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The Canongate Burns

Page 103

by Robert Burns


  1 N.B. The lady affected to be a Poetess. R.B.

  Pinned to Mrs. Walter Riddell’s Carriage –

  First printed in Cunningham, 1834.

  If you rattle along like your Mistress’s tongue,

  Your speed will outrival the dart:

  But, a fly for your load, you’ll break down on the road,

  If your stuff be as rotten’s her heart. —

  This epigram was sent to Mrs McLehose with the Monody addressed to Maria in the letter Burns wrote from Castle Douglas around the end of June 1794 (Letter 629). It was also offered to Patrick Miller Jnr to be passed on to The Morning Chronicle signed under the pen-name ‘Nith’.

  On Robert Riddell

  or At Friars Carse Hermitage

  First printed in Cunningham, 1834.

  To Riddell, much-lamented man,

  This ivied cot was dear; cottage

  Reader, dost value matchless worth?

  This ivied cot revere.

  Cunningham records that he copied this from a window at Friar’s Carse Hermitage, alleging that Burns wrote it on a visit after the death of Robert Riddell. Kinsley doubts this but without further substantiation accepts the epigram into the canon. One version replaces the word ‘Reader’ with ‘Wand’rer’. It reads as authentic despite the lack of manuscript authority.

  The Banks of Cree

  or Here is the Glen

  Tune: The Banks of Cree.

  First printed in Thomson, 1798.

  Here is the glen, and here the bower,

  All underneath the birchen shade;

  The village-bell has told the hour,

  O what can stay my lovely maid.

  5 ’Tis not Maria’s whispering call;

  ‘Tis but the balmy-breathing gale,

  Mixt with some warbler’s dying fall

  The dewy star of eve to hail.

  It is Maria’s voice I hear;

  10 So calls the woodlark in the grove

  His little, faithful Mate to chear,

  At once ’tis music — and ’tis love.

  And art thou come! And art thou true!

  O welcome dear to love and me!

  15 And let us all our vows renew

  Along the flowery banks of Cree.

  Burns wrote these lyrics to match an air composed by Lady Elizabeth Heron (1745–1811) of Kirroughtree, wife to Patrick Heron. The poet visited their country estate home during a second tour across Galloway in 1795. After the poet’s death Thomson printed the lyrics to the tune of The Flowers of Edinburgh.

  On Rev. Dr Babington

  In answer to one who affirmed of a well-known Character here, Dr Babington, that there was Falsehood in his very looks

  First printed in Cromek, 1808.

  That there is a Falsehood in his looks

  I must and will deny;

  They say, their Master is a Knave —

  — And sure they do not lie.

  Dr William Babbington (1746–1818) was a priest of the Episcopal Church in Dumfries. A copy of this exists in the Glenriddell manuscript collection.

  Ye True Loyal Natives

  First printed in Cromek, 1808.

  Ye true ‘Loyal Natives’, attend to my song,

  In uproar and riot rejoice the night long;

  From envy and hatred your corps is exempt;

  But where is your shield from the darts of contempt?

  The ‘Loyal Natives’ was an association set up in Dumfries in January 1794 to preserve the Constitution, and display loyalty to King and Country against French Jacobins and their radical supporters in Britain. It is known that there was friction between members of this group and Burns’s circle of friends in the town. Burns is supposed to have written the above after being provoked by reading The Loyal Native’s Verses:

  Ye Sons of Sedition, give ear to my song,

  Let Syme, Burns, and Maxwell pervade every throng,

  With Cracken the attorney, and Mundell the quack,

  Send Willie the monger to Hell with a smack.

  The Dumfries loyal association was no exception during these times. In the intense political tumult of December 1792 up until early 1796 the loyalty of all Scots, particularly those of position and rank, was called upon to help maintain social stability against the threat of so-called ‘Jacobins’. It is now known as fact that such a pro-French group existed in Dumfries and that its delegate to the National Convention of the Friends of the People in Edinburgh in 1794 was John Drummond, a friend of the poet’s. This information was collated by a spy, Claude Irvine Boswell, the Depute Sheriff of Fife and passed to Robert Dundas in Edinburgh. So, from late 1794 onwards, the authorities in Edinburgh knew for certain there was a cell of the Friends of the People in Dumfries.

  Ode for General Washington’s Birthday

  First published in Notes and Queries, March 1874.

  No Spartan tube, no Attic shell,

  No lyre Æolian I awake;

  ’Tis Liberty’s bold note I swell,

  Thy harp, Columbia, let me take.

  5 See gathering thousands, while I sing,

  A broken chain, exulting, bring,

  And dash it in a tyrant’s face!

  And dare him to his very beard,

  And tell him he no more is fear’d,

  10 No more the Despot of Columbia’s race.

  A tyrant’s proudest insults brav’d,

  They shout, a People freed! They hail an Empire saved.

  Where is Man’s godlike form?

  Where is that brow erect and bold,

  15 That eye that can, unmov’d, behold

  The wildest rage, the loudest storm,

  That e’er created Fury dared to raise!

  Avaunt! thou caitiff, servile, base,

  That tremblest at a Despot’s nod,

  20 Yet, crouching under the iron rod,

  Canst laud the arm that struck th’ insulting blow!

  Art thou of man’s Imperial line?

  Dost boast that countenance divine?

  Each skulking feature answers, No!

  25 But come, ye sons of Liberty,

  Columbia’s offspring, brave as free,

  In danger’s hour still flaming in the van,

  Ye know, and dare maintain The Royalty of Man.

  Alfred, on thy starry throne

  30 Surrounded by the tuneful choir,

  The Bards that erst have struck the patriot lyre,

  And rous’d the freeborn Briton’s soul of fire,

  No more thy England own. —

  Dare injured nations form the great design,

  35 To make detested tyrants bleed?

  Thy England execrates the glorious deed!

  Beneath her hostile banners waving,

  Every pang of honour braving,

  England in thunder calls — ‘The Tyrant’s cause is mine!’

  40 That hour accurst, how did the fiends rejoice,

  And Hell thro’ all her confines raise th’ exulting voice,

  That hour which saw the generous English name

  Link’t with such damnèd deeds of everlasting shame!

  Thee, Caledonia, thy wild heaths among,

  45 Fam’d for the martial deed, the heaven-taught song,

  To thee, I turn with swimming eyes. —

  Where is that soul of Freedom fled?

  Immingled with the mighty Dead!

  Beneath that hallow’d turf where WALLACE lies!

  50 Hear it not, Wallace, in thy bed of death!

  Ye babbling winds in silence sweep;

  Disturb not ye the hero’s sleep,

  Nor give the coward secret breath. —

  Is this the ancient Caledonian form,

  55 Firm as her rock, resistless as her storm?

  Shew me that eye which shot immortal hate,

  Blasting the Despot’s proudest bearing:

  Shew me that arm which, nerv’d with thundering fate,

  Braved Usurpation’s boldest daring!

  60 Dark
-quench’d as yonder sinking star,

  No more that glance lightens afar;

  That palsied arm no more whirls on the waste of war. —

  General George Washington (1732–99) was born on 22nd February. Burns probably began writing this work after the American president’s birthday, but dedicated the work to him because of his iconic position as a leading world figure of Liberty and Independence. During the 1793–4 period there are many letters by Washington printed in the British radical press.

  On June 25, 1794 Burns wrote to Mrs Dunlop from Castle Douglas in a letter that travelled ‘through many devious paths’, in Galloway:

  I am just going to trouble your critical patience with the first sketch of a stanza I have been framing as I passed along the road.—The Subject is, LIBERTY: you know, my honored Friend how dear the theme is to me. I design it as an irregular Ode for Genl. Washington’s birth-day.—After having mentioned the degeneracy of other kingdoms I come to Scotland thus—

  Burns then quotes the last stanza of the poem dealing with a disinherited, morbid Scotland. It is impossible to know his intentions regarding the poem. Nor, like his newly retrieved Bruce poems, was the poem suitable in 1794 for rallying the dispersing, ever more pressurized radicals. In this poem Washington, as hero, is tragically exclusive to America. The poem did not finally emerge in all its four stanzas till 1874 in Notes and Queries, then during the same year, in The Glasgow Herald. Kinsley, in an extreme example of his, at best, political evasiveness, deals with the poem in a few lines by citing its, to him, formal deficiencies. In fact, it is one of Burns’s most important and darkest political poems. Its theme is, precisely as Burns defined it, the relationship between liberty and degeneracy. Liberty is expressed by the virile success of the American Revolution but the success of this child of British democratic ideals is not being replicated in the British Isles. American democratic values are being not simply dissipated but actively destroyed. Burns’s initial response in his poetry to the American War was to celebrate republican American victory. Quite unknown to him, Blake, differently expressed, is writing similar political sentiments. This, for example from his Plate 13 of America:

  … the flames cover’s the land, they rouze, they cry; Shaking their mental chains, they rush in fury to the sea To quench their anguish; at the feet of Washington down fall’n They grovel on the sand and writhing lie, while all The British soldiers thro’ the thirteen states sent up a howl Of anguish, threw their swords & muskets to the earth, & ran From their grim encampments and dark castles, seeking where to hide …

  As Roger Fechner has written in ‘Burns and American Liberty’ in Love and Liberty:

  As one author has noted, ‘A new lyrical note appears in Burns’s treatment of America after 1793.’ No longer was Burns simply empathising with the American Revolution, while ridiculing British military and political blunders. Rather, he was now universalizing the War of American Independence by making the outcome a victory for liberty the world over. His mature idea of America still represented freedom fighting oppression (p. 283).

  While generally true, Fechner’s comment is problematised by this particular poem. Each of the four stanzas of the poem is relevant to four different countries: America, Ireland, England and Scotland but the poem charts a course of democratic degeneration in the latter two.

  As we now know from Hogg’s research, the second, recently discovered two-stanza version of the poem, ‘Columbia’s offspring brave as free’ refers to the Irish Radicals. This, of course, is before the bloody end of the Irish insurrection in 1798 with 30,000 supporters of ‘The Royalty of Man’ dead. Burns may have had knowledge of the Address from the Society of United Irishmen in Dublin, 1792 to encourage their Scots counterparts. Stanza two certainly reflects such Irish values. First, the sense that rather than traditional hostility between nations their only competition should be in who first achieves democratic reform:

  We will lay open to you our Hearts;—our cause is your cause. If there is to be a Struggle between us, let it be which Nation shall be foremost in the Race of Mind; let this be the noble Animos-ity kindled between us, who shall first attain that free Constitution, from which both are equidistant, who shall first be the Saviour of the Empire.

  Further, in saving the British Empire by converting it into a federation of harmonious democratic nations, the Irish were re-sponsive to the luminous American example:

  A sudden light from America shone through our prison. Our volunteers arose, the chains fell from our hands. We followed Grattan, the angel of our deliverance, and in 1782 Ireland ceased to be a province, and became a nation. But, with reason, should we despise and renounce this revolution, as merely a transient burst through a bad habit; the sudden grasp of necessity in despair, from tyranny to distress, did we not believe that the revolution is still in train; that it is only the herald of liberty and glory, of Catholic emancipation, as well as Protestant independence; that, in short, this revolution indicates new principles, foreruns new practices, and lays a foun-dation for advancing the whole people higher in the scale of being, and diffusing equal and permanent happiness.

  The roots of such Irish dissent, nourished by the sort of Hutch-esonian-derived Protestantism combined with elements of Freemasonry (See A.T.Q. Stewart, A Deeper Silence: The Hidden Origins of the United Irishmen, London, 1993) were the same as those influencing Burns himself. He did not think, however, that by 1794 they were strong enough to defeat the evil empire of an increasingly reactionary England. Further, an England that was betraying its own founding democratic principles. As we saw in the introduction, Burns was well aware of the historiography of English radicalism. Hence his invocation in this poem of King Alfred, the English equivalent of William Wallace. In fact, ll. 39–43 are an attack on England’s contemporary activities in putting together a reactionary European coalition to destroy the French Revolution. Professor John Millar’s great cry of despair in his remarkable analysis of Pitt and Dundas’s war policy, Letters of Crito, On the Causes, Objects and Consequences of the Present War (republished by the Faculty of Political Science, University of Rome in 1984 and discovered with its pages uncut on the library shelves of Millar’s own university) can be read as a prose scansion of Burns’s response to the matter. This is from Letter VIII: ‘Does not this abundantly show, that the danger of conquest by the French was a mere bugbear, set up by those persons to terrify and delude the nation; and that, so far from wishing to force a peace, as they might easily have done, by offering to guarantee a reasonable treaty, and by threatening upon the refusal of either party, to throw the weight of Britain on the opposite scale, our ministers were in reality desirous of joining the framers of the league of Pilnitz and of entering the war of extermination against France, not for the reasons they assigned, but from motives best known to themselves.’

  The last stanza presents a nation over which the Bard weeps real un-Ossianic tears. There is no redeeming Bruce as in The Edinburgh Gazetteer poems of the previous year. Wallace is a buried corpse whose spirit would be violated by what has happened in Dundas’s Scotland. Perhaps this image of the incarcerated Scottish spirit was one repeated in Edwin Muir’s image of Bruce under the permafrost in his poem, Scotland’s Winter. This stanza is an inversion of his earlier, unconvincing Caledonia which portrayed a nation never conquered. Unlike Bruce’s arm in the 1793 poems Scotland’s arm is now palsied. Heroic Scotland is dead and gone and with Wallace in the grave.

  Ode for Hibernia’s Sons

  This appears here for the first time.

  No Spartan tube, no Attic shell,

  No lyre Æolian I awake;

  ‘Tis Liberty’s bold note I swell,

  Thy harp, Hibernia, let me take.

  5 See gathering thousands, while I sing,

  A broken chain, exulting, bring,

  And dash it in a tyrant’s face!

  And dare him to his very beard,

  And tell him he no more is fear’d,

  10 No more the Despot of Hiberni
a’s race.

  A tyrant’s proudest insults brav’d,

  They shout, a People freed! They hail an Empire saved.

  Where is Man’s godlike form?

  Where is that brow erect and bold,

  15 That eye that can, unmov’d, behold

  The wildest rage, the loudest storm,

  That e’er created Fury dared to raise!

  Avaunt! thou caitiff, servile, base,

  That tremblest at a Despot’s nod,

  20 Yet, crouching under the iron rod,

  Canst laud the arm that struck th’ insulting blow!

  Art thou of man’s Imperial line?

  Dost boast that countenance divine?

  Each skulking feature answers, No!

  25 But come, ye sons of Liberty,

  Hibernia’s offspring, brave as free,

  In danger’s hour still flaming in the van,

  Ye know, and dare maintain The Royalty of Man.

  This early version of Ode for General Washington’s Birthday refers to Hibernia (Ireland), and was sold in holograph in London during May 1862. It is recorded in manuscript along with many other authentic pieces which surfaced from the original Currie archives in Liverpool, as sold by auctioneers Puttock and Simpson. (A copy of the sales catalogue is in the Mitchell Library.) It would appear that the manuscript was later destroyed or is still in private hands. If the auction sale’s catalogue had not been printed, no-one would have known that Burns crucially passed commentary on Irish political affairs. This was probably written in early 1794 when the Dublin offices of the Friends of the People were raided and their leaders arrested for seditious pamphleteering. By the end of 1794 over 200,000 people across Ireland had taken the oath of the radical and reformist group the United Irishmen, who had made links with many such groups in Scotland and England, particularly the United Scotsmen. Leading Irish radicals attended the National Convention of Friends of the People in Edinburgh.

 

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