108- ] English Literature
Robert Burns
Robert
Burns (born January 25, 1759, Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland—died July 21, 1796,
Dumfries, Dumfriesshire), also known familiarly as Rabbie Burns, was a Scottish
poet and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and
is celebrated worldwide, who wrote lyrics and songs in Scots and in English. He
was also famous for his amours and his rebellion against orthodox religion and
morality.. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots
language, although much of his writing is in a "light Scots dialect"
of English, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in
standard English, and in these writings his political or civil commentary is
often at its bluntest.
He
is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and after his death he
became a great source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and
socialism, and a cultural icon in Scotland and among the Scottish diaspora
around the world. Celebration of his life and work became almost a national
charismatic cult during the 19th and 20th centuries, and his influence has long
been strong on Scottish literature. In 2009 he was chosen as the greatest Scot
by the Scottish public in a vote run by Scottish television channel STV.
As
well as making original compositions, Burns also collected folk songs from
across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. His poem (and song)
"Auld Lang Syne" is often sung at Hogmanay (the last day of the
year), and "Scots Wha Hae" served for a long time as an unofficial
national anthem of the country. Other poems and songs of Burns that remain well
known across the world today include "A Red, Red Rose", "A Man's
a Man for A' That", "To a Louse", "To a Mouse",
"The Battle of Sherramuir", "Tam o' Shanter" and "Ae
Fond Kiss".
Life
Robert
Burns was born in 1759, two miles (3 km) south of Ayr,in Alloway, Scotland, ,
the eldest of the seven children of William and Agnes Brown Burnes , tenant
farmer from Dunnottar in the Mearns, and Agnes Broun (1732–1820), the daughter
of a Kirkoswald tenant farmer.[3][4][5] . Like his father, Burns was a
self-educated tenant farmer. However, toward the end of his life he became an
excise collector in Dumfries, where he died in 1796.
He
was born in a house built by his father (now the Burns Cottage Museum), where
he lived until Easter 1766, when he was seven years old. William Burnes sold
the house and took the tenancy of the 70-acre (280,000 m2) Mount Oliphant farm,
southeast of Alloway. Here Burns grew up in poverty and hardship, and the
severe manual labour of the farm left its traces in a weakened constitution.[6]
Burns’s
father had come to Ayrshire from Kincardineshire in an endeavour to improve his
fortunes, but, though he worked immensely hard first on the farm of Mount
Oliphant, which he leased in 1766, and then on that of Lochlea, which he took
in 1777, ill luck dogged him, and he died in 1784, worn out and bankrupt. It
was watching his father being thus beaten down that helped to make Robert both
a rebel against the social order of his day and a bitter satirist of all forms
of religious and political thought that condoned or perpetuated inhumanity. He
received some formal schooling from a teacher as well as sporadically from
other sources. He acquired a superficial reading knowledge of French and a bare
smattering of Latin, and he read most of the important 18th-century English
writers as well as Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. His knowledge of Scottish
literature was confined in his childhood to orally transmitted folk songs and
folk tales together with a modernization of the late 15th-century poem
“Wallace.” His religion throughout his adult life seems to have been a
humanitarian Deism.
He
was given irregular schooling and a lot of his education was with his father,
who taught his children reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history
and also wrote for them A Manual of Christian Belief.[6] He was also taught and
tutored by the young teacher John Murdoch (1747–1824), who opened an
"adventure school" in Alloway in 1763 and taught Latin, French, and
mathematics to both Robert and his brother Gilbert (1760–1827) from 1765 to
1768 until Murdoch left the parish. After a few years of home education, Burns
was sent to Dalrymple Parish School in mid-1772 before returning at harvest
time to full-time farm labouring until 1773, when he was sent to lodge with
Murdoch for three weeks to study grammar, French, and Latin.
By
the age of 15, Burns was the principal labourer at Mount Oliphant. During the
harvest of 1774, he was assisted by Nelly Kilpatrick (1759–1820), who inspired
his first attempt at poetry, "O, Once I Lov'd A Bonnie Lass". In
1775, he was sent to finish his education with a tutor at Kirkoswald, where he met
Peggy Thompson (born 1762), to whom he wrote two songs, "Now Westlin'
Winds" and "I Dream'd I Lay".
Proud,
restless, and full of a nameless ambition, the young Burns did his share of
hard work on the farm. His father’s death made him tenant of the farm of
Mossgiel to which the family moved and freed him to seek male and female
companionship where he would. He took sides against the dominant extreme
Calvinist wing of the church in Ayrshire and championed a local gentleman,
Gavin Hamilton, who had got into trouble with the kirk session (a church court)
for Sabbath breaking. He had an affair with a servant girl at the farm,
Elizabeth Paton, who in 1785 bore his first child, and on the child’s birth he
welcomed it with a lively poem.
Tarbolton
Despite
his ability and character, William Burnes was consistently unfortunate, and
migrated with his large family from farm to farm without ever being able to
improve his circumstances. At Whitsun, 1777, he removed his large family from
the unfavourable conditions of Mount Oliphant to the 130-acre (0.53 km2) farm
at Lochlea, near Tarbolton, where they stayed until William Burnes's death in
1784. Subsequently, the family became integrated into the community of
Tarbolton. To his father's disapproval, Robert joined a country dancing school
in 1779 and, with Gilbert, formed the Tarbolton Bachelors' Club the following
year. His earliest existing letters date from this time, when he began making
romantic overtures to Alison Begbie (b. 1762). In spite of four songs written
for her and a suggestion that he was willing to marry her, she rejected him.
Robert
Burns was initiated into the Masonic lodge St David, Tarbolton, on 4 July 1781,
when he was 22. In December 1781, Burns moved temporarily to Irvine to learn to
become a flax-dresser, but during the workers' celebrations for New Year
1781/1782 (which included Burns as a participant) the flax shop caught fire and
was burnt to the ground. This venture accordingly came to an end, and Burns
went home to Lochlea farm. During this time he met and befriended Richard
Brown, who encouraged him to become a poet. He continued to write poems and
songs and began a commonplace book in 1783, while his father fought a legal
dispute with his landlord. The case went to the Court of Session, and Burnes
was upheld in January 1784, a fortnight before he died.
Mauchline
Robert
and Gilbert made an ineffectual struggle to keep on the farm, but after its
failure they moved to Mossgiel Farm, near Mauchline, in March, which they
maintained with an uphill fight for the next four years. In mid-1784 Burns came
to know a group of girls known collectively as The Belles of Mauchline, one of
whom was Jean Armour, the daughter of a stonemason from Mauchline.
Love
affairs
His
first child, Elizabeth "Bess" Burns, was born to his mother's
servant, Elizabeth Paton, while he was embarking on a relationship with Jean
Armour, who became pregnant with twins in March 1786. Burns signed a paper
attesting his marriage to Jean, but her father "was in the greatest distress,
and fainted away". To avoid disgrace, her parents sent her to live with
her uncle in Paisley. Although Armour's father initially forbade it, they were
married in 1788. Armour bore him nine children, three of whom survived infancy.
Burns
had encountered financial difficulties due to his lack of success as a farmer.
In order to make enough money to support a family, he accepted a job offer from
Patrick Douglas, an absentee landowner who lived in Cumnock, to work on his
sugar plantations near Port Antonio, Jamaica. Douglas' plantations were managed
by his brother Charles, and the job offer, which had a salary of £30 per annum,
entailed working in Jamaica as a "book-keeper", whose duties included
serving as an assistant overseer to the Black slaves on the plantations (Burns
himself described the position as being "a poor Negro driver"). The
position, which was for a single man, would entail Burns living on a plantation
in rustic conditions, as it was unlikely a book keeper would be housed in the
plantation's great house. Apologists have argued in Burns' defence that in
1786, the Scottish abolitionist movement was just beginning to be broadly
active. Burns's authorship of "The Slave's Lament", a 1792 poem
argued as an example of his abolitionist views, is disputed. His name is absent
from any abolitionist petition written in Scotland during the period, and
according to academic Lisa Williams, Burns "is strangely silent on the
question of chattel slavery compared to other contemporary poets. Perhaps this
was due to his government position, severe limitations on free speech at the
time or his association with beneficiaries of the slave trade system".
Around
the same time, Burns fell in love with a woman named Mary Campbell, whom he had
seen in church while he was still living in Tarbolton. She was born near Dunoon
and had lived in Campbeltown before moving to work in Ayrshire. He dedicated
the poems "The Highland Lassie O", "Highland Mary", and
"To Mary in Heaven" to her. His song "Will ye go to the Indies,
my Mary, And leave auld Scotia's shore?" suggests that they planned to
emigrate to Jamaica together. Their relationship has been the subject of much
conjecture, and it has been suggested that on 14 May 1786 they exchanged Bibles
and plighted their troth over the Water of Fail in a traditional form of
marriage. Soon afterwards Mary Campbell left her work in Ayrshire, went to the
seaport of Greenock, and sailed home to her parents in Campbeltown. In October
1786, Mary and her father sailed from Campbeltown to visit her brother in
Greenock. Her brother fell ill with typhus, which she also caught while nursing
him. She died of typhus on 20 or 21 October 1786 and was buried there.
Kilmarnock volume
As Burns lacked the funds to pay for his passage to
Jamaica, Gavin Hamilton suggested that he should "publish his poems in the
mean time by subscription, as a likely way of getting a little money to provide
him more liberally in necessaries for Jamaica." On 3 April Burns sent
proposals for publishing his Scotch Poems to John Wilson, a printer in
Kilmarnock, who published these proposals on 14 April 1786, on the same day
that Jean Armour's father tore up the paper in which Burns attested his
marriage to Jean. To obtain a certificate that he was a free bachelor, Burns
agreed on 25 June to stand for rebuke in the Mauchline kirk for three Sundays.
He transferred his share in Mossgiel farm to his brother Gilbert on 22 July,
and on 30 July wrote to tell his friend John Richmond that, "Armour has
got a warrant to throw me in jail until I can find a warrant for an enormous
sum ... I am wandering from one friend's house to another."
On 31 July 1786 John Wilson published the volume of
works by Robert Burns, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish dialect. Known as the
Kilmarnock volume, it sold for 3 shillings and contained much of his best
writing, including "The Twa Dogs" (which features Luath, his Border
Collie), "Address to the Deil", "Halloween", "The
Cotter's Saturday Night", "To a Mouse", "Epitaph for James
Smith", and "To a Mountain Daisy", many of which had been
written at Mossgiel farm. The success of the work was immediate, and soon he
was known across the country.
Burns
postponed his planned emigration to Jamaica on 1 September, and was at Mossgiel
two days later when he learnt that Jean Armour had given birth to twins. On 4
September Thomas Blacklock wrote a letter expressing admiration for the poetry
in the Kilmarnock volume, and suggesting an enlarged second edition. A copy of
it was passed to Burns, who later recalled, "I had taken the last farewell
of my few friends, my chest was on the road to Greenock; I had composed the
last song I should ever measure in Scotland – 'The Gloomy night is gathering
fast' – when a letter from Dr Blacklock to a friend of mine overthrew all my
schemes, by opening new prospects to my poetic ambition. The Doctor belonged to
a set of critics for whose applause I had not dared to hope. His opinion that I
would meet with encouragement in Edinburgh for a second edition, fired me so
much, that away I posted for that city, without a single acquaintance, or a
single letter of introduction."
Development
as a poet
Burns
developed rapidly throughout 1784 and 1785 as an “occasional” poet who more and
more turned to verse to express his emotions of love, friendship, or amusement
or his ironical contemplation of the social scene. But these were not
spontaneous effusions by an almost illiterate peasant. Burns was a conscious
craftsman; his entries in the commonplace book that he had begun in 1783 reveal
that from the beginning he was interested in the technical problems of
versification.
Though
he wrote poetry for his own amusement and that of his friends, Burns remained
restless and dissatisfied. He won the reputation of being a dangerous rebel
against orthodox religion, and, when in 1786 he fell in love with Jean Armour,
her father refused to allow her to marry Burns even though a child was on the
way and under Scots law mutual consent followed by consummation constituted a
legal marriage. Jean was persuaded by her father to go back on her promise.
Robert, hurt and enraged, took up with another woman, Mary Campbell, who died
soon after. On September 3 Jean bore him twins out of wedlock.
Meanwhile,
the farm was not prospering, and Burns, harassed by insoluble problems, thought
of emigrating. But he first wanted to show his country what he could do. In the
midst of his troubles he went ahead with his plans for publishing a volume of
his poems at the nearby town of Kilmarnock. It was entitled Poems, Chiefly in
the Scottish Dialect and appeared on July 31, 1786. Its success was immediate
and overwhelming. Simple country folk and sophisticated Edinburgh critics alike
hailed it, and the upshot was that Burns set out for Edinburgh on November 27,
1786, to be lionized, patronized, and showered with well-meant but dangerous
advice.
The
Kilmarnock volume was a remarkable mixture. It included a handful of first-rate
Scots poems: “The Twa Dogs,” “Scotch Drink,” “The Holy Fair,” “An Address to
the Deil,” “The Death and Dying Words of Poor Maillie,” “To a Mouse,” “To a
Louse,” and some others, including a number of verse letters addressed to
various friends. There were also a few Scots poems in which he was unable to
sustain his inspiration or that are spoiled by a confused purpose. In addition,
there were six gloomy and histrionic poems in English, four songs, of which
only one, “It Was Upon a Lammas Night,” showed promise of his future greatness
as a song writer, and what to contemporary reviewers seemed the stars of the
volume, “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” and “To a Mountain Daisy.”
Burns
selected his Kilmarnock poems with care: he was anxious to impress a genteel
Edinburgh audience. In his preface he played up to contemporary sentimental
views about the “natural man” and the “noble peasant,” exaggerated his lack of
education, pretended to a lack of natural resources, and in general acted a
part. The trouble was that he was only half acting. He was uncertain enough
about the genteel tradition to accept much of it at its face value, and though,
to his ultimate glory, he kept returning to what his own instincts told him was
the true path for him to follow, far too many of his poems are marred by a
naïve and sentimental moralizing.
After
Edinburgh
Edinburgh
unsettled Burns, and, after a number of amorous and other adventures there and
several trips to other parts of Scotland, he settled in the summer of 1788 at a
farm in Ellisland, Dumfriesshire. At Edinburgh, too, he arranged for a new and
enlarged edition (1787) of his Poems, but little of significance was added to
the Kilmarnock selection. He found farming at Ellisland difficult, though he
was helped by Jean Armour, with whom he had been reconciled and whom he finally
married in 1788.
In
Edinburgh Burns had met James Johnson, a keen collector of Scottish songs who
was bringing out a series of volumes of songs with the music and who enlisted
Burns’s help in finding, editing, improving, and rewriting items. Burns was
enthusiastic and soon became virtual editor of Johnson’s The Scots Musical
Museum. Later he became involved with a similar project for George Thomson, but
Thomson was a more consciously genteel person than Johnson, and Burns had to
fight with him to prevent him from “refining” words and music and so ruining
their character. Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum (1787–1803) and the first
five volumes of Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs for the
Voice (1793–1818) contain the bulk of Burns’s songs. Burns spent the latter
part of his life in assiduously collecting and writing songs to provide words
for traditional Scottish airs. He regarded his work as service to Scotland and
quixotically refused payment. The only poem he wrote after his Edinburgh visit
that showed a hitherto unsuspected side of his poetic genius was “Tam o’
Shanter” (1791), a spirited narrative poem in brilliantly handled
eight-syllable couplets based on a folk legend.
Meanwhile,
Burns corresponded with and visited on terms of equality a great variety of
literary and other people who were considerably “above” him socially. He was an
admirable letter writer and a brilliant talker, and he could hold his own in
any company. At the same time, he was still a struggling tenant farmer, and the
attempt to keep himself going in two different social and intellectual
capacities was wearing him down. After trying for a long time, he finally
obtained a post in the excise service in 1789 and moved to Dumfries in 1791,
where he lived until his death. His life at Dumfries was active. He wrote
numerous “occasional” poems and did an immense amount of work for the two song
collections, in addition to carrying out his duties as exciseman. The outbreak
of the French Revolution excited him, and some indiscreet outbursts nearly lost
him his job, but his reputation as a good exciseman and a politic but
humiliating recantation saved him.
Edinburgh
On
27 November 1786 Burns borrowed a pony and set out for Edinburgh. On 14
December William Creech issued subscription bills for the first Edinburgh
edition of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish dialect, which was published on 17
April 1787. Within a week of this event, Burns had sold his copyright to Creech
for 100 guineas. For the edition, Creech commissioned Alexander Nasmyth to
paint the oval bust-length portrait now in the Scottish National Portrait
Gallery, which was engraved to provide a frontispiece for the book. Nasmyth had
come to know Burns and his fresh and appealing image has become the basis for
almost all subsequent representations of the poet. In Edinburgh, he was
received as an equal by the city's men of letters—including Dugald Stewart,
Robertson, Blair and others—and was a guest at aristocratic gatherings, where
he bore himself with unaffected dignity. Here he encountered, and made a
lasting impression on, the 16-year-old Walter Scott, who described him later
with great admiration:
[His
person was strong and robust;] his manners rustic, not clownish, a sort of
dignified plainness and simplicity which received part of its effect perhaps
from knowledge of his extraordinary talents. His features are presented in Mr
Nasmyth's picture but to me it conveys the idea that they are diminished, as if
seen in perspective. I think his countenance was more massive than it looks in
any of the portraits ... there was a strong expression of shrewdness in all his
lineaments; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and
temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, and literally glowed when he
spoke with feeling or interest. [I never saw such another eye in a human head,
though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time.]
The
new edition of his poems brought Burns £400. His stay in the city also resulted
in some lifelong friendships, among which were those with Lord Glencairn, and
Frances Anna Dunlop (1730–1815), who became his occasional sponsor and with
whom he corresponded for many years until a rift developed. He embarked on a
relationship with the separated Agnes "Nancy" McLehose (1758–1841),
with whom he exchanged passionate letters under pseudonyms (Burns called himself
"Sylvander" and Nancy "Clarinda"). When it became clear
that Nancy would not be easily seduced into a physical relationship, Burns
moved on to Jenny Clow (1766–1792), Nancy's domestic servant, who bore him a
son, Robert Burns Clow, in 1788. He also had an affair with a servant girl,
Margaret "May" Cameron. His relationship with Nancy concluded in 1791
with a final meeting in Edinburgh before she sailed to Jamaica for what turned
out to be a short-lived reconciliation with her estranged husband. Before she
left, he sent her the manuscript of "Ae Fond Kiss" as a farewell.
In
Edinburgh, in early 1787, he met James Johnson, a struggling music engraver and
music seller with a love of old Scots songs and a determination to preserve
them. Burns shared this interest and became an enthusiastic contributor to The
Scots Musical Museum. The first volume was published in 1787 and included three
songs by Burns. He contributed 40 songs to volume two, and he ended up
responsible for about a third of the 600 songs in the whole collection, as well
as making a considerable editorial contribution. The final volume was published
in 1803.
Dumfriesshire
Ellisland
Farm
On
his return from Edinburgh in February 1788, he resumed his relationship with
Jean Armour and they married in March 1788. He took out a lease on Ellisland
Farm, Dumfriesshire, settling there in June. He also took up a training
position as an exciseman or gauger, which involved long rides and detailed
bookkeeping. He was appointed to duties in Customs and Excise in 1789. Burns
chose the land of Ellisland a few miles north of the town of Dumfries, from
Patrick Miller's estate at Dalswinton, where he had a new farmhouse and byre
built. He and Jean moved in the following summer 1789 to the new farm house at
Ellisland. In November 1790, he had written his masterpiece, the narrative poem
"Tam O' Shanter". The Ellisland farm beside the river Nith, now holds
a unique collection of Burns's books, artefacts, and manuscripts and is mostly
preserved as when Burns and his young family lived there.[citation needed]
Burns gave up the farm in 1791 to move to Dumfries. About this time he was
offered and declined an appointment in London on the staff of The Star
newspaper, and refused to become a candidate for a newly created Chair of
Agriculture in the University of Edinburgh, although influential friends
offered to support his claims. He did however accept membership of the Royal
Company of Archers in 1792.
Lyricist
After
giving up his farm, he removed to Dumfries. It was at this time that, being
requested to write lyrics for The Melodies of Scotland, he responded by
contributing over 100 songs. He made major contributions to George Thomson's A
Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice as well as to James
Johnson's Scots Musical Museum.[citation needed] Arguably his claim to
immortality chiefly rests on these volumes, which placed him in the front rank
of lyric poets. As a songwriter he provided his own lyrics, sometimes adapted
from traditional words. He put words to Scottish folk melodies and airs which
he collected, and composed his own arrangements of the music including
modifying tunes or recreating melodies on the basis of fragments. In letters he
explained that he preferred simplicity, relating songs to spoken language which
should be sung in traditional ways. The original instruments would be fiddle
and the guitar of the period which was akin to a cittern, but the transcription
of songs for piano has resulted in them usually being performed in classical
concert or music hall styles. At the 3 week Celtic Connections festival Glasgow
each January, Burns songs are often performed with both fiddle and guitar.
Thomson
as a publisher commissioned arrangements of "Scottish, Welsh and Irish
Airs" by such eminent composers of the day as Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van
Beethoven, with new lyrics. The contributors of lyrics included Burns. While
such arrangements had wide popular appeal, Beethoven's music was more advanced
and difficult to play than Thomson intended.
Burns
described how he had to master singing the tune before he composed the words:
My
way is: I consider the poetic sentiment, correspondent to my idea of the
musical expression, then chuse my theme, begin one stanza, when that is
composed—which is generally the most difficult part of the business—I walk out,
sit down now and then, look out for objects in nature around me that are in
unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy and workings of my bosom,
humming every now and then the air with the verses I have framed. when I feel
my Muse beginning to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, and
there commit my effusions to paper, swinging, at intervals, on the hind-legs of
my elbow chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as my, pen
goes.
Burns
also worked to collect and preserve Scottish folk songs, sometimes revising,
expanding, and adapting them. One of the better known of these collections is
The Merry Muses of Caledonia (the title is not Burns's), a collection of bawdy
lyrics that were popular in the music halls of Scotland as late as the 20th
century. At Dumfries, he wrote his world famous song "A Man's a Man for A'
That", which was based on the writings in The Rights of Man by Thomas
Paine, one of the chief political theoreticians of the American Revolution.
Burns sent the poem anonymously in 1795 to the Glasgow Courier. He was also a
radical for reform and wrote poems for democracy, such as – "Parcel of
Rogues to the Nation" and the "Rights of Women".
Many
of Burns's most famous poems are songs with the music based upon older
traditional songs. For example, "Auld Lang Syne" is set to the
traditional tune "Can Ye Labour Lea", "A Red, Red Rose" is
set to the tune of "Major Graham" and "The Battle of
Sherramuir" is set to the "Cameronian Rant".
Political
views
Burns
alienated some acquaintances by freely expressing sympathy with the French, and
American Revolutions, for the advocates of democratic reform and votes for all
men and the Society of the Friends of the People which advocated Parliamentary
Reform. His political views came to the notice of his employers, to which he
pleaded his innocence. Burns met other radicals at the Globe Inn Dumfries. As
an Exciseman he felt compelled to join the Royal Dumfries Volunteers in March
1795.
Failing
health and death
Latterly
Burns lived in Dumfries in a two-storey red sandstone house on Mill Hole Brae,
now Burns Street. The home is now a museum. He went on long journeys on
horseback, often in harsh weather conditions as an Excise Supervisor, and was
kept very busy doing reports. The father of four young children, he was also
frequently occupied as a song collector and songwriter.
As
his health began to give way, he aged prematurely and fell into fits of
despondency. Rumours of intemperance (alleged mainly by temperance activist
James Currie) may have been overstated. Hard manual farm labour earlier in his
life may have damaged Burns' health. Burns possibly had a long-standing
rheumatic heart condition, perhaps beginning when he was 21, and a bacterial
infection, possibly arising from a tooth abcess, may have exacerbated this.
On
the morning of 21 July 1796, Burns died in Dumfries, at the age of 37.
The
funeral took place on Monday 25 July 1796, the day that his son Maxwell was
born. He was at first buried in the far corner of St. Michael's Churchyard in
Dumfries; a simple "slab of freestone" was erected as his gravestone
by Jean Armour, which some felt insulting to his memory. His body was
eventually moved to its final location in the same cemetery, the Burns
Mausoleum, in September 1817. The body of his widow Jean Armour was buried with
his in 1834.
After
Burns death
Armour
had taken steps to secure his personal property, partly by liquidating two
promissory notes amounting to fifteen pounds sterling (about 1,100 pounds at
2009 prices). The family went to the Court of Session in 1798 with a plan to
support his surviving children by publishing a four-volume edition of his
complete works and a biography written by James Currie. Subscriptions were
raised to meet the initial cost of publication, which was in the hands of
Thomas Cadell and William Davies in London and William Creech, bookseller in
Edinburgh. Hogg records that fund-raising for Burns's family was embarrassingly
slow, and it took several years to accumulate significant funds through the
efforts of John Syme and Alexander Cunningham.
Burns
was posthumously given the freedom of the town of Dumfries. Hogg records that
Burns was given the freedom of the Burgh of Dumfries on 4 June 1787, 9 years
before his death, and was also made an Honorary Burgess of Dumfries.
Through
his five surviving children (of 12 born), Burns has over 900 living descendants
as of 2019.
Poetical
Career
Throughout
his life Robert Burns was also a practicing poet. His poetry recorded and
celebrated aspects of farm life, regional experience, traditional culture,
class culture and distinctions, and religious practice. He is considered the
national poet of Scotland. Although he did not set out to achieve that
designation, he clearly and repeatedly expressed his wish to be called a Scots
bard, to extol his native land in poetry and song, as he does in “The Answer”:
Ev’n
thena wish (I mind its power)
A
wish, that to my latest hour
Shall
strongly heave my breast;
That
I for poor auld Scotland’s sake
Some
useful plan, or book could make,
Or
sing a sang at least.
And
perhaps he had an intimation that his “wish” had some basis in reality when he
described his Edinburgh reception in a letter of December 7, 1786 to his friend
Gavin Hamilton: “I am in a fair way of becoming as eminent as Thomas a Kempis
or John Bunyan; and you may expect henceforth to see my birthday inserted among
the wonderful events, in the Poor Robin’s and Aberdeen Almanacks. … and by all
probability I shall soon be the tenth Worthy, and the eighth Wise Man, of the
world.”
That
he is considered Scotland’s national poet today owes much to his position as
the culmination of the Scottish literary tradition, a tradition stretching back
to the court makars, to Robert Henryson and William Dunbar, to the 17th-century
vernacular writers from James VI of Scotland to William Hamilton of
Gilbertfield, to early 18th-century forerunners such as Allan Ramsay and Robert
Fergusson. Burns is often seen as the end of that literary line both because
his brilliance and achievement could not be equaled and, more particularly,
because the Scots vernacular in which he wrote some of his celebrated works
was—even as he used it—becoming less and less intelligible to the majority of
readers, who were already well-versed with English culture and language. The
shift toward English cultural and linguistic hegemony had begun in 1603 with
the Union of the Crowns when James VI of Scotland became James I of Great
Britain; it had continued in 1707 with the merging of the Scottish and English
Parliaments in London; and it was virtually a fait accompli by Burns’s day save
for pockets of regional culture and dialect. Thus, one might say that Burns
remains the national poet of Scotland because Scottish literature ceased with
him, thereafter yielding poetry in English or in Anglo-Scots or in imitations
of Burns.
Burns,
however, has been viewed alternately as the beginning of another literary
tradition: he is often called a pre-Romantic poet for his sensitivity to
nature, his high valuation of feeling and emotion, his spontaneity, his fierce
stance for freedom and against authority, his individualism, and his
antiquarian interest in old songs and legends. The many backward glances of
Romantic poets to Burns, as well as their critical comments and pilgrimages to
the locales of Burns’s life and work, suggest the validity of connecting Burns
with that pervasive European cultural movement of the late 18h and early 19th
centuries which shared with him a concern for creating a better world and for
cultural renovation.
Nonetheless,
the very qualities which seem to link Burns to the Romantics were logical
responses to the 18th-century Scotland into which he was born. And his humble,
agricultural background made him in some ways a spokesperson for every Scot,
especially the poor and disenfranchised. He was aware of humanity’s unequal
condition and wrote of it and of his hope for a better world of equality
throughout his life in epistle, poem, and song—perhaps most eloquently in the
recurring comparison of rich and poor in the song “For A’ That and A’ That,”
which resoundingly affirms the humanity of the honest, hard-working, poor, man:
“The Honest man, though e’er sae poor, / Is king o’ men for a’ that.”
Burns
is an important and complex literary personage for several reasons: his place
in the Scottish literary tradition, his pre-Romantic proclivities, his position
as a human being from the less-privileged classes imaging a better world. To
these may be added his particular artistry, especially his ability to create
encapsulating and synthesizing lines, phrases, and stanzas which continue to
speak to and sum up the human condition. His recurring and poignant hymns to
relationships are illustrative, as in the lines from the song beginning “Ae
fond Kiss”:
Had
we never lov’d sae kindly,
Had
we never lov’d sae blindly!
Never
met—or never parted,
We
had ne’er been broken-hearted.
The
Scotland in which Burns lived was a country in transition, sometimes in
contradiction, on several fronts. The political scene was in flux, the result
of the 1603 and 1707 unions which had stripped Scotland of its autonomy and
finally all but muzzled the Scottish voice, as decisions and directives issued
from London rather than from Edinburgh. A sense of loss led to questions and
sometimes to actions, as in the Jacobite rebellions early in the 18th century.
Was there a national identity? Should aspects of Scottish uniqueness be
collected and enshrined? Should Scotland move ahead, adopting English manners,
language, and cultural forms? No single answer was given to any of these
questions. But change was afoot: Scots moved closer to an English norm, particularly
as it was used by those in the professions, religion, and elite circles; “think
in English, feel in Scots” seems to have been a widespread practice, which
limited the communicative role, as well as the intelligibility, of Scots. For a
time, however, remnants of the Scots dialect met with approbation among certain
circles. A loose-knit movement to preserve evidences of Scottish culture
embraced products that had the stamp of Scotland upon them, lauding Burns as a
poet from the soil; assembling, editing, and collecting Scottish ballads and
songs; sometimes accepting James Macpherson’s Ossianic offerings; and lauding
poetic Jacobitism. This movement was both nationalistic and antiquarian,
recognizing Scottish identity through the past and thereby implicitly accepting
contemporary assimilation.
Perhaps
the most extraordinary transition occurring between 1780 and 1830 was the
economic shift from agriculture to industry that radically altered social
arrangements and increased social inequities. While industrialization finished
the job agricultural changes had set the transition in motion earlier in the
18th century. Agriculture in Scotland had typically followed a widespread
European form known as runrig, wherein groups of farmers rented and worked a
piece of land which was periodically re-sub-divided to insure diachronic if not
synchronic equity. Livestock was removed to the hills for grazing during the
growing season since there were no enclosures. A subsistence arrangement, this
form of agriculture dictated settlement patterns and life possibilities and was
linked inextricably to the ebb and flow and unpredictable vicissitudes of the
seasons. The agricultural revolution of the 18th century introduced new crops,
such as sown grasses and turnips, which made wintering over of animals
profitable; advocated enclosing fields to keep livestock out; developed new
equipment—in particular the iron plow—and improved soil preparation; and
generally suggested economies of scale. Large landowners, seeing profit in making
“improvements,” displaced runrig practices and their adherents, broadening the
social and economic gap between landowner and former tenant; the latter
frequently became a farm worker. Haves and have-nots became more clearly
delineated; “improvements” depended on capital and access to descriptive
literature. Many small tenant farmers foundered during the transition,
including both Burnes and his father.
Along
with the gradual change in agriculture and shift to industry there was a
concomitant shift from rural to urban spheres of influence. The move from Scots
to greater reliance on English was accelerated by the availability of cheap
print made possible by the Industrial Revolution. Print became the medium of
choice, lessening the power of oral culture’s artistic forms and aesthetic
structures; print, a visual medium, fostered linear structures and perceptual
frameworks, replacing in part the circular patterns and preferences of the oral
world.
Two
forces, however, served to keep change from being a genuine revolution and made
it more nearly a transformation by fits and starts: the Presbyterian church and
traditional culture. Presbyterianism was established as the Kirk of Scotland in
1668. Although fostering education, the printed word, and, implicitly, English
for specific religious ends, and thus seeming to support change, religion was
largely a force for constraint and uniformity. Religion was aided but
simultaneously undermined by traditional culture, the inherited ways of living,
perceiving, and creating. Traditional culture was conservative, preferring the
old ways—agricultural subsistence or near subsistence patterns and oral forms
of information and artistry conveyed in customs, songs, and stories. But if
both religion and traditional culture worked to maintain the status quo,
traditional culture was finally more flexible: as inherited, largely oral
knowledge and art always adapting to fit the times, traditional culture was
less rigid. It was diverse and it celebrated freedom.
Scotland’s
upheavals were in many ways Burns’s upheavals as well: he embraced cultural
nationalism to celebrate Scotland in poem and song; he struggled as a tenant
farmer without the requisite capital and know-how in the age of “improvement”;
he combined the oral world of his childhood and region with the education his
father arranged through an “adventure school”; he accepted, but resented, the
moral judgments of the Kirk against himself and friends such as Gavin Hamilton;
he knew the religious controversies which pitted moderate against conservative
on matters of church control and belief; he reveled in traditional culture’s
balladry, song, proverbs, and customs. He was a man of his time, and his
success as poet, songwriter, and human being owes much to the way he responded
to the world around him. Some have called him the typical Scot, Everyman.
Burns
began his career as a local poet writing for a local, known audience to whom he
looked for immediate response, as do all artists in a traditional context. He
wrote on topics of appeal both to himself and to his artistic constituency,
often in a wonderfully appealing conversational style.
Burns’s
early life was spent in the southwest of Scotland, where his father worked as
an estate gardener in Alloway, near Ayr. Subsequently William Burnes leased
successively two farms in the region, Mount Oliphant nearby and Lochlie near
Tarbolton. Between 1765 and 1768 Burns attended an “adventure” school
established by his father and several neighbors with John Murdock as teacher,
and in 1775 he attended a mathematics school in Kirkoswald. These formal and
more or less institutionalized bouts of education were extended at home under
the tutelage of his father. Burns was identified as odd because he always
carried a book; a countrywoman in Dunscore, who had seen Burns riding slowly
among the hills reading, once remarked, “That’s surely no a good man, for he
has aye a book in his hand!” The woman no doubt assumed an oral norm, the
medium of traditional culture.
Life
on a pre-or semi-improved farm was backbreaking and frequently heartbreaking,
since bad weather might wipe out a year’s effort. Bad seed would not prosper
even in the best-prepared soil. Rain and damp, though necessary for crop
growth, were often “too much of a good thing.” Burns grew up knowing the
vagaries of farming and understanding full well both mental preparation and
long days of physical labor. His father had married late and was thus older
than many men with a household of children; he was also less physically
resilient and less able to endure the tenant farmer’s lot. Bad seed and rising
rents at various times spelled failure to his ventures. At the time of his
approaching death and a disastrous end to the Lochlie lease, Burns and his
brother secretly leased Mossgiel Farm near Mauchline. Burns was 25.
The
death of his father, the family’s patriarchal force for constraint in religion,
education, and morality, freed Burns. He quickly became recognized as a rhymer,
sometimes signing himself after the farm as Rab Mossgiel. The midwife’s prophecy
at his birth—that he would be much attracted to the lasses—became a reality; in
1785 he fathered a daughter by Betty Paton, and in 1786 had twins by Jean
Armour. His fornications and his thoughts about the Kirk, made public, opened
him to church censure, which he bore but little accepted. It was almost as
though the floodgates had burst: his poetic output between 1784 and 1786
includes many of those works on which his reputation stands—epistles, satires,
manners-painting, and songs—many of which he circulated in the manner of the
times: in manuscript or by reading aloud. Many works of this period,
judiciously chosen to appeal to a wider audience, appeared in the first formal
publication of his work, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, printed in Kilmarnock
in 1786 and paid for by subscriptions.
The
Kilmarnock edition might be seen as the result of two years or so of riotous
living: much conviviality, much socializing with women in an era before birth
control, much thinking about humanity without the “correcting” restraint of the
paterfamilias, much poetry and song ostensibly about the immediate environment
but encapsulating aspects of the human condition. All of this was certainly
more interesting than the agricultural round, which offered a physical constraint
to match the moral and mental constraint of religion. Both forms of constraint
impeded the delight in life that many of Burns’s finest works exhibit.
Furthermore, he was in serious trouble with the Armour family, who destroyed a
written and acceptable, if a bit unorthodox, marriage contract. He resolved to
get out of town quickly and to leave behind something to prove his worth. He
seems to have made plans to immigrate to the West Indies, and he brought to
fruition his plan to publish some of his already well-received works. One of
the 612 copies reached Edinburgh and was perceived to have merit. Informed of
this casual endorsement, Burns abandoned his plans for immigration—if they had
ever been serious—and left instead for Edinburgh.
The
Kilmarnock edition shows Burns’s penchant for self-presentation and his ability
to choose variable poses to fit the expectations of the intended receiver.
Burns presents himself as an untutored rhymer, who wrote to counteract life’s
woes; he feigns anxiety over the reception of his poems; he pays tribute to the
genius of the Scots poets Ramsay and Fergusson; and he requests the reader’s
indulgence. In large measure, the material belies the tentativeness of the
preface, revealing a poet aware of his literary tradition, capable of building
on it, and deft in using a variety of voices—from “couthie” and colloquial,
through sentimental and tender, to satiric and pointed. But the book also
contains evidence of Burns as local poet, turning life to verse in slight,
spur-of-the-moment pieces, occasional rhymes made on local personages, often to
the gratification of their enemies. The Kilmarnock edition, however, is more
revealing for its illustration of his place in a literary tradition: “The
Cotter’s Saturday Night,” for example, echoes Fergusson’s “The Farmer’s Ingle”
(1773); “The Holy Fair” is part of a long tradition of peasant brawls, drawing
on a verse form, the Chrystis Kirk stanza, known by the name of a
representative poem attributed to James I: “Chrystis Kirk of the Grene.” Many
of Burns’s poems and verse epistles employ the six-line stanza, derived from
the medieval tail-rhyme stanza which was used in Scotland by Sir David Lindsay
in Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (1602) but was probably seen by Burns in
James Watson’s Choice Collection (1706-1711) in works by Hamilton of
Gilbertfield and Robert Sempill of Beltrees; Sempill’s “The Life and Death of
Habbie Simpson” gave the form its accepted name, Standard Habbie. Quotations
from and allusions to English literary figures and their works appear
throughout his work: Thomas Gray in “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” Alexander
Pope in “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” John Milton in “Address to the Deil.”
Poems,
Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (an undistinguished title used often before and
after as a title of local poets’ effusions) was a success. With all its obvious
contradictions—untutored but clearly lettered; peasant but perspicacious;
conscious national pride (“The Vision,” “Scotch Drink”) together with multiple
references to other literatures—the Kilmarnock edition set the stage for
Burns’s success in Edinburgh and anticipated his conscious involvement in the
cultural nationalistic movement. Such works as “Address to the Deil” anticipate
this later concern:
O
Thou, whatever title suit theee!
Auld
Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie,
Wha
in you cavern grim an’ sooty
Clos’d
under hatches,
Spairges
about the brunstane cootie,
To
scaud poor wretches!
Hear
me, auld Hangie, for a wee,
An’
let poor, damned bodies bee;
I’m
sure sma’ pleasure it can gie,
Ev’n
to a deil,
To
skelp an’ scaud poor dogs like me,
An’
hear us squeel!
These
two stanzas provide evidence of the implicit tension between established
religion and traditional culture rampant in Burns’s early work. Burns takes his
epigraph from Milton—
O
Prince, O chief of many throned pow’rs,
That
led th’ embattl’d Seraphim to war—
conjuring
up biblical ideas of Satan as fallen angel, hell as a place of fire and
damnation, the devil as punisher of evil. But Burns’s deil, familiarly
addressed, is an almost comic, ever-present figure, tempting humanity but
escapable. Burns allies him with traditional forces—spunkies, waterkelpies—and
gives old Clootie no more force or power. Traditional notions of the devil are
much less restraining than the formal religious concepts. By juxtaposing Satan
and Auld Nickie, Burns conjures up metaphorically the two dominant cultural
forces—one for constraint and the other for freedom. Here as elsewhere in
Burns’s work, freedom reigns.
Burns’s
affection for traditional culture is amply illustrated. In a well-known
autobiographical letter to Dr. John Moore (August 2, 1787) he pays tribute to
its early influence when he says, “In my infant and boyish days too, I owed
much to an old Maid of my Mother’s, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity and
superstition.—She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the county of tales
and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks,
spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips,
giants, inchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery.—This cultivated the
latent seeds of Poesy.”
Burns’s
first and last works were songs, reflecting his deep connection with oral
ballad and song. The world of custom and belief is most particularly described
in “Halloween,” an ethnographic poem with footnotes elucidating rural customs.
Many forms of prognostication are possible on this evening when this world and
the other world or worlds hold converse, a time when unusual things are deemed
possible—especially foretelling one’s future mate and status. Burns’s notes and
prefatory material have often been used as evidence of his distance from and
perhaps disdain for such practices. Yet the poem itself is peopled with a
sympathetic cast of youths, chaperoned by an old woman, joined together for fun
and fellowship. The youthful players try several prognosticatory rites in
attempting to anticipate their future love relationships. In one stanza Burns
alludes to a particular practice—“pou their stalks o’ corn”—and explains in his
note that “they go to the barn-yard, and pull each, at three several times, a
stalk of Oats. If the third stalk wants the top-pickle, that is, the grain at
the top of the stalk, the party in question will come to the marriage-bed any thing
but a Maid.” Burns concludes the stanza by saying that one Nelly almost lost
her top-pickle that very night. Some of the activities in what is essentially a
preliminary courtship ritual are frightening, requiring collective daring.
Burns describes the antics, anticipation, and anxieties of the participants as
they enjoy the communal event, which is concluded with food and drink:
Wi’
merry sangs, an’ friendly cracks,
I
wat they did na weary;
And
unco tales, an’ funnie jokes,
Their
sports were cheap an’ cheary:
Till
buttr’d So’ns, wi’ fragrant lunt,
Set
a’ their gabs a steerin;
Syne,
wi’ a social glass o’ strunt,
They
parted aff careerin
Fu’
blythe that night.
“The
Cotter’s Saturday Night” is on one level a microcosmic description of the
agricultural, social, and religious practices of the farm worker—albeit an
idealized vision that reiterates Burns’s absolute affection for traditional
aspects of life, a fictive version of his own experience. The poem is a
celebration of the family and of the lives of simple folk, sanitized of
hardship, crop failure, sickness, and death. Burns achieves this vision by
focusing on a moment of domestic repose of a family reunited in love and
affection. The Master and Mistress are the architects of the family circle;
Jenny and “a neebor lad” seem destined to provide continuity. The gathering
concludes with family worship: songs are sung and Scripture is read, including
biblical accounts of human failings by way of warning. The domestic celebration
of religion within the context of traditional life is noble and good.
From
Scenes like these, old SCOTIA’S grandeur springs,
That
makes her lov’d at home, rever’d abroad:
Princes
and lords are but the breath of kings,
‘An
honest man’s the noble work of GOD.’
This
poem was lauded largely because of its linguistic accessibility, as a pastoral
expression of nationalism, a symbolic representation of the “soul of Scotland.”
Auguste Angellier offers critical affirmation: “Never has the existence of the
poor been invested with so much dignity.” The lowly farm worker is depicted as
the ideal Scot. The cotter’s good life was already an anachronism, so Burns’s
depiction in this early poem is antiquarian, backward-looking, and imbued with
cultural nationalism—perspectives which became intensified and focused in his
later work. But by 1784-1785 his work was already engaged in dialogue with
larger cultural issues. The linguistic attributes of the poem become part of
this conversation as Burns modulates from Scots into Scots English to English,
poetically reflecting the dichotomy of feeling and thinking. The stability of
life as described in this poem is a wonderful accommodation of traditional
culture and religion; celebration of belief in God follows naturally from
sharing a way of life. But the religion that is here applauded is domestic and
familial. Institutional religion Burns saw as something quite other.
Institutional
religion at its worst is excessively hierarchical, constraining, and above all
unjust, damning some and saving others. As a child Burns was steeped in the
doctrine of predestination and effectual calling, which asserts that some
people are “elected” by God to be saved without any consideration of life and
works; the unchosen are damned no matter what they do. Carried to an extreme,
the doctrine would permit an individual who felt assured of election to do all
manner of evil, a scenario developed in Burns’s “Holy Willie’s Prayer.” Burns
could not accept the orthodox position of the so-called Auld Lichts; he
believed in the power of good works to determine salvation. His corner of
Scotland was a bastion of conservative religious position and practice: the
Kirk session served as a moral watchdog, summoning congregants who strayed from
the “straight and narrow” and handing out censure and punishment.
Thus
religion was a cultural force with which to contend. Burns participated in the
debate through poetry, circulating his material orally and in manuscript. Chief
among his works in this vein is the satire “Holy Willie’s Prayer.” Prompted by
the defeat of the Auld Licht censure of his friend Hamilton for failure to
participate in public worship, the poem, shaped like a prayer, is put into the
mouth of the Auld Licht adherent Holy Willie. It begins with an effective
invocation which articulates Willie’s doctrinal stance on predestination in
Standard Habbie:
O
Thou that in the heavens does dwell!
Wha,
as it pleases best thysel,
Sends
ane to heaven an ten to h-ll,
A’
for thy glory!
And
no for ony gude or ill
They’ve
done before thee.
The
poem continues with Willie’s thanks for his own “elected” status and reaches
its highest moments in Willie’s confession that “At times I’m fash’d wi’
fleshly lust.” Burns has Willie condemn himself by describing moments of
fornication and justifying them as temptations visited on him by God. The
concluding stanzas recount Willie’s opinion of Hamilton—“He drinks, and swears,
and plays at cartes”—and his chagrin that Minister Auld was defeated. The poem
ends with the requisite petition, calling for divine vengeance on those who
disagree with him and asking blessings for himself and his like. Burns condemns
both the doctrine and the practice of institutional religion.
The
tensions between religion and traditional culture are particularly obvious in
“The Holy Fair.” Burns’s depiction of an open-air communion gathering, with
multiple sermons and exhortations, includes an important subtext on the
sociability of food, drink, chat, and perhaps love—attractions which will lead
to behavior decried in sermons that very day. Again religious constraint and
traditional license meet, with freedom clearly preferable:
How
monie hearts this day converts,
O’
Sinners and o’ Lasses!
Their
hearts o’ stane, gin night are gane
As
saft as ony flesh is.
There’s
some are fou o’ love divine;
There’s
some are fou o’ brandy;
An’
monie jobs that day begin,
May
end in Houghmagandie
Some
ither day.
“The
Jolly Beggars; or, Love and Liberty: A Cantata” goes even further toward
affirming freedom through traditional culture. Probably written in 1785 but not
published until after Burns’s death, this work combines poetry and song to
describe a joyful gathering of society’s rejects: the maimed and physically
deformed, prostitutes, and thieves. The work alternates life histories with
narrative passages describing the convivial interaction of the social outcasts.
Despite their low status, the accounts they give of their lives reveal an
unrivaled ebullience and joy. The texts are wedded to traditional and popular
tunes. The choice of tunes is not random but underlines the characteristics and
experiences described in the words: thus the tinker describes his occupation to
the woman he has seduced away from a fiddler to the tune “Clout the Caudron,”
whose traditional text describes an itinerant fixer of pots and pans, that is,
a seducer of women. The assembled company exhibits acceptance of their lots in
life, an acceptance made possible because their positions are shared by all
present and by the power of drink to soften hardships. Stripped of all the
components of human decency, lacking religious or material riches, the beggars
are jolly through drink and fellowship, rich in song and story—traditional
pastimes. The cantata rushes to a riotous conclusion in which those assembled
sing a rousing countercultural chorus that would certainly have received Holy
Willie’s harshest censure:
A
fig for those by LAW protected,
LIBERTY’s
a glorious feast!
COURTS
for Cowards were erected,
CHURCHES
built to please the Priest.
“The
Jolly Beggars” implicitly speaks to the economic situation of the time: more
and more people were made jobless and homeless in the rush for “improvement,”
and the older pattern of taking care of the parish poor had broken down because
of greater mobility and greater numbers of needy. Burns offers no solution, but
he does illustrate the beggars’ humanity and, above all, their capacity for
Life with a capital L—a mode of behavior that is convivial; unites people in
story, song, and drink; and exudes delight and joy: traditional culture wins
again.
Burns
worked out in poetry some of his responses to his own culture by showing
opposing views of how life should be lived. Descriptions of his own experiences
stimulated musings on constraint and freedom. Critical tradition says that John
Richmond and Burns observed the beggars in Poosie Nansie’s “The Holy Fair” may
be based on the Mauchline Annual Communion, which was held on the second Sunday
of August in 1785; the gathering of the cotter’s family may not describe a
specific event but certainly depicts a generalized and typical picture. Thus
Burns’s own experiences became the base from which he responded to and
considered larger cultural and human issues.
The
Kilmarnock edition changed Burns’s life: it sprang him away for a year and a
half from the grind of agricultural routine, and it made him a public figure.
Burns arrived in the capital city in the heyday of cultural nationalism, and
his own person and works were hailed as evidences of a Scottish culture: the
Scotsman as a peasant, close to the soil, possessing the “soul” of nature; the
works as products of that peasant, in Scots, containing echoes of earlier
written and oral Scottish literature.
Burns
went to Edinburgh to arrange for a new edition of his poems and was immediately
taken up by the literati and proclaimed a remarkable Scot. He procured the
support of the Caledonian Hunt as sponsors of the Edinburgh edition and set to
work with the publisher William Creech to arrange a slightly altered and
expanded edition. He was wined and dined by the taste-setters, almost without
exception persons from a different class and background from his. He was the
“hit” of the season, and he knew full well what was going on: he intensified
aspects of his rural persona to conform to expectations. He represented the
creativity of the peasant Scot and was for a season “Exhibit A” for a distinct
Scottish heritage.
Burns
used this time for a variety of experiments, trying on several roles. He
entered into what seems to have been a platonic dalliance with a woman of some
social standing, Agnes McLehose, who was herself in an ambiguous social
situation—her husband having been in Jamaica for some time. The relationship,
whatever its true nature, stimulated a correspondence, in which Burns and Mrs.
McLehose styled themselves Sylvander and Clarinda and wrote predictably
elevated, formulaic, and seemingly insincere letters. Burns lacks conviction in
this role; but he met more congenial persons: boon companions, males whom he
joined in back-street howffs for lively talk, song, and bawdry.
If
the Caledonian Hunt represented the late-18th-century crème de la crème, the
Crochallan Fencibles, one of the literary and convivial clubs of the day in
which members took on assumed names and personae, represented the middle ranks
of society where Burns felt more at home. In the egalitarian clubs and howffs
Burns met more sympathetic individuals, among them James Johnson, an engraver
in the initial stages of a project to print all the tunes of Scotland. That
meeting shifted Burns’s focus to song, which became his principal creative form
for the rest of his life.
The
Edinburgh period provided an interlude of potentiality and experimentation.
Burns made several trips to the Borders and Highlands, often being received as
a notable and renowned personage. Within a year and a half Burns moved from
being a local poet to one with a national reputation and was well on his way to
being the national poet, even though much of his writing during this period
continued an earlier versifying strain of extemporaneous, occasional poetry.
But the Edinburgh period set the ground-work for his subsequent creativity,
stimulated his revealing correspondence, and provided him with a way of
becoming an advocate for Scotland as anonymous bard.
If
Burns were received in Edinburgh as a typical Scot and a producer of genuine
Scottish products, that cultural nationalism in turn channeled his love of his
country—already expressed in several poems in the Kilmarnock edition—into his
songs. Burns’s support for Johnson’s project is infectious; in a letter to a
friend, James Candlish, he wrote in November 1787: “I am engaged in assisting
an honest Scots Enthusiast, a friend of mine, who is an Engraver, and has taken
it into his head to publish a collection of all our songs set to music, of which
the words and music are done by Scotsmen.—This, you will easily guess, is an
undertaking exactly to my taste.—I have collected, begg’d, borrow’d and stolen
all the songs I could meet with.—Pompey’s Ghost, words and music, I beg from
you immediately.” Here was a chance to do what he had been doing all his
life—wedding text and tune—but for Scotland. Thus Burns became a conscious
participant in the antiquarian and cultural movement to gather and preserve
evidences of Scottish identity before they were obliterated in the cultural
drift toward English language and culture. Burns’s clear preference for
traditional culture, and particularly for the freedom it represented, shifted
intensity and direction because of the Edinburgh experience. He narrowed his focus
from all of traditional culture to one facet—song. Balladry and song were safe
artifacts that could be captured on paper and sanitized for polite edification.
This approach to traditional culture was distanced and conscious, while his
earlier depiction of the larger whole of traditional culture had been
immediate, intimate, and largely unconscious. Thus Edinburgh changed his
artistic stance, making him more clearly aware of choices and directions as
well as a conscious antiquarian.
In
all, Burns had a hand in some 330 songs for Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum
(1787-1803), a six-volume work, and for George Thomson’s five-volume A Select
Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice (1793-1818). As a
nationalistic work, The Scots Musical Museum was designed to reflect Scottish
popular taste; like similar publications, it included traditional songs—texts
and tunes—as well as songs and tunes by specific authors and composers. Burns
developed a coded system of letters for identifying contributors, suggesting to
all but the cognoscenti that the songs were traditional. It is often difficult
to separate Burns’s work from genuinely traditional texts; he may, for example,
have edited and polished the old Scots ballad “Tam Lin,” which tells of a man
restored from fairyland to his human lover. Many collected texts received a
helping hand—fragments were filled out, refrains and phrases were amalgamated
to make a whole—and original songs in the manner of tradition were created
anew. Burns’s song output was enormous and uneven, and he knew it: “Here, once
for all, let me apologies for many silly compositions of mine in this work.
Many beautiful airs wanted words.” Yet many of the songs are succinct
masterpieces on love, on the brotherhood of man, and on the dignity of the
common man—subjects which link Burns with oral and popular tradition on the one
hand and on the other with the societal changes that were intensifying
distinctions between people.
Perhaps
the most remarkable thing about Burns’s songs is their singability, the
perspicacity with which words are joined to tune. “My Love she’s but a lassie
yet” provides a superb example: a sprightly tune holds together four loosely
connected stanzas about a woman, courtship, drink, and sexual dalliance to
create a whole much greater than the sum of the parts. The Song begins:
My
love she’s but a lassie yet,
My
love she’s but a lassie yet;
We’ll
let her stand a year or twa,
She’ll
no be half sae saucy yet.
It
concludes, enigmatically:
We’re
a’ dry wi’ drinking o’t,
We’re
a’ dry wi’ drinking o’t:
The
minister kisst the fidler’s wife,
He
could na preach for thinkin o’t.—
The
songs are at their best when sung, but there may be delight in text alone, for
brilliant stanzas appear most unexpectedly. The chorus of “Auld Lang Syne”
encapsulates the pleasure of reunion, of shared memory:
For
auld lang syne, my jo,
For
auld lang syne,
We’ll
tak a cup o’ kindness yet
For
auld lang syne.
The
vignette of a couple aging together—“We clamb the hill the gither” in “John
Anderson My Jo” suggests praise of continuity and shared lives. In a similar
manner “A Red, Red Rose“ depicts a love that is both fresh and lasting: “O my
Luve’s like a red, red rose, / That’s newly sprung in June.”
Burns’s
comment in a letter to Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop in 1790—“Old Scots Songs are, you
know, a favorite study and pursuit of mine”—accurately describes his absorption
with song after Edinburgh. He not only collected, edited, and wrote songs but
studied them, perusing the extant collections, commenting on provenance,
gathering explanatory material, and speculating on the distinct qualities of
Scottish song: “There is a certain something in the old Scots songs, a wild
happiness of thought and expression” and of Scottish music: “let our National
Music preserve its native features.—They are, I own, frequently wild, &
unreduceable to the more modern rules; but on that very eccentricity, perhaps,
depends a great part of their effect.” This nationalism did not stop with song
but pervaded all Burns’s work after Edinburgh. Certainly the most critically
acclaimed product of this period is a work written for Francis Grose’s
Antiquities of Scotland (1789-1791). Burns suggested Alloway Kirk as a subject
for the work and wrote “Tam o’ Shanter” to assure its inclusion.
“Tam
o’ Shanter” is the culmination of Burns’s delight in traditional culture and
his selective elevation of parts of that culture in his antiquarian and
nationalistic pursuit of Scottish distinctness. The poem retells a legend about
a man who comes upon a witches’ Sabbath and unwisely comments on it, alerting
the participants to his presence and necessitating their revenge. Burns
provides a frame for the legend, localizes it at Alloway Kirk, and peoples it
with plausible characters—in particular, the feckless Tam, who takes every
opportunity to imbibe with his buddies and avoid going home to wife and
domestic responsibilities. Tam stops at a tavern for a drink and sociability
and gets caught up in the flow of song, story, and laughter; the raging storm
outside makes the conviviality inside the tavern doubly precious. But it is
late and Tam must go home and “face the music,” having yet again gotten drunk,
no doubt having used money intended for less selfish and more basic purposes.
On his way home Tam experiences the events which are central to the legend; the
initial convivial scene has provided the context in which such legends might be
told. After passing spots enshrined in other legends, he comes upon the
witches’ Sabbath revels at the ruins of Alloway Kirk, with the familiar and not
quite malevolent devil, styled “auld Nick,” in dog form playing bagpipe
accompaniment to the witches’ dance. Burns incorporates skeptical
interpolations into the narrative—perhaps Tam is only drunk and “seeing
things”—which replicate in poetic form aspects of an oral telling of legends.
And the concluding occurrence of Tam’s escapade, the loss of his horse’s tail
to the foremost witch’s grasp, demands a response from the reader in much the
same way a legend told in conversation elicits an immediate response from the
listener. Burns, then, has not only used a legend and provided a setting in
which legends might be told but has replicated poetically aspects of a verbal
recounting of a legend. And he has used a traditional form to celebrate Scotland’s
cultural past. “Tam o’ Shanter” may be seen as Burns’s most mature and complex
celebration of Scottish cultural artifacts.
If
there were a shift of emphasis and attitude toward traditional culture as a
result of the Edinburgh experience, there was also continuity. Early and late
Burns was a rhymer, a versifier, a local poet using traditional forms and
themes in occasional and sometimes extemporaneous productions. These works are
seldom noteworthy and are sometimes biting and satiric. He called them “little
trifles” and frequently wrote them to “pay a debt.” These pieces were not
thought of as equal to his more deliberate endeavors; they were play,
increasingly expected of him as a poet. He probably would have disavowed many
now attributed to him, particularly some of the mean-spirited epigrams. Several
occasional pieces, however, deserve a closer look for their ability to raise
the commonplace to altogether different heights.
In
1786 Burns wrote “To a Haggis,” a paean to the Scottish pudding of seasoned
heart, liver, and lungs of a sheep or calf mixed with suet, onions, and oatmeal
and boiled in an animal’s stomach:
Fair
fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great
Chieftan o’ the Puddin-race!
Aboon
them a’ ye tak your place,
Painch,
tripe, or thairm:
Weel
are ye wordy of a grace
As
lang’s my arm.
Varying
accounts claim that the poem was created extempore, more or less as a blessing,
for a meal of haggis. Burns’s praise has contributed to the elevation of the
haggis to the status of national food and symbol of Scotland. Less well known
and dealing with an even more pedestrian subject is “Address to the
Tooth-Ache,” prefaced “Written by the Author at a time when he was grievously
tormented by that Disorder.” The poem is a harangue, delightfully couched in
Standard Habbie, beginning: “My curse on your envenom’d stang, / That shoots my
tortur’d gums alang,” a sentiment shared by all who have ever suffered from
such a malady.
The
many songs, the masterpiece “Tam o’ Shanter,” and the continuation and
profusion of ephemeral occasional pieces of varying merit all stand as
testimony to Burns’s artistry after Edinburgh, albeit an artistry dominated by
a selective, focused celebration of Scottish culture in song and legend. This
narrowing of focus and direction of creativity suited his changed situation.
Burns left Edinburgh in 1788 for Ellisland Farm, near Dumfries, to take up
farming again; on August 5 he legally wed Jean Armour, with whom he had seven
more children. For the first time in his life he had to become respectable and
dependable. Suddenly the carefree life of a bachelor about town ended (although
he still sired a daughter in 1791 by a woman named Anne Park), and the trials
of life, sanitized in “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” became a reality. A year
later he also began to work for the Excise; by the fall of 1791 he had
completely left farming for excise work and had moved to Dumfries. “The De’il’s
awa wi’ th’ Exciseman,” probably written for Burns’s fellow excise workers and
shared with them at a dinner, is a felicitous union of text and tune, lively,
rollicking, and affecting. The text plays on the negative view of tax
collecting, delighting that the de’il—that couthie bad guy, not Milton’s
Satan—has rid the country of the blight.
The
Ellisland/Dumfries phase must have been curiously disjointed for Burns. At
first he found himself back where he had started—farming and with Jean
Armour—as though nothing had changed. But much had changed: Burns was now
widely recognized as a poet, as a personage of note, and things were expected
of him because of that, such as willingness to share a meal, to stop and talk,
or to exhibit his creativity publicly. But he was clearly in an ambiguous class
position, working with his hands during the day and entertained for his mind
during the evening. Perhaps the mental and physical tensions were just too
much. He died on July 21, 1796, probably of endocarditis. He was 37.
His
was a hard life, perhaps made both better and worse by his fame. His art
catapulted him out of the routine and uncertainty of the agricultural world and
gave him more options than most people of his background, enabling him to be
trained for the Excise. His renown gave him access to persons and places he
might otherwise not have known. He seems to have felt thoroughly at home in
all-male society, whether formal, as in the Tarbolton Bachelor’s Club and
Crochallan Fencibles, or informal. The male sharing of bawdy song and story cut
across class lines. Depicting women as objects, filled with sexual metaphors,
bragging about sexual exploits, such bawdy material was a widespread and
dynamic part of Scottish traditional culture. Because the sharing of the bawdy
material was covert and largely oral, it is impossible to sort out definitively
Burns’s role in such works as the posthumously published and attributed volume,
The Merry Muses of Caledonia (1799).
Burns’s
formal education was unusual for an individual in his situation; it was more
like the education of the son of a small laird. His references to Scots,
English, and Continental writers provide evidence of his awareness of literary
tradition; he was remarkably knowledgeable. Lines quoted from Thomas Gray’s
“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard“ (1751) acknowledge the literary
precursor of the “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” while Fergusson’s “Farmer’s
Ingle” was the direct, though unstated, model. Fergusson provides a less
sentimental, more realistic, secular account of one evening’s fireside
activities. Fergusson and Ramsay were direct inspirations for Burns’s
vernacular works. He inherited particular genres and verse forms from the oral
and written traditions, for example, the Spenserian stanza and English Augustan
tone of “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” or the comic elegy and vernacular
informality drawn from such models in Standard Habbie as Sempill’s “The Life
and Death of Habbie Simpson,” used in “The Death and Dying Words of Poor
Mailie.” His concern for feeling and sentiment would seem to connect him with
the 18th-century cult of sensibility. Living in a time of extraordinary
transition clearly enriched Burns’s array of influences—oral and written, in
Scots and English. These resources he molded and transmuted in extending the
literary traditions he inherited.
Both
critics and ordinary people have responded to Burns. Early critical response
often placed more emphasis on the man than on his poetry and focused first on
his inauspicious origins, later grappling with his character. Burns was seen by
some as an ideal, as a model Scot for his revolutionary political, social, and
sexual stances. By other critics his revolutionary behavior was viewed
negatively: his morality, especially with reference to women and drink, was
criticized, and his attitude toward the Kirk and to forms of authority and his
use of obscure language were questioned.
Burns
the man became central because he was at one and the same time typical and
atypical—a struggling tenant farmer become tax collector and poet. If he could
transcend his birth-right, achieving recognition in his lifetime and posthumous
fame thereafter, so might any Scot. Thus Burns became a symbol of every
person’s potentiality and even of Scotland’s future as an independent country.
To many, Burns became a hero; almost immediately after his death a process of
traditionalizing his life began. People told one another about their personal
experiences with him; repeated tellings formed a loose-knit legendary cycle
which emphasizes his way with women, his impromptu poetic abilities, and his
innate humanity. Many apocryphal accounts found their way into early works of
criticism. But the legendary tradition has had a particularly dynamic life in a
“calendar custom” called the Burns Supper.
Shortly
after Burns’s death, groups of friends and acquaintances began to gather in his
memory. In 1859, the centenary of his birth, memorial events were held all over
Scotland and among the Scottish diaspora, and January 25 virtually became a
national holiday. The memorial events have taken on a particular structure:
there is a meal, one ingredient of which must be the haggis, addressed with
Burns’s poem before serving. After the meal there are two speeches with fixed
titles, but variable contents: “To the Immortal Memory” and “To the Lasses.”
“The Immortal Memory” offers a serious recollection of Burns, usually with
emphasis on him as man rather than as poet, and often incorporates legendary
instances of his humanity: he is said, for example, to have warned a woman
selling ale without a license that the tax collectors would be by late in the
day, thereby giving her the opportunity to destroy the evidence. The toast “To
the Lasses” is usually short and humorous, paying tribute to Burns’s way with
women and to the many descriptive songs he wrote about them. Interspersed among
these speeches and other toasts are performances of Burns’s songs and poems.
Typically, the event concludes with the singing of “Auld Lang Syne” by the
assembled company, arrayed in a circle and clasping hands.
The
legendary cycle about Burns and the calendar custom in his honor represent an
incorporation of Burns into the developing body of oral tradition which
inspired some of his own work. The Burns Suppers in particular, held by formal
Burns clubs, social clubs, church groups, and gatherings throughout the world,
keep Burns alive as symbol for Scotland. Yet this widespread cultural response
to Burns is often denigrated by serious critics as “Burnomania.”
Initially
Burns’s songs were dismissed by the critics as trivial; the bawdry was
discounted; poems on sensitive topics were sometimes ignored; vernacular pieces
were deemed unintelligible; aspects of his character and life were censured.
Subsequent critics have responded to Burns out of altered personal and cultural
environments. Wordsworth’s admiration of Burns’s depiction of real life is clearly
a selective identification of a quality pertinent to his own poetic ideology.
The initial perspective on the songs has changed completely; Burns’s bawdry has
been seriously analyzed and seen in the context of a long male tradition of
scatological verse; his satires have been lauded for their identification of
social inequities; his vernacular works have been praised as the very apogee of
the Scottish literary tradition. Critical praise of Burns’s songs and
vernacular poetry curiously confirms a long Scottish popular tradition of
preference for these works: no Burns Supper is complete without the singing of
Burns’s songs and recitation of such works as “To a Haggis” and “Tam o’
Shanter.” National concerns, then, are often implicit in the valuation of Burns:
he remains the national poet of Scotland.
Since
Burns was Scottish, his artistic achievements seem outside the mainstream of
18th-century English literature. Nor does he fit neatly into the Romantic
period. As a result, he is often left out of literary histories and anthologies
of those periods, the linguistic qualities of his best work providing an
additional barrier. But language need not be a stumbling block, as translations
of his work attest. Burns’s roots among the people and his concern with social
inequalities have made him particularly popular in Russia and China. While
Burns and his literary products are firmly rooted in the societal environment
from which he came, both continue to be powerful symbols of humanity’s
condition; and his utopian cry remains as elusive and appropriate today as when
he wrote it:
That
Man to Man the warld o’er,
Shall
brothers be for a’ that.
Burns
died in Dumfries, Scotland, in 1796.
Literary
style
Burns's
style is marked by spontaneity, directness, and sincerity, and ranges from the
tender intensity of some of his lyrics through the humour of "Tam o'
Shanter" and the satire of "Holy Willie's Prayer" and "The
Holy Fair".
Burns's
poetry drew upon a substantial familiarity with and knowledge of Classical,
Biblical, and English literature, as well as the Scottish Makar tradition.
Burns was skilled in writing not only in the Scots language but also in the
Scottish English dialect of the English language. Some of his works, such as
"Love and Liberty" (also known as "The Jolly Beggars"), are
written in both Scots and English for various effects.]
His
themes included republicanism (he lived during the French Revolutionary period)
and Radicalism, which he expressed covertly in "Scots Wha Hae",
Scottish patriotism, anticlericalism, class inequalities, gender roles,
commentary on the Scottish Kirk of his time, Scottish cultural identity,
poverty, sexuality, and the beneficial aspects of popular socialising
(carousing, Scotch whisky, folk songs, and so forth).
The
strong emotional highs and lows associated with many of Burns's poems have led
some, such as Burns biographer Robert Crawford , to suggest that he suffered
from manic depression—a hypothesis that has been supported by analysis of
various samples of his handwriting. Burns himself referred to suffering from
episodes of what he called "blue devilism". The National Trust for
Scotland has downplayed the suggestion on the grounds that evidence is
insufficient to support the claim .
Legacy
of Robert Burns
Burns
was a man of great intellectual energy and force of character who, in a
class-ridden society, never found an environment in which he could fully
exercise his personality. It may be argued that Scottish culture in his day was
incapable of providing an intellectual background that could replace the
Calvinism that Burns rejected, or that Burns’s talent was squandered on an
Edinburgh literati that, according to English critics, were second-raters. Yet
he lived during the cultural and intellectual tumult known as the Scottish
Enlightenment, and the problem was ultimately more than one of personalities.
The only substitute for the rejected Calvinism seemed to be, for Burns, a
sentimental Deism, a facile belief in the good heart as all, and this was
arguably not a creed rich or complex enough to nourish great poetry. That Burns
in spite of this produced so much fine poetry shows the strength of his unique
genius, and that he has become the Scottish national poet is a tribute to his
hold on the popular imagination.
Burns
perhaps exhibited his greatest poetic powers in his satires. There is also a
remarkable craftsmanship in his verse letters, which display a most adroit
counterpointing of the colloquial and the formal. But it is by his songs that
Burns is best known, and it is his songs that have carried his reputation round
the world.
Burns
wrote all his songs to known tunes, sometimes writing several sets of words to
the same air in an endeavour to find the most apt poem for a given melody. Many
songs which, it is clear from a variety of evidence, must have been
substantially written by Burns he never claimed as his. He never claimed “Auld
Lang Syne,” for example, which he described simply as an old fragment he had
discovered, but the song we have is almost certainly his, though the chorus and
probably the first stanza are old. (Burns wrote it for a simple and moving old
air that is not the tune to which it is now sung, as Thomson set it to another
tune.) The full extent of Burns’s work on Scottish song will probably never be
known.
It
is positively miraculous that Burns was able to enter into the spirit of older
folk song and re-create, out of an old chorus, such songs as “I’m O’er Young to
Marry Yet,” “Green Grow the Rashes, O,” and a host of others. It is this
uncanny ability to speak with the great anonymous voice of the Scottish people
that explains the special feeling that Burns arouses, feelings that manifest
themselves in the “Burns cult.”
Influence
Britain
Burns
is generally classified as a proto-Romantic poet, and he influenced William
Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley greatly. His
direct literary influences in the use of Scots in poetry were Allan Ramsay and
Robert Fergusson. The Edinburgh literati worked to sentimentalise Burns during
his life and after his death, dismissing his education by calling him a
"heaven-taught ploughman". Burns influenced later Scottish writers,
especially Hugh MacDiarmid, who fought to dismantle what he felt had become a
sentimental cult that dominated Scottish literature.
Canada
Burns
had a significant influence on Alexander McLachlan and some influence on Robert
Service. While this may not be so obvious in Service's English verse, which is
Kiplingesque, it is more readily apparent in his Scots verse.
Scottish
Canadians have embraced Robert Burns as a kind of patron poet and mark his
birthday with festivities. 'Robbie Burns Day' is celebrated from Newfoundland
and Labrador to Nanaimo. Every year, Canadian newspapers publish biographies of
the poet, listings of local events and buffet menus. Universities mark the date
in a range of ways: McMaster University library organized a special collection
and Simon Fraser University's Centre for Scottish Studies organized a marathon
reading of Burns's poetry. Senator Heath Macquarrie quipped of Canada's first
Prime Minister that "While the lovable [Robbie] Burns went in for wine,
women and song, his fellow Scot, John A. did not chase women and was not
musical!" 'Gung Haggis Fat Choy' is a hybrid of Chinese New Year and
Robbie Burns Day, celebrated in Vancouver since the late 1990s.]
United
States
In
January 1864, President Abraham Lincoln was invited to attend a Robert Burns
celebration by Robert Crawford; and if unable to attend, send a toast. Lincoln
composed a toast.]
An
example of Burns's literary influence in the US is seen in the choice by
novelist John Steinbeck of the title of his 1937 novel, Of Mice and Men, taken
from a line in the second-to-last stanza of "To a Mouse": "The
best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley." Burns's influence on
American vernacular poets such as James Whitcomb Riley and Frank Lebby Stanton
has been acknowledged by their biographers. When asked for the source of his
greatest creative inspiration, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan selected Burns's
1794 song "A Red, Red Rose" as the lyric that had the biggest effect
on his life.
The
author J. D. Salinger used protagonist Holden Caulfield's misinterpretation of
Burns's poem "Comin' Through the Rye" as his title and a main
interpretation of Caulfield's grasping to his childhood in his 1951 novel The
Catcher in the Rye. The poem, actually about a rendezvous, is thought by
Caulfield to be about saving people from falling out of childhood.
Russia
Burns
became the "people's poet" of Russia. In Imperial Russia Burns was
translated into Russian and became a source of inspiration for the ordinary,
oppressed Russian people. In Soviet Russia, he was elevated as the archetypal
poet of the people. As a great admirer of the egalitarian ethos behind the
American and French Revolutions who expressed his own egalitarianism in poems
such as his "Birthday Ode for George Washington" or his "Is
There for Honest Poverty" (commonly known as "A Man's a Man for a'
that"), Burns was well placed for endorsement by the Communist regime as a
"progressive" artist. A new translation of Burns begun in 1924 by
Samuil Marshak proved enormously popular, selling over 600,000 copies. The USSR
honoured Burns with a commemorative stamp in 1956. He remains popular in Russia
after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Honours
Landmarks
and organisations
Burns
clubs have been founded worldwide. The first one, known as The Mother Club, was
founded in Greenock in 1801 by merchants born in Ayrshire, some of whom had
known Burns. The club set its original objectives as "To cherish the name
of Robert Burns; to foster a love of his writings, and generally to encourage
an interest in the Scottish language and literature." The club also
continues to have local charitable work as a priority.
Burns's
birthplace in Alloway is now a National Trust for Scotland property called the
Robert Burns Birthplace Museum. It includes: the humble Burns Cottage where he
was born and spent the first years of his life, a modern museum building which
houses more than 5,000 Burns artefacts including his handwritten manuscripts,
the historic Alloway Auld Kirk and Brig o Doon which feature in Burns's
masterpiece 'Tam o Shanter', and the Burns Monument which was erected in
Burns's honour and finished in 1823. His house in Dumfries is operated as the
Robert Burns House, and the Robert Burns Centre in Dumfries features more
exhibits about his life and works. Ellisland Farm in Auldgirth, which he owned
from 1788 to 1791, is maintained as a working farm with a museum and
interpretation centre by the Friends of Ellisland Farm.
Significant
19th-century monuments to him stand in Alloway, Leith, and Dumfries. An early
20th-century replica of his birthplace cottage belonging to the Burns Club
Atlanta stands in Atlanta, Georgia. These are part of a large list of Burns
memorials and statues around the world.
Organisations
include the Robert Burns Fellowship of the University of Otago in New Zealand,
and the Burns Club Atlanta in the United States. Towns named after Burns
include Burns, New York, and Burns, Oregon.
In
the suburb of Summerhill, Dumfries, the majority of the streets have names with
Burns connotations. A British Rail Standard Class 7 steam locomotive was named
after him, along with a later Class 87 electric locomotive, No. 87035. On 24
September 1996, Class 156 diesel unit 156433 was named The Kilmarnock Edition
at Girvan station to launch the new Burns Line services between Girvan, Ayr and
Kilmarnock, supported by Strathclyde Partnership for Transport.
Several
streets surrounding the Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.'s Back Bay Fens in Boston,
Massachusetts, were designated with Burns connotations. A life-size statue was
dedicated in Burns's honour within the Back Bay Fens of the West Fenway
neighbourhood in 1912. It stood until 1972 when it was relocated downtown,
sparking protests from the neighbourhood, literary fans, and preservationists
of Olmsted's vision for the Back Bay Fens.
In
November 2012, Burns was awarded the title Honorary Chartered Surveyor by The
Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, the only posthumous membership so far
granted by the institution.
The
oldest statue of Burns is in the town of Camperdown, Victoria. It now hosts an
annual Robert Burns Scottish Festival in celebration of the statue and its
history.
In
2020, the Robert Burns Academy in Cumnock, East Ayrshire opened and is named
after Burns as an honour of Burns having spent time living in nearby Mauchline.
Musical
tributes
In
1976, singer Jean Redpath, in collaboration with composer Serge Hovey, started
to record all of Burns's songs, with a mixture of traditional and Burns's own
compositions. The project ended when Hovey died, after seven of the planned
twenty-two volumes were completed. Redpath also recorded four cassettes of
Burns's songs (re-issued as 3 CDs) for the Scots Musical Museum.
In
1996, a musical about Burns's life called Red Red Rose won third place at a
competition for new musicals in Denmark. Robert Burns was played by John
Barrowman. On 25 January 2008, a musical play about the love affair between
Robert Burns and Nancy McLehose entitled Clarinda premiered in Edinburgh before
touring Scotland. [citation needed] The plan was that Clarinda would make its
American premiere in Atlantic Beach, FL, at Atlantic Beach Experimental Theatre
on 25 January 2013. Eddi Reader has released two albums, Sings the Songs of
Robert Burns and The Songs of Robert Burns Deluxe Edition, about the work of
the poet.
Alfred
B. Street wrote the words and Henry Tucker wrote the music for a song called
Our Own Robbie Burns in 1856.
Burns
suppers
Burns
Night, in effect a second national day, is celebrated on Burns's birthday, 25
January, with Burns suppers around the world, and is more widely observed in
Scotland than the official national day, St. Andrew's Day. The first Burns
supper in The Mother Club in Greenock was held on what was thought to be his
birthday on 29 January 1802; in 1803 it was discovered from the Ayr parish
records that the correct date was 25 January 1759.
The
format of Burns suppers has changed little since. The basic format starts with
a general welcome and announcements, followed with the Selkirk Grace. After the
grace comes the piping and cutting of the haggis, when Burns's famous
"Address to a Haggis" is read and the haggis is cut open. The event
usually allows for people to start eating just after the haggis is presented.
At the end of the meal, a series of toasts, often including a 'Toast to the
Lassies', and replies are made. This is when the toast to "the immortal
memory", an overview of Burns's life and work, is given. The event usually
concludes with the singing of "Auld Lang Syne".
Greatest
Scot
In
2009, STV ran a television series and public vote on who was "The Greatest
Scot" of all time. Robert Burns won, narrowly beating William Wallace.[89]
A bust of Burns is in the Hall of Heroes of the National Wallace Monument in
Stirling.
Crater
A
crater on the planet Mercury has been named after Burns.
Robert
Burns
1759–1796
Poems
/ Robert Burns
Tam o' Shanter, 1791 , A Red, Red Rose, 1794 , To a Mouse , 1785 , To a Louse , 1786 , Holy Willie's Prayer , , 1789 , Halloween , , 1786 , Address to the Devil , The Birks of Aberfeldy , 1788 , To a Mountain Daisy , The Cotter's Saturday Night , Sweet Afton , Epitaph for James Smith
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