The Canongate Burns

by Robert Burns

  An’ how ye gat him i’ your thrall, got, spell

  An’ brak him out o’ house an’ hal’, broke

  105 While scabs an’ blotches did him gall,

  Wi’ bitter claw;

  An’ lows’d his ill-tongu’d wicked Scawl — slackened, scolding wife

  Was warst ava? worst of all

  But a’ your doings to rehearse,

  110 Your wily snares an’ fechtin fierce, fighting

  Sin’ that day MICHAEL did you pierce

  Down to this time,

  Wad ding a Lallan tongue, or Erse, would, beat, Lowland Scots, Irish

  In Prose or Rhyme.

  115 An’ now, auld Cloots, I ken ye’re thinkan, old, know

  A certain Bardie’s rantin, drinkin,

  Some luckless hour will send him linkan, hurrying

  To your black pit; Hell

  But, faith! he’ll turn a corner jinkin, dodging

  120 An’ cheat you yet.

  But fare-you-weel, auld Nickie-ben! old

  O wad ye tak a thought an’ men’! would, mend

  Ye aiblins might — I dinna ken — perhaps, do not know

  Still hae a stake: have

  125 I’m wae to think upo’ yon den, sad

  Ev’n for your sake.

  Burns mentions to John Richmond on 17th February 1786 that he had recently completed this poem. It is normally dated to the winter of 1785–6. A poem of this length Burns might have turned out quickly, so it is probably one of the fruits of his intense writing campaign leading to publication of the Kilmarnock edition.

  This poem is now generally accepted as a relatively light-weight piece of near comic knockabout as Burns mocks the allegedly fast-fading figure of the Devil from his hitherto central role in Scottish theology and folk-lore. In his essay ‘Robert Burns, Master of Scottish Poetry’ (Uncollected Scottish Criticism, ed. Noble (London), pp. 199–200), Edwin Muir analyses this poem as the centre-piece of his persuasive argument that during the eighteenth century enlightened, improving, secularising Scotland had lost both its theological passion and its sense of supernatural mystery integral to its older poetry:

  … two centuries of religious terrors had faded under the touch of reason and enlightenment, and the mysterious problems of election and damnation, had turned into amusing doggerel:

  O Thou wha in the Heavens dost dwell,

  Wha, as it pleases best thysel’;

  Sends ane to heaven and ten to hell,

  A’ for thy glory,

  And no for any guid or ill

  They’ve done afore thee!

  Calvinism, once feared as a power or hated as a superstition, became absurd under the attack of common reason. The growing powers of the Enlightenment encouraged the change in the universities, the churches, in popular debate, and among the people. The ideas of liberty and equality did their part; Scotland became a place where a man was a man for a’ that; the new humanistic attitude to religion led people to believe that ‘The hert’s aye the pairt aye that mak’s us richt or wrang.’ The story of the Fall became a simple story of human misfortune to two young people whose intentions had been so good, ‘Lang syne in Eden’s bonnie yard’.

  Then you, ye auld sneck-drawing dog!

  Ye cam to Paradise incog.

  And played on a man a curse brogue

  (Black be your fa!)

  An’ gled the infant world a shog

  Maist ruined a’.

  Muir further thinks that this new enlightened poetry is, with ‘something of Voltaire’s contes and Bernard Shaw’s plays’, witty but lightweight, even, relative to the old poetry, superficial. There are two related fundamental miscomprehensions in Muir’s account. First, the power of folklore is present in the poem though not, say, as we find its direct intrusion as in the great Scottish Ballad tradition, so beloved by Muir, but in Burns’s ambivalent treatment of it. As he wrote to Dr Moore:

  I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more sceptical in these matters than I, yet it often takes an effort of Philosophy to shake of these idle terrors (Letter 125).

  What we see in this particular poem from ll. 5–84 is no simple send-up of foolishly atavistic folk-superstition. Not only is Burns intent on anthropologically recording, as in Halloween, the customs and beliefs of his rural community but, as in Tam o’Shanter, conveying the still ‘eerie’ potency of that world. (See Edward J. Cowan, ‘Burns and Superstition’, Love and Liberty, pp. 229–37.) He is also, as usual, making salacious jokes inspired by the bottomless well of sexual metaphor supplied to him by folk-tradition. Hugh Blair wanted ll. 61–6 deleted as ‘indecent’ because they depend on the identification of lume/loom with the penis. (See BC, 1932, p. 95.)

  Muir, however, is absolutely wrong in thinking that it is the diminished power of Calvinism on the Scottish psyche that leads to the poem’s, to him, lightweight tone. This is a particularly weird error in Muir, who more than any other figure in a profoundly anti-Calvinist, Scottish Renaissance group believed that Knox (of whom he actually wrote a biography) had not lost his sadistic, disintegrating grip on the Scottish soul. Further, that Scottish reintegration meant a return to catholic, European humanism.

  Burns is certainly partly laughing at the Devil in the poem’s opening sequences (ll. 1–24) by the reductive ridicule of reducing the devil’s energies to being devoted to the poet’s petty transgressions. The Devil, however, is not for his own sake being laughed out of court. Burns’s poetic wit is in direct proportion to his most potent enemies. The enemy here is not the devil but those who seek demonically to control mankind in his name. For their power structure to remain intact the Devil could not be allowed to become a laughing matter. This is why, even more than the more personally abusive clerical satires, this poem caused such an outcry. As Carol McGuirk finely writes:

  A ringing blow in Burns’s quarrel with the Auld Licht, this satire caused a major local scandal. Several of the anonymous contributors to Animadversions, James Maxwell’s compilation of evangelical attacks on Burns (Paisley, 1788), saw this poem as final proof of Burns’s evil values. Alexander (‘Saunders’) Tait of Tarbolton, a mantua-maker and tailor who considered himself Burns’s equal as a satirist, also seized upon this as Burns’s most shocking poem, publishing his attack in 1790.

  Burns intended it to shock, and so structures the poem round what any Auld Licht partisan would see as a heretical statement of Arminianism: the deil’s long-ago invasion of Eden only ‘almost’ ‘ruined all’ for Adam and Eve (l. 96): the stain of sin is not ineradicable and even Satan (if he wished) could ‘tak a thought’ and mend=change and receive forgiveness. Burns’s ‘deil’ is neither the sadistic demon of Auld Licht sermons nor the tragic hero Milton’s Satan considered himself to be. A rather forlorn and unsuccessful mischief-maker, his smudged (‘smoutie’) face ashy from brimstone and his plots against humanity invariably thwarted, the deil is addressed more or less as just another ‘poor, damned body’. The poet is dramatising his rejection of predestination. The Arminians had challenged Calvinist ‘election’ (salvation through grace alone, not human effort) but Burns focuses on its corollary—repudiation, a doctrine that insisted that the reprobated are eternally cast away from grace, whatever their benighted individual efforts to be (and do) good. Burns, by contrast, announces that he considers himself salvageable (ll. 119–20) –andif ‘a certain Bardie’ can besaved, then there must be hope for a mere devil. The poet is paying a backhanded compliment to his own sinfulness as he mocks the Auld Licht. No one – not even the deil – is all bad and forever incapable of change, the poem argues with a cheerful perversity that enraged the Auld Licht. A more orthodox point is also made: hope of heaven is more likely to convert sinners than fear of damnation. (pp. 233–4)

  The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie,

  The Author’s Only Pet Yowe: An Unco Mournfu’ Tale

  First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.

  As MAILIE, an’ her lambs th
egither, together

  Was ae day nibblin on the tether, one day, chewing

  Upon her cloot she coost a hitch, hoof, looped

  An’ owre she warsl’d in the ditch: over, floundered

  5 There, groanin, dying, she did ly,

  When Hughoc he cam doytan by. walking/staggering

  Wi’ glowrin een, an’ lifted han’s staring eyes

  Poor Hughoc like a statue stan’s;

  He saw her days were near hand ended,

  10 But, wae’s my heart! he could na mend it! woe, not

  He gaped wide, but naething spak. nothing spoke

  At length poor Mailie silence brak: — broke

  ‘O thou, whase lamentable face whose

  Appears to mourn my woefu’ case!

  15 My dying words attentive hear,

  An’ bear them to my Master dear.

  ‘Tell him, if e’er again he keep

  As muckle gear as buy a sheep, much money

  O, bid him never tie them mair, more

  20 Wi’ wicked strings o’ hemp or hair!

  But ca’ them out to park or hill, call/drive

  An’ let them wander at their will:

  So may his flock increase, an’ grow

  To scores o’ lambs, an’ packs o’ woo’!

  25 ‘Tell him, he was a Master kin’, kind

  An’ ay was guid to me an’ mine; good

  An’ now my dying charge I gie him, give

  My helpless lambs, I trust them wi’ him. with

  ‘O, bid him save their harmless lives,

  30 Frae dogs, an’ tods, an’ butchers’ knives! from, foxes

  But gie them guid cow-milk their fill, give, good

  Till they be fit to fend themsel; themselves

  An’ tent them duely, e’en an’ morn, tend

  Wi’ taets o’ hay an’ ripps o’ corn. small amounts, handfuls

  35 ‘An’ may they never learn the gaets, ways

  Of ither vile, wanrestfu’ Pets — other, restless

  To slink thro’ slaps, an’ reave an’ steal, gaps in dykes

  At stacks o’ pease, or stocks o’ kail. plants

  So may they, like their great forbears,

  40 For monie a year come thro’ the sheers: many

  So wives will gie them bits o’ bread, give

  An’ bairns greet for them when they’re dead. children cry

  ‘My poor toop-lamb, my son an’ heir, tup/male

  O, bid him breed him up wi’ care! with

  45 An’ if he live to be a beast,

  To pit some havins in his breast! conduct

  An’ warn him, what I winna name, would not

  To stay content wi’ yowes at hame; ewes

  An’ no to rin an’ wear his cloots, run, hooves

  50 Like other menseless, graceless brutes. unmannerly

  ‘An’ niest, my yowie, silly thing; next, ewekin/female baby

  Gude keep thee frae a tether string! from

  O, may thou ne’er forgather up, make friends

  Wi’ onie blastet, moorland toop; any, blasted/damned

  55 But ay keep mind to moop an’ mell, always, nibble & mix

  Wi’ sheep o’ credit like thysel!

  ‘And now, my bairns, wi’ my last breath,

  I lea’e my blessin wi’ you baith: leave, with, both

  An’ when you think upo’ your Mither, mother

  60 Mind to be kind to ane anither. one another

  ‘Now, honest Hughoc, dinna fail, do not

  To tell my Master a’ my tale;

  An’ bid him burn this cursed tether,

  An’ for thy pains thou’se get my blather.’ thou will, bladder

  65 This said, poor Mailie turn’d her head,

  An’ clos’d her een amang the dead! eyes, among

  This poem fuses an actual experience at Lochlea, subsequently recorded by Gilbert Burns, with Burns’s awareness of the tradition of comic animal monologue as integral to the eighteenth-century Scottish vernacular revival. As Burns noted, Hughoc was an actual neighbouring herdsman though, in reality, the sheep was freed from the strangling tether and survived. Its ‘poetic’ death is necessary to the comic pathos of the poem. The literary tradition of burlesquing animal poetry commenced with William Hamilton of Gilbertfield (c. 1665–1751) whose rhetorical greyhound’s death-speech parodies Blind Harry’s Wallace. Burns would also be aware of the so-influential Robert Fergusson’s very funny parody of Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) with his Milton-burlesquing The Sow of Feeling (1773). As we saw in the Introduction, Mackenzie never forgave Fergusson’s lachrymose porcine parody. The tone of Burns’s poem is more subtle since the mother’s dying warnings to her children, particularly against keeping the wrong sexual company, are a mixture of his satirising snobbery and prudery with genuine sympathy towards a mother’s natural, protective love. Burns, indeed (see Address to a Young Friend), often displayed a genuine paternal care, which revealed a desire to preserve his varied dependants from the dangers inherent in his own licentious excesses.

  Poor Mailie’s Elegy

  First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.

  Lament in rhyme, lament in prose,

  Wi’ saut tears tricklin down your nose; salt

  Our Bardie’s fate is at a close,

  Past a’ remead! remedy

  5 The last, sad cape-stane of his woes; coping stone (final weight)

  Poor Mailie’s dead!

  It’s no the loss of warl’s gear, worldly goods

  That could sae bitter draw the tear, so

  Or mak our Bardie, dowie, wear drooping/gloomy

  10 The mourning weed:

  He’s lost a friend an’ neebor dear neighbour

  In Mailie dead.

  Thro’ a’ the toun she trotted by him; town

  A lang half-mile she could descry him; long

  15 Wi’ kindly bleat, when she did spy him,

  She ran wi’ speed:

  A friend mair faithfu’ ne’er cam nigh him, more, came near

  Than Mailie dead.

  I wat she was a sheep o’ sense, wot

  20 An’ could behave hersel wi’ mense: tact/grace

  I’ll say’t, she never brak a fence, broke

  Thro’ thievish greed.

  Our Bardie, lanely, keeps the spence parlour

  Sin’ Mailie’s dead.

  25 Or, if he wanders up the howe, glen

  Her livin image in her yowe ewe

  Comes bleatin till him, owre the knowe, over the hill edge

  For bits o’ bread;

  An’ down the briny pearls rowe roll

  30 For Mailie dead.

  She was nae get o’ moorlan tips, not born from

  Wi’ tawted ket, an’ hairy hips; matted fleece

  For her forbears were brought in ships,

  Frae ’yont the TWEED: from beyond

  35 A bonier fleesh ne’er cross’d the clips fleece, sheep shears

  Than Mailie dead.

  Wae worth the man wha first did shape woe befall

  That vile, wanchancie thing — a raep! dangerous, rope

  It maks guid fellows girn an’ gape, makes good, facial contortion

  40 Wi’ chokin dread;

  An’ Robin’s bonnet wave wi’ crape mourning

  For Mailie dead.

  O a’ ye Bards on bonie DOON!

  An’ wha on AIRE your chanters tune! who, Ayr, bagpipes

  45 Come, join the melancholious croon

  O’ Robin’s reed!

  His heart will never get aboon! above/over

  His Mailie’s dead!

  This was probably written in 1785–6 as a companion piece for publication with the preceding Mailie monologue. Again the tone of the poem is mixed. Burns employs the six-line Standard Habbie used in vernacular eighteenth-century elegy while partly parodying the content of these poems. His most specified source is probably Fergusson’s Elegy on the Death of Mr David Gregory with its repetitive end-
line ‘Sin Gregory’s dead’. He is also partly sending up his own emotions. This is emphasised by the recent discovery from a London saleroom catalogue for May 1962 of an hitherto unknown last stanza:

  She was nae get o’ runted rams,

  Wi’ woo’ like goat’s an’ legs like trams;

  She was the flower o’ Fairlee lambs,

  A famous breed:

  Now Robin, greetin’, chows the hams

  O’ Mailie dead.

  This peasant practicality would have been too much for his genteel audience. On the other hand, there is real affection for its pedigree beauty. This was the man who was still surrounding himself with pet sheep at Ellisland. Further, as in his mouse poem, the lives of men and beasts are both brutally intruded upon not only by lethal elemental forces but by human-inspired, cruel economic and political forces. The accidentally throttled beast has its more sinister legally garrotted human counterpart:

  Wae worth the man wha first did shape

  That vile chancie thing – a rape!

  It maks guid fellows girn an’ gape,

  Wi’ chokin dread …

  Epistle to James Smith

  First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.

  Friendship, mysterious cement of the soul!

  Sweet’ner of Life, and solder of Society!

  I owe thee much.

  – BLAIR

  Dear Smith, the sleest, pawkie thief, slyest, cunning

  That e’er attempted stealth or rief! robbery/plunder

  Ye surely hae some warlock-breef have, wizard-spell

  Owre human hearts; over

  5 For ne’er a bosom yet was prief proof

  Against your arts.

  For me, I swear by sun an’ moon,