by Robert Burns
Frae words an’ aiths, to clours an’ nicks; from, oaths, bumps, cuts
An’ monie a fallow gat his licks, many, fellow got, punishment
40 Wi’ hearty crunt; blow
An’ some, to learn them for their tricks,
Were hang’d an’ brunt. burned
This game was play’d in monie lands, many
An’ auld-light caddies bure sic hands, lackeys bore such
45 That faith, the youngsters took the sands fled
Wi’ nimble shanks, legs
Till Lairds forbade, by strict commands,
Sic bluidy pranks. such bloody
But new-light herds gat sic a cowe, got such a terror
50 Folk thought them ruin’d stick-an-stowe; completely
Till now, amaist on ev’ry knowe almost, hill or hillock
Ye’ll find ane placed; one
An’ some, their New-Light fair avow,
Just quite barefac’d.
55 Nae doubt the auld-light flocks are bleatan;
Their zealous herds are vex’d and sweatan;
Mysel, I’ve even seen them greetan crying
Wi’ girnan spite, snarling
To hear the Moon sae sadly lie’d on so
60 By word an’ write.
But shortly they will cowe the louns! terrify, rascals
Some auld-light herds in neebor touns neighbour towns
Are mind’t, in things they ca’ balloons, call
To tak a flight, take
65 An’ stay ae month amang the Moons one, among
An’ see them right.
Guid observation they will gie them; good, give
An’ when the auld Moon’s gaun to lea’e them, old, going, leave
The hindmost shaird, they’ll fetch it wi’ them, fragment
70 Just i’ their pouch;
An’ when the new-light billies see them, people
I think they’ll crouch!
Sae, ye observe that a’ this clatter so, talk
Is naething but a ‘moonshine matter’; nothing
75 But tho’ dull prose-folk Latin splatter speak
In logic tulzie, quarrel
I hope we, Bardies, ken some better know
Than mind sic brulzie. such a brawl
William Simpson (1758–1815) was a Glasgow University graduate who taught at Ochiltree and later at Cumnock. His relationship with Burns was initiated by sending him a now lost verse epistle praising Burns’s anti-clerical satire, The Holy Tulzie. Burns was, of course, always looking for allies in his guerrilla warfare with the forces of Auld-Licht Calvinism. The attack, almost surreal, on crazed theology provides the poem’s postscript. The bulk of the poem is, however, like its longer contemporary, The Vision, taken up with Burns’s self-placing in the lineage of great Scottish poets and Ayrshire’s topography and heroic dead. L. 9, ‘Ironic satire, sidelins sklented’ is of particular note because it is of the quintessence of Burns’s own poetic strategy as a satirist since he was socially disempowered from full frontal assault on his enemies.
He celebrates his great eighteenth century vernacular predecessors, Ramsay, Hamilton of Gilbertfield but above all his wholly beloved Robert Fergusson to whom, as soon as he got to Edinburgh, he paid for a tombstone for his unmarked grave. Ironically Fergusson’s fate at the hands of genteel Edinburgh (ll. 19–24) was to be a sorry prelude to his own.
Burns’s genteel contemporaries thought his pastoral poetry imitatively conventional. John Logan wrote to Henry Mackenzie: ‘Mr Burns is a clever fellow, a Man of Observation, and a Country Libertine, but I am much mistaken if he has anything of the Penseroso in his character’ (Low, Robert Burns: The Critical Heritage, p. 79). Actually, Burns’s intense intimate rural realism they shied away from; the harsh life of man and beast is not what they wished to countenance. Burns himself would not have disavowed the libertine. L. 29. ‘I kittle up my rustic reed’ arguably endorses his opinion that erotic and creative energy were always synergetic for him: in this case, ejaculatively so.
As in The Vision the poem looks forward to a Bardic celebration of Ayrshire, in this case as a poetic-newfoundland. Wordsworth when he came to pay pilgrimage to the poet to whom he owed so much was perturbed that Burns had not creatively, unlike himself, lifted his eyes unto the hills. The Arran Mountains were for the English poet disturbingly above Burns’s line of vision. Burns is, however, like MacDiarmid a poet given to water music:
The Muse nae Poet ever fand her,
Till by himself he learn’d to wander,
Adown some trottin burn’s meander.…
Thus Coila’s (Ayrshire’s) rivers are to receive the poetic celebration given already to bardically celebrated Scottish and European streams. So, too, is Ayrshire’s archetypal hero, William Wallace. Wallace haunts Burns’s poetry and letters. A biography of Wallace was one of the first things he read: ‘the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the floodgates of life shut in eternal rest’ (See Letters 55, 78, 125). Burns hoped that Wallace’s example would energise the struggle for freedom of his own generation. More darkly, he perhaps came to associate Scotland’s dismembered hero with his own fate. As in all these early Ayrshire epistles a compensatory natural freedom is celebrated in the face of the greedy (Mandevillism) of the prosperously secure (ll. 90–6).
The poem’s Postscript is a deeply comic account of the controversy between Auld and New Licht Theology in terms of the analogy of a quarrel between the old and new thought about the nature of the moon. Ancestral thought believed that the moon, when it waned, was discarded and replaced by a completely new one in the sky. The Auld Lichts cling to this unscientific cosmology. The traditionalists then decide to set off into space in a balloon to prove their case empirically. There is controversy regarding how much Swift Burns knew. Certainly they were, for different reasons, both profoundly displaced persons which allowed them to view eccentrically worlds to which they never fully belonged and which they agonisingly saw as suffused with inequity and iniquity. Certainly also, as in this balloon fantasy, Burns is distinctively Swiftian in his send-up of the madness of scientific hyperrationalism. Burns, as he footnotes, is also defending the theology of ‘Dr Taylor of Norwich (1722)’ whose tract The Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin Proposed to Free and Candid Examination (1740) provided the foundation for liberalising ‘New Licht’ doctrine.
1 A cant-term for those religious opinions which Dr Taylor of Norwich has defended so strenuously. –R.B.
Epistle to John Ranken,
Enclosing Some Poems
First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
O rough, rude, ready-witted RANKEN,
The wale o’ cocks for fun an’ drinkin! pick/choice
There’s monie godly folks are thinkin’ many
Your dreams1 and tricks
5 Will send you, Korah-like, a-sinkin
Straught to Auld Nick’s. straight, old, the Devil
Ye hae sae monie cracks an’ cants, have so many stories & jokes
And in your wicked drucken rants, drunken babble
Ye mak a devil o’ the Saunts, saints
10 An’ fill them fou’; drunk
And then their failings, flaws, an’ wants
Are a’ seen thro’.
Hypocrisy, in mercy spare it!
That holy robe, O dinna tear it! do not
15 Spare ’t for their sakes, wha aften wear it — who often
The lads in black; robes
But your curst wit, when it comes near it,
Rives ’t aff their back. rips, off
Think, wicked Sinner, wha ye’re skaithing: who, slighting
20 It’s just the Blue-gown badge an’ claithing clothing
O’ Saunts; tak that, ye lea’e them naething saints, take, leave, nothing
To ken them by, know
Frae ony unregenerate Heathen, from any
Like you or I.
25 I’ve sent you here some rhymi
ng ware items of poetry
A’ that I bargain’d for, an’ mair; more
Sae, when ye hae an hour to spare, so, have
I will expect,
Yon Sang2 ye’ll sen ’t, wi’ cannie care, song, send it, cautious
30 And no neglect.
Tho’ faith, sma’ heart hae I to sing: little, have
My Muse dow scarcely spread her wing: can
I’ve play’d mysel a bonie spring, pleasant tune
An’ danc’d my fill!
35 I’d better gaen an’ sair’t the King gone, served
At Bunker’s Hill.
’Twas ae night lately, in my fun, one
I gaed a rovin wi’ the gun, went
An’ brought a Paitrick to the grun’, partridge, ground
40 A bonie hen; pretty
And, as the twilight was begun,
Thought nane wad ken. none would know
The poor, wee thing was little hurt;
I straikit it a wee for sport, stroked, a little
45 Ne’er thinkan they wad fash me for’t; would, trouble
But, Deil-ma-care!
Somebody tells the Poacher-Court Kirk Session
The hale affair. whole
Some auld, us’d hands had taen a note, old, taken
50 That sic a hen had got a shot; such
I was suspected for the plot;
I scorn’d to lie;
So gat the whissle o’ my groat, got, played a losing game
An’ pay’t the fee.
55 But by my gun, o’ guns the wale, pick/choice
An’ by my pouther an’ my hail. gunpowder
An’ by my hen, an’ by her tail,
I vow an’ swear!
The Game shall Pay, owre moor an’ dail, over
60 For this, niest year! next
As soon’s the clockin-time is by, egg-hatching
An’ the wee pouts begun to cry, small chicks
Lord, I’se hae sportin by an’ by I’ll have
For my gowd guinea; gold
65 Tho’ I should herd the buckskin kye American cattle/slaves
For ’t, in Virginia! in America
Trowth, they had muckle for to blame! in truth, much
’Twas neither broken wing nor limb,
But twa-three draps about the wame, two-, (sperm), belly
70 Scarce thro’ the feathers;
An’ baith a yellow George to claim both, gold guinea
An’ thole their blethers! suffer, gossip
It pits me ay as mad’s a hare; puts/makes, always
So I can rhyme nor write nae mair; no more
75 But pennyworths again is fair, a paid bargain
When time’s expedient:
Meanwhile I am, respected Sir,
Your most obedient,
Robt. Burns.
John Rankin (d. 1810) was a tenant farmer in Adamhill, Tarbolton. He was friendly with Burns in the Lochlea years. His sister Margaret was, appropriately, the first wife of John Lapraik since both Lapraik and Rankin belonged to that anarchic, anti-clerical ‘ramstam’ Ayrshire group. The specific occasion of the poem is Burns’s ‘allegorical’ account of his impregnation of Betty Paton resulting in the birth of an illegitimate daughter represented in terms of the poacher and his gun. Hugh Blair was first uncomprehending and then horrified as understanding slowly dawned: ‘The description of shooting the hen is understood, I find, to convey an indecent meaning tho’ in reading the poem … I took it literally, and the indecency did not strike me. But … the whole poem ought undoubtedly to be left out of the new edition’ (J. De Lancey Ferguson, ‘Burns and Hugh Blair’, Modern Language Notes, xlv (1930), 441–3). It was not in the least of Burns’s resistances to Blair that he kept the poem in.
L. 5. is a direct reference to Numbers xvi, 29–33, again demonstrating the range of Burns’s allusive grasp of the Bible. The initial part of the poem, especially ll. 13–18, is an attack on the clergy akin to Blake’s Songs of Experience. These holy devils reassert themselves later in the poem as ‘the Poacher-Court’ kirk session which punished apprehended fornicators by putting them on black-gowned display.
While this Ayrshire epistle is much less concerned than the others with Burns’s anxieties about his ability to create for himself a poetic career in such a hostile environment, American allusions betray doubts about both the worth of his creativity and its capacity to earn him a living. Thus ll. 35–6, ‘I’d better gaen an’ sair’t the King/At Bunker’s Hill’ is, given both the fate of British arms and Burns’s espousal of the American cause, a particularly self-denigrating remark. Troubling in a different way are ll. 65–66, ‘Tho’ I should herd the buckskin kye/For ’t in Virginia!’ which are arguably the least politically correct lines the Bard wrote. He is, of course, referring to his intended emigration as escape from Ayrshire’s cloying fiscal and clerical restraints to become a ‘poor Negro-driver’ (Letter 125). On the other hand, he went on to write The Slave’s Lament, praised by Maya Angelou because of its grasp not only of the substance but the very rhythm of Black American experience.
1 A certain humorous dream of his was then making a noise in the world. R.B.
2 A Song he had promised the author.
The Rigs o Barley
or It was upon a Lammas Night
First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
Tune: Corn Rigs are Bonie
It was upon a Lammas night, harvest festival
When corn rigs are bonie, ridges/rows
Beneath the moon’s unclouded light,
I held awa to Annie: away
5 The time flew by, wi’ tentless heed; carefree
Till,’ tween the late and early,
Wi’ sma’ persuasion she agreed
To see me thro’ the barley.
Chorus
10 Corn rigs, an’ barley rigs,
An’ corn rigs are bonie:
I’ll ne’er forget that happy night,
Amang the rigs wi’ Annie.
The sky was blue, the wind was still,
15 The moon was shining clearly;
I set her down, wi’ right good will,
Amang the rigs o’ barley:
I ken’t her heart was a’ my ain; knew
I lov’d her most sincerely;
20 I kiss’d her owre and owre again, over
Amang the rigs o’ barley.
Corn rigs, &c.
I lock’d her in my fond embrace;
Her heart was beating rarely:
25 My blessings on that happy place,
Amang the rigs o’ barley!
But by the moon and stars so bright,
That shone that hour so clearly!
She ay shall bless that happy night always
30 Amang the rigs o’ barley.
Corn rigs, &c.
I hae been blythe wi’ comrades dear; have
I hae been merry drinking;
I hae been joyfu’ gath’rin gear; making money
35 I hae been happy thinking:
But a’ the pleasures e’er I saw,
Tho’ three times doubl’d fairly —
That happy night was worth them a’,
Amang the rigs o’ barley.
40 Corn rigs, &c.
This joyful reminiscence of love has been one of the poet’s most popular songs, perfectly matching his lyric to traditional music. The poem’s Annie is supposed to be John Rankine’s daughter. (See Epistle to John Ranken).
Composed in August –
Westlin Winds
First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
Tune: Port Gordon
Now westlin winds and slaught’ring guns from the west
Bring Autumn’s pleasant weather;
The moorcock springs on whirring wings
Amang the blooming heather:
5 Now waving grain, wide o’er the plain,
Delights the weary Farmer;
The moon shines bright, as I rove at night
The Paitrick lo’es the fruitfu’ fells, partridge, loves
10 The Plover lo’es the mountains;
The Woodcock haunts the lanely dells, lonely
The soaring Hern the fountains; heron
Thro’ lofty groves the Cushat roves, wood pigeon
The path o’ man to shun it;
15 The hazel bush o’erhangs the Thrush,
The spreading thorn the Linnet.
Thus ev’ry kind their pleasure find,
The savage and the tender;
Some social join, and leagues combine,
20 Some solitary wander:
Avaunt, away! the cruel sway,
Tyrannic man’s dominion!
The Sportsman’s joy, the murd’ring cry,
The flutt’ring, gory pinion!
25 But, PEGGY dear, the ev’ning’s clear,
Thick flies the skimming swallow,
The sky is blue, the fields in view
All fading-green and yellow:
Come let us stray our gladsome way,
30 And view the charms o’ Nature;
The rustling corn, the fruited thorn,
And ilka happy creature. every
We’ll gently walk, and sweetly talk,
While the silent moon shines clearly;
35 I’ll clasp thy waist, and, fondly prest,
Swear how I lo’e thee dearly: love
Not vernal show’rs to budding flow’rs,
Not Autumn to the Farmer,
So dear can be as thou to me,
40 My fair, my lovely Charmer!
In August 1785, the first 8 lines were copied into the poet’s First Commonplace Book. That version is not the final polished work. It reads:
Now breezy win’s and slaughtering guns
Bring Autumn’s pleasant weather;