by Robert Burns
Within yon chariot gilt aboon. above
Mally’s meek, Mally’s sweet, &c.
Her yellow hair, beyond compare,
Comes trinkling down her swan white neck,
15 And her two eyes like stars in skies
Would keep a sinking ship frae wreck. from
Mally’s meek, Mally’s sweet, &c.
Burns sent this song with others, including O, Were I on Parnassus Hill, to Johnson in August 1788, from Mauchline. It was not printed until 1803. The manuscript is now part of the Law Collection.
To Robert Graham of Fintry, Esq.,
With a request for an Excise Division.
Ellisland, September 8th 1788.
First printed by Currie, 1800.
WHEN Nature her great Masterpiece designed,
And framed her last, best Work, the Human Mind,
Her eye intent on all the mazy Plan,
She forms of various stuff the various Man. —
5 The USEFUL MANY first, she calls them forth,
Plain, plodding Industry, and sober Worth:
Thence Peasants, Farmers, native sons of earth,
And Merchandise’ whole genus take their birth:
Each prudent Cit a warm existence finds, citizen
10 And all Mechanics’ many-apron’d kinds. —
Some other, rarer Sorts are wanted yet,
The lead and buoy are needful to the net. —
The caput mortuum of Gross Desires,
Makes a material for mere knights and squires:
15 The Martial Phosphorus is taught to flow;
She kneads the lumpish Philosophic dough;
Then marks th’ unyielding mass with grave Designs,
Law, Physics, Politics, and deep Divines:
Last, she sublimes th’ Aurora of the Poles,
20 The flashing elements of Female Souls. —
The order’d System fair before her stood,
Nature, well pleased, pronounced it very good;
Yet ere she gave creating labour o’er,
Half-jest, she tryed one curious labour more. —
25 Some spumy, fiery, ignis fatuus matter,
Such as the slightest breath of air might scatter,
With arch-alacrity and conscious glee,
(Nature may have her whim as well as we;
Her Hogarth-art perhaps she meant to show it)
30 She forms the Thing, and christens it — A POET. —
Creature, tho’ oft the prey of Care and Sorrow,
When blest today, unmindful of tomorrow;
A being form’d t’ amuse his graver friends,
Admir’d and praised — and there the wages ends;
35 A mortal quite unfit for Fortune’s strife,
Yet oft the sport of all the ills of life;
Prone to enjoy each pleasure riches give,
Yet haply wanting wherewithal to live;
Longing to wipe each tear, to heal each groan,
40 Yet frequent all un-heeded in his own. —
But honest Nature is not quite a Turk;
She laught at first, then felt for her poor Work:
Viewing the propless Climber of mankind,
She cast about a Standard-tree to find;
45 In pity for his helpless wood-bine state,
She clasp’d his tendrils round THE TRULY GREAT:
A title, and the only one I claim,
To lay strong hold for help on generous GRAHAM. —
Pity the tuneful Muses’ hapless train,
50 Weak, timid Landsmen on life’s stormy main!
Their hearts no selfish, stern, absorbent stuff
That never gives — tho’ humbly takes enough;
The little Fate allows they share as soon,
Unlike sage, proverbed Wisdom’s hard-wrung boon:
55 The world were blest, did bliss on them depend,
Ah, that the FRIENDLY e’er should want a FRIEND!
Let Prudence number o’er each sturdy son
Who life and wisdom at one race begun,
Who feel by reason, and who give by rule,
60 (Instinct’s a brute, and Sentiment a fool!)
Who make poor, ‘Will do’ wait upon, ‘I should,’
We own they’re prudent — but who owns they’re good?
Ye Wise Ones, hence! ye hurt the social eye;
God’s image rudely etch’d on base alloy!
65 But come, ye who the godlike pleasure know,
Heaven’s attribute distinguish’d, — to bestow,
Whose arms of love would grasp all human-race;
Come, thou who givest with all a courtier’s grace,
Friend of my life! (true Patron of my rhymes)
70 Prop of my dearest hopes for future times. —
Why shrinks my soul, half-blushing, half-afraid,
Backward, abashed, to ask thy friendly aid?
I know my need, I know thy giving hand,
I tax thy friendship at thy kind command:
75 But, there are such, who court the tuneful Nine,
Heavens, should the branded character be mine!
Whose verse in manhood’s pride sublimely flows,
Yet vilest reptiles in their begging prose.
Mark, how their lofty, independant spirit
80 Soars on the spurning wing of injured Merit!
Seek you the proofs in private life to find? —
Pity, the best of words should be but wind!
So to Heaven’s gates the lark’s shrill song ascends,
But grovelling on the earth the carol ends. —
85 In all the clam’rous cry of starving Want
They dun Benevolence with shameless front:
Oblidge them, patronize their tinsel lays,
They persecute you all your future days. —
E’er my poor soul such deep damnation stain,
90 My horny fist, assume the Plough again;
The pie-bald jacket, let me patch once more;
On eighteenpence a week I’ve liv’d before. —
Tho’, thanks to Heaven! I dare even that last shift,
I trust, meantime, my boon is in thy gift:
95 That, plac’d by thee upon the wished-for height,
Where Man and Nature fairer in her sight,
My Muse may imp her wing for some sublimer flight. —
Burns did not choose to publish this 1788 epistle to Robert Graham of Fintry because it is certainly a lesser poem than the 1791 poem printed in the second Edinburgh edition. He may also have considered the seeking of Fintry’s favour too overt. Certainly it was, like its successor, driven by deep economic need. In September of that year he wrote to Graham that his Ellisland farm ‘does by no means promise to be such a Pennyworth as I was taught to expect. – It is in the last stage of worn out poverty, and will take some time before it pays the rent’. Kinsley is not sensitive to such matters and is wholly condemnatory of the poem, seeing in it, particularly Mrs Dunlop’s specific enthusiasm for it, genteel Scotland’s wrong-headed encouragement for Burns to write derivative, outmoded English verse:
This kind of response did Burns no good; it encouraged him, as some of his criticism he had got in Edinburgh had done, in a vain attempt to write ‘Augustan’ poetry. The weakness of the epistle does not lie only in loose-strung couplets and conventional notions; the description of the poet (ll. 21–40) is a mask unnatural to Burns (contrast Epistle to J. Lapraik, ll. 49–78); and the conjunction of flattery – to a patron he hardly knew and owed little as yet – with an equally insincere posture of independence (ll. 89–97) is absurd (Vol. III, p. 1279).
Burns certainly did not disguise his debt to Pope in this poem. On September 16th, 1788, he wrote to Margaret Chalmers that he had ‘since harvest began, wrote a poem not in imitation, but in the manner of Pope’s Moral Epistles. It is only a short essay, just to try the strength of my Muse’s pinion in that way’ (Letter 272). This is, of course, echoed in the last line: ‘My
Muse may imp her wing for some sublimer flight’. If the poem is a product of Burns’s ‘prentice hand’ in this genre, it was also one to which he gave deep attention. Writing to Henry Erskine, the great radical lawyer and one of his heroes, he enclosed a copy, while also discussing the iniquitous agony of seeking favour from the great and the specific necessity for securing Graham’s patronage:
I have no great faith in the boasted pretensions to intuitive propriety and unlaboured elegance. – The rough material of Fine Writing is certainly the gift of Genius; but as I firmly believe that the workmanship is the united effort of Pains, Attention & Repeated – trial. – The piece addressed to Mr. Graham is my first essay in that didactic epistolary way; which circumstance I hope will bespeak your indulgence (Letter 299).
Kinsley’s refusal to indulge him should certainly not be seen as mandatory. Burns was attempting to educate Graham in these two English language epistles as to his complex, educated vision of the role and fate of the poet in society in order to receive his understanding and patronage. The complexity of the vision is the necessary product of his synthesis of his knowledge of Robert Fergusson’s fate with examples taken from Pope, Swift, Dr Johnson and, contemporaneously, Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper and the peculiarly self-destructive Charles Churchill.
Ll. 1–20 denote a world more feudal than democratic whereby everything has its place. It is perhaps derived from his friend William Smellie’s evolutionary vision of life ascending by a law of refinement. Thus the female soul is the highest earthly form. Smellie further argued that the highest of human life forms, such as the creative poet, might attain to states which made earthly reality incompatible to his spirit. Indeed, Burns’s vision here would arguably make him more compatible with Ezra Pound than Pablo Neruda. Burns, partly jokingly, sees Nature as a Hogarth-like power which (ll. 21–40) creates the poet as a sort of incompatible freak. Burns’s letters are filled with self-analysis of his eccentric, agonised creative relationship with the world: ‘It is not easy to imagine a more helpless state than his whose poetic fancy unfits him for the world’ (Letter 61). If this is seen as self-indulgent Romantic agony slightly before the event, it also went in Burns with a spiritually derived agony that he had not power to give succour to the pain of the world: ‘ – Oh, how often had my heart ached to agony, for the power, To wipe away all tears from all eyes!’ (Letter 491). If he had a tendency to endorse the Devil, or at least Milton’s version of him, he was also tempted to imitate Christ. This, too, is not without its spiritual perils. In terms of the worldly appetites, Burns also believed the poet to have a particularly keen sensuality which was never accompanied by the fiscal capacity to indulge: ‘Take a being of our kind; give him a stronger imagination and more delicate sensibility, which will ever between them engender a more ungovernable set of Passions, than the usual lot of man… curse him with a keener relish than any man living for the pleasures that only Lucre can bestow … and you have created a wight nearly as miserable as a Poet’ (Letter 413). If this sounds somewhat like Keats before the event, Keats thought so, too, as his Ayrshire letters recording Burns’s victimage by the repressive forces of the Scottish church, contain a chilling premonition of his own sensual thwarting and premature death.
The poem then argues for a compensatory element in Nature (ll. 41–8) where the poet’s lack of worldly strength is compared to a climbing plant moving upwards supported by the tree-trunk provided by the benevolent, if rare, great man. Burns then makes a characteristic comparison, often also found in his letters, between the altruistic, empathetic poetic personality, emotions on which a just world could be erected, and the prudential, self-absorbed, materialists who actually run the world.
Ll. 65–70 are, as Kinsley suggests, far beyond the reality, present or subsequent, with regard to Graham’s patronage. Ll. 71–88 have, however, a quality worthy of the best Augustan verse in their analysis so common in eighteenth-century verse of the caninely sycophantic poet whose apparently divine song masks degenerate self-seeking. The poem ends with an assertion, again very common in the Ayrshire vernacular epistles, of retaining his independence by, if necessary, returning to the plough. Kinsley rather tartly remarks that l. 92 is an exaggeration as the day rate for an Ayrshire labourer was around eighteen pence.
On William Creech
First printed by Cromek, 1808.
A little upright, pert, tart, tripping wight,
And still his precious Self his dear delight;
Who loves his own smart shadow in the streets
Better than e’er the fairest She he meets.
5 Much specious lore, but little understood
(Fineering oft outshines the solid wood)
His solid sense by inches you must tell,
But mete his subtle cunning by the ell!
A man of fashion, too, he made his tour,
10 Learn’d ‘Vive la bagatelle et vive l’amour’;
So travell’d monkies their grimace improve,
Polish their grin — nay, sigh for ladies’ love!
His meddling vanity, a busy fiend,
Still making work his Selfish-craft must mend.
William Creech was the publisher of the 1787 Edinburgh edition. He purchased the poet’s copyright and brought out the 1793 and 1794 editions of Burns for his own profit allowing the poet a few complimentary copies. This means Creech obtained Scotland’s most popular poem Tam O’Shanter and other poems at no cost. Creech, a one-time member of the Crochallan Fencibles, lost his early Enlightenment-influenced radical ideals as the tumult of the 1790s ensued. He published most of the loyalist government propaganda during this period and his business thrived while radical publications such as The Edinburgh Gazetteer and The Bee were either persecuted or driven out of business. Mackay omits this poetic fragment from the 1993 edition, but includes the next piece on Smellie. Both are belived to have formed part of an early, proposed work The Poet’s Progress which eventually formed To Robert Graham of Fintry, published in 1793. Ll. 7–8 do not appear in Kinsley.
On William Smellie
First printed by Currie, 1800.
Crochallan came:
The old cock’d hat, the brown surtout the same;
His grisly beard just bristling in its might
(‘Twas four long nights and days to shaving-night);
His uncomb’d, hoary locks, wild-staring, thatch’d
A head for thought profound and clear unmatch’d;
Yet, tho’ his caustic wit was biting rude,
His heart was warm, benevolent, and good. —
William Smellie (1746–95) was a leading Edinburgh intellectual and a key member of the Crochallan Fencibles. He was the printer of the Edinburgh edition. His reputation for humorous verbal flyting was such that he is reputed to have verbally thrashed Burns on the poet’s inauguration to the Fencibles Club. He published work on medicine and natural philosophy. He was more of a friend to Burns than Creech. Maria Riddell befriended the old man via the poet’s introduction. His biographer mentions that most of the letters from Burns to Smellie were unfit for publication because of the caustic remarks on people still living. They were burned. As the above poetic fragment on Creech, this fragment is viewed as an early piece intended for The Poet’s Progress which ended up as the 1793poemtoGraham of Fintry.
To the Beautiful Miss Eliza J—N,
On her Principles of Liberty and Equality –
First printed in Chambers-Wallace, 1896.
How Liberty, girl, can it be by thee nam’d?
Equality too! hussey, art not asham’d:
FREE and EQUAL indeed; while mankind thou enchainest,
And over their hearts a proud DESPOT so reignest. —
This is undated and the identity of Elizabeth is unknown. Kinsley guesses that it may be Elizabeth Johnston, a friend of Dr Blacklock in Edinburgh. Like much of The Rights of Woman, this is a poem to set feminists’ teeth on edge, with its apparent traditional view of erotic power being greater than democratic rig
hts.
Sketch for an Elegy
First printed in 1851 by Robert Chambers.
CRAIGDARROCH, fam’d for speaking art
And every virtue of the heart,
Stops short, nor can a word impart
To end his sentence,
5When mem’ry strikes him like a dart
With auld acquaintance. old
Black James — whase wit was never laith, whose, reluctant
But, like a sword had tint the sheath, lost
Ay ready for the work o’ death —
10 He turns aside,
And strains wi’ suffocating breath
His grief to hide.
Even Philosophic Smellie tries
To choak the stream that floods his eyes:
15So Moses wi’ a hazel-rice
Came o’er the stane; stone
But, tho’ it cost him speaking twice,
It gush’d amain.
Go to your marble graffs, ye great, graves
20In a’ the tinkler-trash of state!
But by thy honest turf I’ll wait,
Thou man of worth,
And weep the ae best fallow’s fate one, fellow’s
E’er lay in earth!
This was composed in 1788. The final stanza is more or less the same as in Elegy to Matthew Henderson. Due to this, it is viewed by most editors as a first draft for the Henderson poem. Craigdarroch was Alexander Fergusson of Craigdarroch (d. 1796), an advocate and justice given to bibulous disorder (see The Whistle). Black James (l. 7) is almost certainly not James Boswell as has been suggested.
Auld Lang Syne
Tune: Can Ye Labour Lea
First published in S.M.M, December 1796.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot old
And never brought to mind?
