by Robert Burns
You may believe that the present state of madness here, engrosses all our attention … if we take decided and strong measures against those Rebels, we shall be supported…. It is the only system that will have effect or, otherways, an Insurrection will be the consequence. (RH 2/4/74/f.76).
Political anxiety was running at such a pitch that at one point, it was thought Glasgow radicals were tunnelling from Glasgow to the Edinburgh Tolbooth to liberate Thomas Muir (such a crazy alarm is described in The Edinburgh Gazetteer October 1793). Prior to the arrests there were reports that ‘Paisley & its neighbourhood’ were in a ‘state of tumult and unrest’ (RH 2/4/74/f.76). Even worse, reports came in from a Charles Ogilvie of the Customs in Greenock that local people were supplying provisions to French naval ships at the town docks (RH 2/4/74/f.95). Edinburgh Supporters of the accused gathered at Calton Hill, Edinburgh as the trial went on. Scott, the Fiscal, ordered ‘to have people on the watch’ and list who was in attendance (Laing II, 500, f.533). In the following week, legal action against the editor of The Edinburgh Gazetteer was successful and it was forcibly closed. Being charged with sedition, James Thomson Callender (1758–1803), author of the savage critique on political corruption, The Political Progress of Britain, fled the country and was declared a fugitive. (See Michael Durey, With the Hammer of Truth. James Thomson Callender, University of Virginia, 1990.) Amid such tumult, upwards of ‘10,000’ people helped take Maurice Margarot in a carriage to parliament square in Edinburgh on the opening of his trial: all ‘well wishers … where we were received with such a universal shout … entered into the court & having taken my seat at the Bar between two soldiers with drawn bayonets’ the court was adjourned due to a ‘sudden illness of the Lord Advocate [Robert Dundas]’ (TS 11/959/3505: Margarot to Thomas Hardy, LCS, London, January 1794). Despite their varied and eloquent defences, expressed in Enlightenment concepts and Biblical allusion, the accused were all found guilty of sedition. As a result, this and later political suppression of radicalism put back the cause of British democratic progress for over a generation. Burns, watching from Dumfries, was conscious of these events and wrote wryly in From Esopus to Maria, that ‘his heresies in Church and State, / Might well award him Muir and Palmer’s fate’.
The introductory quotation from Milton is an apt description of Burns’s personal predicament in Dumfries, where his relationship with, inter alia, John Syme, was strained. He cast a keen glance at the London treason trials during early 1795, as he remarked to Mrs Dunlop:
Thank God, these London trials have given us a little more breath, & I imagine that the time is not far distant when a man may freely blame Billy Pit [t], without being called an enemy to his Country (Letter 649).
It is evident from the extent of censorship outlined in our Introduction that Burns almost certainly had his say on these matters and that missing letters to Mary Wollstonecraft, William Roscoe, William Masterton, William Smellie and others, probably contained commentary and/or poetry on the Scottish sedition trials.
The language employed here is seen in the elegiac style of Elegy on the Death of Sir James Hunter-Blair, where the Muse of Caledonia loudly laments:
I saw my sons resume their ancient fire,
I saw fair Freedom’s blossoms richly blow;
But ah! How hope is born but to expire,
Relentless fate has laid their guardian low.
My patriot falls, but shall he die unsung,
While empty Greatness saves a worthless name?
No: every Muse shall join her tuneful tongue,
And future ages hear his glowing fame.
Indeed, these stanzas might almost be placed within the new poem and read with natural continuity, despite the fact that the poems were written some four years apart.
What makes this a typical Burnsian political poem is that, despite his creative anxieties of being worthy of his theme, the poet’s metaphorical darkness precedes a radical dawn. Thus, the poem ends with the beautiful image of poetry itself succouring the sea-borne exiles. The feel is akin to Coleridge and, indeed, we might here recall the first lines of Coleridge’s sonnet, To the Honourable Mr [Thomas] Erskine which also deals with the exiled Scots:
When British Freedom for an happier land
Spread her broad wings, that flutter’d with affright,
ERSKINE! thy voice she heard, and paus’d her flight
Sublime of hope, for dreadless thou didst stand
(Thy censer glowing with the hallow’d flame)
A hireless Priest before the insulted shrine,
And at her altar pour the stream divine
Of unmatch’d eloquence …
Coleridge’s sonnet appeared in The Morning Chronicle at the end of the same year, 1794. As well as demonstrating poetic affinity between the two men, it records the enormous impact the Scottish Sedition Trials had on British radical consciousness.
The Ewe Bughts
First printed in The Morning Chronicle, 10th July, 1794.
‘Will you go to the Ewe-bughts, Marian, sheep pens
‘And wear in the sheep wi’ me? bring
‘The mavis sings sweetly, my Marian, song thrush
‘But not sae sweetly as thee’. so
5 These aft were the words of my Sandy, often
As we met in the how of the glen, hollow
But nae mair shall I meet wi’ my Sandy, no more
For Sandy to Flanders is gane. gone
How can the trumpets loud clarion
10 Thus take a’ the shepherds afar?
Oh could na’ the Ewe-bughts and Marian not
Please mair than the horrors of war? more
But, oh, tis the fault o’ them a’, Sirs, all
In search of gowd and of fame, gold
15 The lads daily wander awa’, Sirs, away
And leave their poor lasses at hame. home
Not a plough in the land has been ganging, moving
The owsen hae stood in the sta’, oxen have, stall
Nae flails in our barns hae been banging, no
20 For mair than this towmond or twa. more, 12 months, two
Ilka Laird in the Highlands is rueing, each
That he drove his poor tenants away,
For naething is seen here but ruin, nothing
As the haughs are a’ lying in lay. fertile lands, all
25 There’s gowd in the garters of Sandy, gold
And silk in his blue-bonnet lug, flap of a cap/bonnet
And I’m not a kaerd nor a randy, gypsy, rude person
Nor a lass without blanket or rug;
Then why should he fight sae for riches, so
30 Or seek for a sodger’s degree, soldier’s commission
Or fling by his kilt for the breeches, throw, trousers
And leave the dear Ewe-Bughts and me?
This appears anonymously in The Morning Chronicle, 10th July, 1794. It was first ascribed to Burns by Professor Lucylle Werkmeister in her 1966 paper Robert Burns and the London Daily Press (Modern Philology, LXIII, p. 328). Werkmeister does not provide a textual argument for her case, but a formally contextual one as we shall see in notes to the immediately following ‘A Cabinet Dinner’. It was subsequently ascribed to Burns in Scott Hogg’s The Lost Poems (1997).
Textually, the song is based on an old song named Will Ye Go to the Ewe Bughts, Marion and its tune of the same name, which melody Burns had already set to Will Ye Go to the Indies, My Mary. This new version is significantly adapted from Allan Ramsay’s earlier Ewe Bughts, Marion. Like Burns’s treatment of Logan Braes, the new lyric has been transformed into a war-broken love song. The simple language and style is enhanced by the evocative use of the feminine voice; a characteristic trait of Burns’s lyrics. Ramsay’s version is written in the male voice. No poet of the eighteenth century possessed Burns’s skill in employing the female voice in song.
L. 20 is almost straight from Burns’s The Ronnals of the Bennals, which reads ‘For mair than this towmond, or twa’. Burns
employs the name ‘Sandy’ (l. 5) on many occasions; it was a stock-in-trade name within pastoral narrative or dialogue during the century (See Burns’s Sandy and Jockie). Moreover, he sent a copy of Ewe Bughts Marion to James Johnson in 1795, commenting ‘Another song – “Ewe Bughts Marion” – a quite different set from the one you have already published’ (Letter 684). He also mentions it to Thomson (Letter 511) and in his reply to Burns, Thomson commented, ‘What you say of The Ewe Bughts is just … All I requested was that you would try your hand on some of the inferior stanzas’ (Currie, 1800, Correspondence, Letter VII, p. 191). Burns was aware that at least two older versions existed and wrote of the earliest text that he was ‘not sure if this old and charming air be of the South, as it is commonly said, or of the North of Scotland. There is a song apparently as ancient as “Ewe Bughts Marion”, which sings to the same time, and is evidently of the North’ (Hogg, The Lost Poems, 1997, p. 158). The Ramsay collected version reads:
Will ye go to the ewe-bught, Marion,
And wear in the sheep wi’ me?
The sun shines sweet, my Marion,
But nae half sae sweet as thee.
5 O Marion’s a bonie lass,
And the blyth blinks in her e’e;
And fain wad I marry Marion,
Gin Marion wad marry me.
There’s gowd in your garters, Marion,
10 And silk on your white hause-bane;
Fu’ fain wad I kiss my Marion,
At e’en when I come hame …
/I’m young and stout, my Marion;
Nane dances like me on the green:
15 And gin ye forsake me, Marion,
I’ll e’en gae draw up wi’ Jean …
This is clearly the model for the new radical text. Such a radical revision would not have been sent to Thomson given his prudish slight on Burns’s anti-war Logan Braes. The obvious outlet, given the demise of The Edinburgh Gazetteer in January 1794, was The Morning Chronicle. After all, as already shown, he did promise to send them such pieces. McGuirk describes The Ewe Bughts as a jewel among the recently recovered poems, stating it has ‘the strongest claim’ to be one of the ‘previously unknown poems by Robert Burns’ (Books in Review, Eighteenth Century Scottish Studies Newsletter, 1997, p. 15).
A Cabinet Dinner
Printed in The Morning Chronicle with The Ewe Bughts, 10th July, 1794.
‘How shall we save the loaves and fishes;
Where safely shall we hide ’em?
To keep them from the Gallic meshes,’
Says Loughb’rough, ‘let’s divide ’em’.
‘Ah! should they fail in savage hand,
You know how they would treat ‘em!
As friends, then, to our native land,
’Tis better we should eat ’em’.
This was, as Professor Werkmeister comments in her 1966 paper, Robert Burns and the London Daily Press, printed next to Ewe Bughts Marion, ‘paired but unsigned’ (p. 328). On this basis she argues it is by the same author as Ewe Bughts Marion and ascribes it to Burns. It was the newspaper custom to pair poems or songs, set them out next to each other without a line across the page to indicate they are by the same author. In the second Heron Ballad (l. 76). Burns also refers to ‘the fishes and loaves’. Loughborough (l. 4) was Alexander Wedderburn, the Lord Chancellor.
The ‘loaves and fishes’ reference is, of course, a brutally ironic inversion of Christ’s miraculous feeding of the poor. This anti-Christian governing class is predatorily grabbing everything for itself. It is a bitter double irony, and complete confirmation of Werkmeister’s suggestion of Burns’s authorship, that in 1795 an Ulster poet, believing, on the sole evidence of The Dumfries Volunteers, that Burns had betrayed the democratic cause, wrote these lines:
O Scotia’s Bard! my muse alas!
For you in private blushes!
You’ve dipt i’ th’ dish wi’ slee Dundas
An prie’d the Loaves and Fishes.
For a full account of this Ulster context see Liam McIlvanney, ‘Robert Burns and the Ulster-Scots Literary Revival of the 1790s’, Bullán, Vol. IV, No. 2, pp. 125–43.
Humanity: An Ode
First printed in The Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1794.
Blow, blow, ye winds! with heavier gust!
And freeze, thou bitter-biting frost!
Descend, ye chilly, smothering snows!
Not all your rage, united, shews
5 More hard unkindness, unrelenting,
Vengeful malice, unrepenting,
Than heav’n-illumin’d Man on brother Man bestows! —
See stern Oppressions iron lip,
See mad Ambition’s gory hand,
10 Sending like blood-hounds from the slip,
Woe, Want and Murder, o’er a land!1
Even in the peaceful, rural vale,
Truth, weeping, tells the mournful tale,
How Luxury, with Flattery by her side,
15 The parasite, empoisoning her ear,
With all the servile wretches in the rear,
Looks o’er proud Property extended wide;
And eyes the simple, lowly hind,
Whose toil upholds the glittering show,
20 A creature of another kind,
Some coarser substance, unrefin’d,
Plac’d for her Lordly use thus vile below!
Where, where, is Love’s fond, tender throe,
With lordly Honour’s lofty brow,
25 The powers you proudly own?
Is there, beneath Love’s noble name,
Can harbour, dark, the selfish aim,
To bless himself alone? —
Mark Maiden-Innocence, a prey
30 To love-pretending snares:
This boasted honour turns away,
Shunning soft Pity’s rising sway,
Regardless all of tears, and unavailing prayers.
Perhaps this hour, in misery’s squalid nest,
35 She strains your infant to her joyless breast,
And with a mother’s fears shrinks at the rocking blast!
O ye! who sunk in beds of down,2
Feel not a want but what yourselves create,
Think, for a moment, on his hapless fate,
Whom friends and fortune quite disown!
Ill-satisfy’d keen Hunger’s clamorous call,
Stretched on his straw he lays himself to sleep,
While through the ragged roof, and chinky wall,
Chill, o’er his slumbers, falls the drifty heap!
Think on the dungeon’s grim confine,
Think on the terrors of the mine,
Where Guilt and poor Misfortune pine!
Guilt, erring Man, relenting view!
Nor let thy legal rage pursue
The wretch, already beaten low
By dire Misfortune’s undeserved blow!
Afflictions sons are brothers in distress;
A brother then relieve, and God the deed shall bless.
R.B.
Several major poems by Burns are recorded with variant stanzas or lines, depending on whether the poem was drafted on several occasions and modified significantly before publication, or changed after publication. The poem given here does not fall into the category of being merely a variant reading of A Winter Night, first published in 1787. It is an updated version, published by Burns himself in August 1794 also in The Gentleman’s Magazine, some three months after Sonnet on the Death of Robert Riddell. Robert Riddell was a subscriber and contributor to the journal and would have made the poet familiar with its pages during their meetings at Friar’s Carse. The poem Humanity: An Ode is not found in manuscript. It does not feature in any previous edition of Burns and lay undiscovered until Scott Hogg’s 1997 research.
The main, obvious difference between the new version and A Winter Night is that the body of the poem is no longer presented as a voice heard at night by the poet. The opening stanzas of A Winter Night in Standard Habbie format are cut away and th
e consolatory ending is dropped. What remains is an exclusively dissident text expressing the humanitarian sentiment of the poem, hence the new title, Humanity: An Ode. There are, on close examination, several minor textual changes from the 1787 version to this final work, including new lines and a new ending to the poem. The differences are: ‘as now’ is dropped from the line ‘Not all your rage, [as now] united, shews’; ‘iron grip’ is modified to ‘iron lip’; ‘Or mad Ambition’s gory hand’ becomes ‘See mad Ambition’s gory hand’; ‘How pamper’d Luxury’ is changed to ‘How Luxury, with Flattery by her side’; ‘rustic hind’ becomes ‘lowly hind’; ‘thus far’ is omitted from ‘Plac’d for her Lordly use [thus far,] thus vile below!’; ‘Regardless of the tears’ is changed to ‘Regardless all of tears …’; ‘wretched fate’ is changed to ‘hapless fate’; ‘piles the drifty heap!’ becomes ‘falls the drifty heap!’ A new line, adding emphasis is given, ‘Think on the terrors of the mine.’ The question ‘But shall thy legal rage pursue’ is dropped for the more direct and forceful, ‘Nor let thy legal rage pursue.’ The phrase ‘crushed low’ is now ‘beaten low’. The final section of the question ending with ‘By cruel Fortune’s undeserved blow?’ is altered to the indignant expression ‘By dire Misfortune’s undeserved blow!’ The poem concludes with a new, improved ending:
Afflictions sons are brothers in distress;
A brother then relieve, and God the deed shall bless.
The structural and stylistic changes made to the poem serve to sharpen the moral outrage of the values expressed. The rhythmical strophes of A Winter Night, lines supposedly heard by the narrator, are now presented as the unequivocal voice of the poet. While the original head quotation from King Lear has been left out, the new, additional footnotes add to the increased energy of the piece within the wholly new context of Britain’s mendacious involvement in the European conflagration. Condemnation of war and its concomitant desolation of human affairs is given a new impetus in a 1794 context, where ‘stern Oppression’ and ‘mad Ambition’s gory hand’ were responsible for unleashing ‘Woe, Want and Murder, o’er a land!’ Burns reinforces this by reference to Young’s ‘imperial butchers’, implying criticism on contemporary warmongers, surrounded by indulgent ‘pleasure’ and ‘power’ from Thomson’s ironic couplet. The Shakespearean debt of Humanity: An Ode (see notes to A Winter Night) is re-emphasised by the footnote ‘Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war’ (Julius Caesar, Act III. Sc. I, 1.273) alluding to an earlier state overwhelmed with bloody civil strife. Battle had also been joined with France.
