by Robert Burns
‘An honest man’s the noble work of GOD’;2
And certes, in fair Virtue’s heavenly road, verily
The Cottage leaves the Palace far behind;
What is a lordling’s pomp? – a cumbrous load,
170 Disguising oft the wretch of human kind,
Studied in arts of Hell, in wickedness refin’d!
O SCOTIA! my dear, my native soil!
For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent!
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil
175 Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content!
And O! may Heaven their simple lives prevent
From Luxury’s contagion, weak and vile!
Then, howe’er crowns and coronets be rent,
A virtuous Populace may rise the while,
180 And stand a wall of fire around their much-lov’d ISLE.
O THOU! who pour’d the patriotic tide,
That stream’d thro’ WALLACE’S undaunted heart,
Who dar’d to, nobly, stem tyrannic pride,
Or nobly die, the second glorious part:
185 (The Patriot’s GOD, peculiarly Thou art,
His friend, inspirer, guardian, and reward!)
O never, never SCOTIA’S realm desert;
But still the Patriot, and the Patriot-bard
In bright succession raise, her Ornament and Guard!
As Kinsley noted (Vol. III, p. 112): ‘What appealed to Burns contemporaries … was the naturalism and the moral tone of TC’s SN. The English Review (Feb. 1787) thought it the best poem in the Kilmarnock book, offering ‘a domestic picture of rustic simplicity, natural tenderness, and innocent passion that must please every reader whose feelings are not perverted’. As Henry Mackenzie’s and Robert Heron’s reviews show (See Low, The Critical Heritage), conformist Scots were only too eager to build up such English pieties.
Unfazed that a ‘heaven-taught’ ploughman should be so canonically allusive, we find, embryonically in these Tory sentimentalists, the enormous Victorian enthusiasm for a poem which seemed, under the growing threat of the anarchic urban, industrial crowd, to offer the security and succour of a pietistically all-accepting rural folk. (See Andrew Noble, ‘Some Versions of Scottish Pastoral: The Literati and the Tradition’ in Order in Space and Society, ed. Markus (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 263–310.
Twentieth-century critics have mainly been less easy with the poem. In his masterly reading Daiches compares it unfavourably to Fergusson’s formally Spenserian precursor, The Farmer’s Ingle. Compared to Fergusson’s consistent vernacular, Daiches finds the language and voice uneven in the Burns poem. The problem Daiches believes is that, beginning with its initial homage to Robert Aitken: ‘What Aitken in a Cottage would have been;/Ah! tho’ his worth unknown, far happier there I ween’, a most unlikely tale, the poem is muddled, in parts, especially the ruined maid sequence, by Burns too consciously looking over his shoulder to please genteel Edinburgh.’ As he further notes:
There is probably no poem of Burns in which the introduction of an artificial personality has spoiled a potentially fine work to the extent that it has in The Cotter’s Saturday Night. The main trouble is that the poet has kept shifting his attitude, and with it his diction, between several incompatible positions. He is at one and the same time the sympathetic, realistic observer; at still another he is the sophisticated moralist acting as a guide showing off his rustic character for the benefit of a sentimental, genteel audience (p. 149).
Daiches is also rightly concerned with the semi, if not wholly, detached nature of the last two stanzas: ‘But he overdoes the patriotic note, and in his final stanza seems to forget altogether the real theme of his poem.’ Perhaps subconsciously, Burns did realise that some of the poem was complicit with values he detested and this invocation of a national, contractually governed common people was his attempt to deny some of the sentiments which preceded his inevitably inorganic conclusion. Certainly he is echoing the national spirit of Fergusson’s The Farmer’s Ingle:
On sicken food has mony doughty deed
By Caledonia’s ancestors been done;
By this did mony wright fu’ weirlike bleed
In brulzies frae the dawn to set o’ sun:
’Twas this that brac’d their gardies stiff and strang
That bent the deidly yew in antient days,
Laid Denmark’s daring sons on yird alang,
Gar’d Scottish thristles bang the Roman bays;
For near our crest their heads they doughtna raise.
It would be hard to overestimate Fergusson’s influence in both national style and substance on Burns. From Fergusson, albeit often more elegiacally expressed, come the sense of the food, drink, music and personages that make up the Scottish spirit. Burns also understood that Fergusson was, if covertly, a profoundly political poet. Like himself, Fergusson was socially displaced because he also existed in a hierarchical world between masters and men. Their political poetry, then, had to be ironic, oblique, comically masked. In defining Fergusson as ‘bauld and slee’ (bold and sly) Burns, knowingly, defined himself. As we have already seen, Fergusson’s brilliant Hame Content: A Satire with its denunciation of those Europhiliac, decadent aristocrats who will not remain responsibly at home was put, in The Twa Dogs, to equally brilliant use. These lines from the same Fergusson poem should remind us simultaneously of the relatively uneven failure of The Cotter’s Saturday Night and the greatness in representing the harshness, beauty and injustice in the life of the common people found in so much of Burns’s other poetry, significantly due to Fergusson’s influence on him:
Now whan the Dog-day heats begin
To birsel and to peel the skin,
May I lie streetkit at my ease,
Beneath the caller shady trees,
(Far frae the din o’ Borrowstown,)
Whar water plays the haughs bedown,
To jouk the simmer’s rigor there,
And breath a while the caller air
’Mang herds, an’ honest cotter fock
That till the farm and feed the flock;
Careless o’ mair, wha never fash
To lade their kist wi’ useless cash
But thank the gods for what they’ve sent
O’ health eneugh, and blyth content,
An’ pith, that helps them to stravaig
Owr ilka cleugh and ilka craig,
Unkend to a’ the weary granes
That aft arise frae gentler banes,
On easy-chair that pamper’d lie,
Wi’ banefu’ viands gustit high,
And turn and fald their weary clay,
To rax and gaunt the live-lang day.
1 Pope’s Windsor Forest, R.B.
2 Pope’s Essay on Man, R.B.
To a Mouse
On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough November 1785
First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie, small, sleek
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie! breast
Thou need na start awa sae hasty away, so
Wi’ bickering brattle! hasty, scurry
5 I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee, would, loath, run
Wi’ murdering pattle! a wooden plough-scraper
I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion
10 Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion
An’ fellow mortal!
I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve; not, sometimes
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live! must
15 A daimen icker in a thrave one ear of corn in 24 sheaves
’S a sma’ request;
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave, remainder
An’ never miss’t!
Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin! small, house/nest
20 Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin
! walls, winds
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane, nothing, build, new one
O’ foggage green! thick winter grass
An’ bleak December’s win’s ensuin, winds
Baith snell an’ keen! both bitter, biting cold
25 Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary Winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast, cosy
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past plough blade
30 Out thro’ thy cell.
That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble, small, stubble
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble! many
Now thou’s turned out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald, without, holding
35 To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble, endure, drizzle
An’ cranreuch cauld! hoar-frost cold
But Mousie, thou art no thy lane, not alone
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
40 Gang aft agley, go often wrong
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, leave
For promis’d joy!
Still thou art blest, compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
45 But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see, cannot
I guess an’ fear!
Formally, this is a companion to that other creaturely masterpiece, To a Louse. McGuirk defines them as both belonging to ‘Horatian satire, linking an exemplum of observed experience with a final sententia or maxim’ (p. 223). In terms of content, however, the two poems, presumably deliberately, could not be more different. The hypothermic mouse, houselessly unprotected, has the ice of winter penetrating its fast fading heart. The hyperactive louse, pulsing with grotesque energy and intentions, foresees a comfortable head-high residence.
This is truly one of the great animal poems of the Sentimental canon fit to stand with Fergusson’s great goldfinch and butterfly poems and Smart’s cat poem. The destructive ploughman poet’s guilt and empathy for the creature are wholly realised as is the sense of the inherent relationship of all created things. It is, seriously, The Ancient Mariner in miniature.
Crawford, in a very fine reading of the poem, rescued it from its daisy-like sentimental reputation particularly by stressing the subtle political analogy in the poem between mice and peasant suffering similar, perhaps fatal, decanting in that age of agrarian revolution. As Crawford remarks:
The mouse becomes more than any animal; she is a symbol of the peasant, or rather of the ‘poor peasant’ condition. On a careful reading of the fifth stanza, the lines ‘Till crash! the cruel coulter past/out thro’ thy cell’ affect us with all the terror of Blake’s ‘dark Satanic mills’. The coulter is in reality Burns’s equivalent of the mills – part of the metaphorical plough of social change that breaks down the houses of both Lowland and Highland cotters. This is not to claim that the poem is allegorical in any crude or literal sense. The mouse does not ‘stand for’ the mother of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ or the Highland ‘hizzies’ whom Beelzebub thought should be ‘lessoned’ in Drury Lane, but she belongs to the same world as these others and gains an extra dimension from those emotions whose intensity arises from the depth and power of Burns’s own contemplation of human wretchedness and exploitation. (pp. 166–7)
It was written in the early winter of 1785.
Epistle to Davie, a Brother Poet
First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
While winds frae aff BEN-LOMOND blaw, from off, blow (north wind)
And bar the doors wi’ drivin’ snaw, snow
And hing us owre the ingle, sit around/over, fireplace
I set me down to pass the time,
5 And spin a verse or twa o’ rhyme, two
In hamely, westlin jingle: western
While frosty winds blaw in the drift, blow
Ben to the chimla lug, right, chimney bottom/fire
I grudge a wee the Great-folk’s gift, little
10 That live sae bien an’ snug: so comfortable
I tent less, and want less care for
Their roomy fire-side;
But hanker, and canker,
To see their cursed pride.
15 It’s hardly in a body’s pow’r,
To keep, at times, frae being sour, from
To see how things are shar’d;
How best o’ chiels are whyles in want, people, often
While Coofs on countless thousands rant, fools, make merry/riot
20 And ken na how to ware’t; know not, spend
But DAVIE, lad, ne’er fash your head, trouble
Tho’ we hae little gear; have, wealth
We’re fit to win our daily bread,
As lang’s we’re hale and fier: long as, whole, vigorous
25 ‘Mair spier na, nor fear na,’1 don’t ask more, nor fear
Auld age ne’er mind a feg; old, fig
The last o’t, the warst o’t, worst
Is only but to beg.
To lie in kilns and barns at e’en,
30 When banes are craz’d, and bluid is thin, bones, blood
Is, doubtless, great distress!
Yet then content could make us blest;
Ev’n then, sometimes, we’d snatch a taste
Of truest happiness.
35 The honest heart that’s free frae a’ from all
Intended fraud or guile,
However Fortune kick the ba’, ball – whatever misfortunes
Has ay some cause to smile; always
And mind still, you’ll find still,
40 A comfort this nae sma’; not small
Nae mair then, we’ll care then, no more
Nae farther can we fa’. no, fall
What tho’, like Commoners of air, owners of air, not land
We wander out, we know not where,
45 But either house or hal’? without house or hall
Yet Nature’s charms, the hills and woods,
The sweeping vales, and foaming floods,
Are free alike to all.
In days when Daisies deck the ground,
50 And Blackbirds whistle clear,
With honest joy our hearts will bound,
To see the coming year:
On braes when we please then, hillsides
We’ll sit an’ sowth a tune; hum
55 Syne rhyme till ’t we’ll time till ’t, then
An’ sing ’t when we hae done. have
It’s no in titles nor in rank: not
It’s no in wealth like Lon’on Bank, not, London
To purchase peace and rest.
60 It’s no in makin muckle, mair: making much, more
It’s no in books, it’s no in Lear, wisdom
To make us truly blest:
If happiness hae not her seat has
An’ centre in the breast,
65 We may be wise, or rich, or great,
But never can be blest:
Nae treasures nor pleasures no
Could make us happy lang; long
The heart ay ’s the part ay always is
70 That makes us right or wrang. wrong
Think ye, that sic as you and I, such
Wha drudge and drive thro’ wet and dry, who
Wi’ never ceasing toil;
Think ye, are we less blest than they,
75 Wha scarcely tent us in their way, who, notice
As hardly worth their while?
Alas! how oft, in haughty mood,
GOD’s creatures they oppress!
Or else, neglecting a’ that’s guid, good
80 They riot in excess!
Baith careless and fearless both
Of either Heaven or Hell;
Esteeming and deeming
It a’ an idle tale!
&nbs
p; 85 Then let us chearfu’ acquiesce,
Nor make our scanty Pleasures less
By pining at our state:
And, even should Misfortunes come,
I here wha sit hae met wi’ some, who, have
90 An ’s thankfu’ for them yet,
They gie the wit of Age to Youth; give
They let us ken oursel; know ourselves
They make us see the naked truth,
The real guid and ill: good
95 Tho’ losses and crosses
Be lessons right severe,
There’s Wit there, ye’ll get there,
Ye’ll find nae other where. no
But tent me, DAVIE, Ace o’ Hearts! take heed
100 (To say aught less wad wrang the cartes, And flatt’ry I detest) anything, would wrong, cards
This life has joys for you and I;
And joys that riches ne’er could buy,
And joys the very best.
105 There’s a’ the Pleasures o’ the Heart,
The Lover an’ the Frien’; friend
Ye hae your MEG, your dearest part, have
And I my darling JEAN!
It warms me, it charms me
110 To mention but her name:
It heats me, it beets me, enraptures
And sets me a’ on flame!
O all ye Pow’rs who rule above!
O THOU whose very self art love!
115 THOU know’st my words sincere!
The life blood streaming thro’ my heart,
Or my more dear Immortal part,
Is not more fondly dear!
When heart-corroding care and grief
120 Deprive my soul of rest,
Her dear idea brings relief
And solace to my breast.
Thou BEING, All-seeing,
O hear my fervent pray’r!
125 Still take her, and make her
THY most peculiar care!
All hail! ye tender feelings dear!
The smile of love, the friendly tear,
The sympathetic glow!
130 Long since, this world’s thorny ways