Burns

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

This selection by Gerard Carruthers first published in Everyman’s Library,
2006 (UK), 2007 (US)
Copyright © 2006, 2007 by Everyman’s Library

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random
House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc.,
New York. Published in the United Kingdom by Everyman’s Library,
Northburgh House, 10 Northburgh Street, London EC1V 0AT.
Distributed by Random House (UK) Ltd.

US website: www.randomhouse.com/everymans

eISBN: 978-0-307-82357-1

v3.1

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

FOLK-TALES FOR AN ENLIGHTENED AGE

Death and Doctor Hornbook

To a Mouse

The Twa Dogs

Halloween

Address to the Deil

To a Louse

Address of Beelzebub

Tam o’ Shanter

RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT AND SATIRE

A Prayer, in the Prospect of Death

Holy Willie’s Prayer

The Holy Fair

The Cotter’s Saturday Night

Prayer – O Thou Dread Power

Epigram to Miss Ainslie in Church

CONTEMPORARY POLITICS

Ballad on the American War

A Dream

The Fête Champetre

Ode on the Departed Regency Bill

The Rights of Woman

Why Shouldna Poor Folk Mowe

Scots Wha Hae

Ode for General Washington’s Birthday

A Man’s a Man for a’ That

Does Haughty Gaul Invasion Threat?

LOVE AND SEX

The Rigs o Barley

Mary Morison

Green Grow the Rashes, O

A Poet’s Welcome to His Love-Begotten Daughter

The Fornicator

The Jolly Beggars – a Cantata

The Lass o Ballochmyle

Libel Summons

Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes

Auld Lang Syne

Yestreen I Had a Pint o Wine

Ae Fond Kiss

Highland Mary

A Red Red Rose

O, Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast

Comin Thro the Rye

Wha’ll Mow Me Now?

O Saw Ye My Maggie

SCOTTISH CULTURAL HISTORY

Scotch Drink

Address to a Haggis

Lines on Fergusson, the Poet

The Bonie Moor-Hen

Johnie Cope

My Heart’s in the Highlands

Awa, Whigs, Awa

The White Cockade

Scots Prologue for Mrs. Sutherland’s Benefit Night, spoken at the Theatre Dumfries

Lament of Mary Queen of Scots on the Approach of Spring

There’ll Never be Peace till Jamie Comes Hame

Ye Jacobites by Name

Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation

OCCASIONAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL VERSE

I’ll Go and be a Sodger

My Father was a Farmer

The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie, the Author’s Only Pet Yowe

Epitaph on My Honoured Father

Epistle to Davie, a Brother Poet

Epistle to J. Lapraik

The Auld Farmer’s New-Year Morning Salutation to His Auld Mare, Maggie

Lines Written on a Bank-Note

The Farewell

Reply to a Trimming Epistle Received from a Taylor

Select Scots Glossary

INTRODUCTION

Robert Burns (1759–96) quickly became a phenomenon after the publication of his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786. The poems and songs of this edition appealed to a European-wide taste for primitive genius, and Burns, ‘this heaven-taught ploughman’ as Henry Mackenzie hailed him in a reputation-defining review, seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Burns, a tenant farmer from Ayrshire, wrote with gusto in Scots and with directness in emotion and wit, providing a rural portraiture that appealed to his contemporary audience as entirely authentic. Certainly, Burns’s work was rooted in his real-life culture and experience, but he was also a very literary artist. The stanzas of ‘Habbie Simson’ (found, for instance, in ‘To a Louse’) and ‘Christ’s Kirk’ (seen in use, for example, in ‘The Holy Fair’) were those established as Scottish cultural signatures during the earlier eighteenth century by his poetic predecessors, Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson. In bringing these forms to bear on his Presbyterian Ayrshire locus, Burns was transposing poetic technology associated with the Eastern and North-eastern parts of Scotland and an Episcopalian and even Catholic cultural outlook, involving carnivalesque anti-puritanism, anti-Unionism and Jacobitism. As well as this eighteenth-century Scots literary tradition, Burns also showed himself adept within a more ‘mainstream’ ‘British’ literary context, so that the elegant couplets and wry social satire of ‘The Twa Dogs’, for example, show a poet as steeped in the example of Alexander Pope as much as in Ramsay or Fergusson. Burns’s landscape painting owes much to the natural idiom established by Anglo-Scot James Thomson, author of The Seasons, and so again speaks of the broad eighteenth-century poetic palette in Burns’s hand.

If the Enlightenment’s taste for the supposedly primitive performer helped provide space for Burns, its cosmopolitan intellect influenced Burns’s treatment of history and psychology. Enlightenment historians were interested in treating with a new objectivity previously marginalized mindsets, and Burns imbibed this lesson so that he is one of the first writers to rehabilitate and even ventriloquize the sad plight of Mary, Queen of Scots (see ‘Lament of Mary Queen of Scots’). Before, a symbol of autocratic, female and Catholic depravity, Mary in Burns’s treatment emerges as someone to whom one might be psychologically sympathetic. From the other end of the religious and ideological spectrum, the Scottish Calvinist, hitherto a byword for dour fanaticism in British literature, emerges in Burns’s hand as a human being of spiritual and cultural wealth (see ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’). Burns’s often identified sympathy for humanity is, indeed, wide and ecumenical and is the product, more than anything, of an enlightened education, which is not to say that his satire does not equally stem from the same source. ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’, one of the great dramatic monologues of world literature, sees the poet lance the religious hypocrite with forensic psychology. ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, a poem that certainly draws on folk legend, is also a complex, barbed performance where a contemporary, ‘educated’ audience is invited to laugh at country superstition, even as Burns is signalling he knows that the salacious material he is providing will be lapped up by this same readership.

Burns was born into a world undergoing rapid transformation. Changed agrarian conditions meant that landlords were increasingly pursuing profit from farming and their tenant farmers were being forced to take larger, less certain leases to pursue increased productivity. The poet’s father, William, came close to bankruptcy under these conditions and his own farming career was a financially precarious affair (these are the situations that underpin the allegorical sketch that is ‘To a Mouse’). Burns thought of emigrating to the West Indies before the success of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect allowed him a brief alternative life as a literary celebrity in Edinburgh and elsewhere furth of his native Ayrshire. His resulting peregrinations in the borders and the highlands allowed him to pursue an increasingly obsessive role of song collector, an activity where his catholic tastes were again to the fore as he assembled a wide portfolio of songs of love, patriotism, labour, Jacobitism and bawdry. On his initial acceptance beyond his own region, Burns had also escaped a rather complicated personal life where he had fathered several illegitimate children and had been publicly censured by the kirk. Eventually, by 1788 Burns was employed by the Excise service and farmed part-time, enabling him to marry one of his early lovers, Jean Armour. Burns though remained something of a libertarian throughout his life (and by the end had fathered at least thirteen children by at least five women).

Burns’s poetic attitude to sex declared it a matter for female as well as male enjoyment (see, for instance, ‘O Saw Ye My Maggie’) and as one of the great and sacred human pleasures in the face of the fabricated fuss of ‘civilization’ in the case of religion, politics and war (see ‘The Holy Fair’, or ‘Why Shouldna Poor Folk Mowe’). Burns at his most dissenting was sceptical about the much-vaunted ‘progress’ of contemporary society (see, for example, ‘Death and Doctor Hornbook’, where advances in medicine – often used for nefarious purposes – have the old allegorical figure of Death repine that humans are usurping his traditional function). Burns knew the darker side of humanity (the philosophic under-felt of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ is that the demons are not so much out there, as to be found rather in the imagination, not to mention the acts, of mankind). A supporter both of the American and French Revolutions, Burns had to be circumspect, most especially since by the time of the latter he was in the employ of the crown. His ‘Scots Wha Hae’ may ostensibly be about the fourteenth-century wars of independence between England and Scotland, but it has a resonance with the more contemporary struggles against ‘tyranny’ to be found among those inspired by the democratic spirit unleashed by the French Revolution. Like others, it may be that he became, in time, rather disillusioned with the altered direction of the French cause (see ‘Does Haughty Gaul Invasion Threat?’), but Burns’s dissent at its best, in any case, runs much deeper than the politics of states. His ‘The Jolly Beggars – a Cantata’ is Burns’s most iconoclastic performance, in which the cumulative vision is one that sees the dearest emotional and physical pleasures of humanity as little recognized by any man-made social or political system. In his scepticism towards such ‘civilized’ fabric, Burns shows himself a great artist, helping usher in the new Romantic age and even the modern world with all its scepticism, as we know it today.

Gerard Carruthers

FOLK-TALES FOR AN
ENLIGHTENED AGE

DEATH AND DOCTOR HORNBOOK
A True Story

Some books are lies frae end to end,

And some great lies were never penn’d:

Ev’n ministers, they hae been kend,

In holy rapture,

A rousing whid at times to vend,

And nail’t wi Scripture.

But this that I am gaun to tell,

Which lately on a night befel,

Is just as true’s the Deil’s in Hell

Or Dublin city:

That e’er he nearer comes oursel

’S a muckle pity!

The clachan yill had made me canty,

I was na fou, but just had plenty:

I stacher’d whyles, but yet took tent ay

To free the ditches;

An hillocks, stanes, an bushes, ken’d ay

Frae ghaists an witches.

The rising moon began to glowr

The distant Cumnock Hills out-owre:

To count her horns, wi a’ my pow’r,

I set myself,

But whether she had three or four,

I cou’d na tell.

I was come round about the hill,

An todlin down on Willie’s mill,

Setting my staff wi a’ my skill,

To keep me sicker;

Tho leeward whyles, against my will,

I took a bicker.

I there wi Something does forgather,

That pat me in an eerie swither;

An awfu scythe, out-owre ae shouther,

Clear-dangling, hang;

A three-tae’d leister on the ither

Lay, large an lang.

Its stature seem’d lang Scotch ells twa,

The queerest shape that e’er I saw,

For fient a wame it had ava;

And then its shanks,

They were as thin, as sharp an sma’

As cheeks o branks.

‘Guid-e’en’, quo I; ‘Friend! hae ye been mawin,

When ither folk are busy sawin?’

It seem’d to mak a kind o stan,

But naething spak.

At length, says I, ‘Friend! whare ye gaun,

Will ye go back?’

It spak right howe, – ‘My name is Death,

But be na fley’d’ – Quoth I, ‘Guid faith,

Ye’re may be come to stap my breath;

But tent me, billie:

I red ye weel, tak care o skaith

See, there’s a gully!’

‘Gudeman,’ quo he, ‘put up your whittle,

I’m no design’d to try its mettle;

But if I did, I wad be kittle

To be mislear’d:

I wad na mind it, no that spittle

Out-owre my beard.’

‘Weel, weel!’ says I, ’a bargain be’t;

Come, gie’s your hand, an sae we’re gree’t;

We’ll ease our shanks, an tak a seat:

Come, gie’s your news:

This while ye hae been monie a gate,

At monie a house.’

‘Ay, ay!’ quo he, an shook his head,

‘It’s e’en a lang, lang time indeed

Sin’ I began to nick the thread,

An choke the breath:

Folk maun do something for their bread,

An sae maun Death.

‘Sax thousand years are near-hand fled

Sin’ I was to the butching bred,

An monie a scheme in vain’s been laid,

To stap or scar me;

Till ane Hornbook’s ta’en up the trade,

An faith! he’ll waur me.

‘Ye ken Jock Hornbook i the clachan?

Defl mak his king’s-hood in a spleuchan!

He’s grown sae weel acquaint wi Buchan

And ither chaps,

The weans haud out their fingers laughin,

An pouk my hips.

‘See, here’s a scythe, an there’s a dart,

They hae piercd monie a gallant heart;

But Doctor Hornbook wi his art

An cursed skill,

Has made them baith no worth a fart,

Damn’d haet they’ll kill!’

‘Twas but yestreen, nae farther gane,

I threw a noble throw at ane;

Wi less, I’m sure, I’ve hundreds slain;

But Deil-ma’care!

It just playd dirl on the bane,

But did nae mair.

‘Hornbook was by wi ready art,

An had sae fortify’d the part,

That when I looked to my dart,

It was sae blunt,

Fient haet o’t wad hae pierc’d the heart

Of a kail-runt.

‘I drew my scythe in sic a fury,

I near-hand cowpit wi my hurry,

But yet the bauld Apothecary

Withstood the shock;

I might as weel hae try’d a quarry

O hard whin-rock.

‘Ev’n them he canna get attended,

Altho their face he ne’er had kend it,

Just shite in a kail-blade, an send it,

As soon’s he smells’t,

Baith their disease, and what will mend it,

At once he tells ’t.

‘And then a’ doctor’s saws and whittles,

Of a’ dimensions, shapes and mettles,

A’ kinds o boxes, mugs, and bottles,

He’s sure to hae;

Their Latin names as fast he rattles

As A B C.

‘Calces o fossils, earths, and trees;

True Sal-marinum o the seas:

The farina of beans and pease,

He has’t in plenty;

Aqua-fontis, what you please,

He can content ye.

‘Forbye some new, uncommon weapons,

Urinus spiritus of capons;

Or Mite-horn shavings, filings, scrapings,

Distill’d per se;

Sal-alkali o Midge-tail-clippings,

And monie mae.

‘Waes me for Johnie Ged’s-Hole now,’

Quoth I, ‘if that thae news be true!

His braw calf-ward whare gowans grew,

Sae white and bonie,

Nae doubt they’ll rive it wi the plew:

They’ll ruin Johnie!’

The creature grain’d an eldritch laugh,

And says: ‘Ye needna yoke the pleugh,

Kirkyards will soon be till’d eneugh,

Tak ye nae fear:

They’ll a’ be trench’d wi monie a sheugh,

In twa-three year.

‘Whare I kill’d ane, a fair strae death

By loss o blood or want o breath,

This night I’m free to tak my aith,

That Hornbook’s skill

Has clad a score i their last claith,

By drap an pill.

‘An honest wabster to his trade,

Whase wife’s twa nieves were scarce weel-bred

Gat tippence-worth to mend her head,

When it was sair;

The wife slade cannie to her bed,

But ne’er spak mair.

‘A countra laird had ta’en the batts,

Or some curmurring in his guts,

His only son for Hornbook sets,

An pays him well:

The lad, for twa guid gimmer-pets

Was laird himsel.

‘A bonie lass, ye kend her name,

Some ill-brewn drink had hov’d her wame;

She trusts hersel, to hide the shame,

In Hornbook’s care;

Horn set her aff to her lang hame

To hide it there.

‘That’s just a swatch o Hornbook’s way;