispute had begun in 1789, when Spain seized a British trading station on Nootka Sound and some English vessels. Pitt seemed determined to go to war over what the Opposition maintained was only a seizure of ‘Catskins’.

  2 Russia had seized Oczakow in 1788, but Pitt ignored the seizure until 1791, when he demanded that Catherine restore the town to Turkey. She refused, but there were so many petit
ions against the war that Pitt was compelled to forget the matter.

  3 The second partition of Poland, which Pitt had not anticipated and which was an additional embarrassment to the government.

  4 The annoncement that Britain was now officialy at war with France was made on 1st February, 1793.

  5 The new quarrels with America were just beginning. They were settled by ‘Jay’s Treaty’ of 1794.

  6 Dundas, who headed an army of spies and informers; John Reeves, organiser of the Association for Protecting Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers; and Charles Long (later Baron Farnborough), Secretary of the Treasury, who assisted in the subversion of the press. These three were regarded as the principal warmongers and conspirators against democratic liberties.

  Lines on Ambition

  First published in The Edinburgh Gazetteer, 31st December, 1793.

  As Caesar once perus’d the warlike page,

  Frought with the acts of Macedonia’s Chief,

  Discordant passions in his bosom rage,

  And sudden tears declare his inward grief.

  5 And when his anxious friends, who round him stood,

  Ask’d, what disturb’d the quiet of his breast —

  While yet his eyes distill’d a briny flood,

  The future tyrant thus his cares express’d —

  ‘[… text unreadable …] my years attain’d,

  10 His triumphs round the earth’s wide orb were spread;

  And [… text unreadable …] seat the hero gain’d,

  And Conquest twin’d her laurels round his head.

  While I remain unnotic’d and unknown,

  A novice yet among the sons of Fame,

  15 Where are the trophies I can call my own?

  What spoils of victory can Caesar claim?’