The Canongate Burns

by Robert Burns

  30 And cudgell’d him full sore; smashed

  They hung him up before the storm,

  And turn’d him o’er and o’er.

  They filled up a darksome pit

  With water to the brim,

  35 They heaved in John Barleycorn,

  There let him sink or swim.

  They laid him out upon the floor,

  To work him farther woe,

  And still, as signs of life appear’d,

  40 They toss’d him to and fro.

  They wasted, o’er a scorching flame

  The marrow of his bones;

  But a Miller us’d him worst of all,

  For he crush’d him between two stones.

  45 And they hae taen his very heart’s blood, have taken

  And drank it round and round;

  And still the more and more they drank,

  Their joy did more abound.

  John Barleycorn was a hero bold,

  50 Of noble enterprise,

  For if you do but taste his blood,

  ’Twill make your courage rise.

  ’Twill make a man forget his woe;

  ’Twill heighten all his joy;

  55 ’Twill make the widow’s heart to sing,

  Tho’ the tear were in her eye.

  Then let us toast John Barleycorn,

  Each man a glass in hand;

  And may his great posterity

  60 Ne’er fail in old Scotland.

  Composition is generally dated to around 1785, although Kinsley believes it was written earlier. In the FCB Burns writes, ‘John Barleycorn. – A Song, to its own Tune. I once heard the old song that goes by this name, sung; and being very fond of it, and remembering only two or three verses of it viz the 1st, 2nd and 3rd, with some scraps which I have interwoven here and there in the following piece’, June 1785. Kinsley probably over-stresses the importance of the myth of the Corn Spirit still prevalent in the 18th century as the ‘kernel’ theme of this song, the notion that the ‘old man of vegitation’ is driven out of the corn at threshing time to inhabit the fields, then returns to be the spirit of the next crop (Vol. III, p. 1017). Low is probably right in assuming Burns had read or heard the chapbook song of 1781, the allegory of drink titled The Whole Trial and Indictment of Sir John Barleycorn, Knt., A Person of Noble Birth and Extraction… Being Accused of Several Misdemeanours… killing some, wounding others, and bringing thousands to Beggary (p. 82). The song celebrates both the positive social influence of whisky as a prompt to friendship and waves the national flag of Scotland in the name of John Barleycorn in the final stanzas. It is a record of events, from seedtime to harvest, on till the brewing and consumption of whisky. For Burns, John Barleycorn is a hero, not a villain.

  1 This is partly composed on the plan of an old song known by the same name. R.B.

  When Guilford Good

  or Ballad on the American War

  Tune: Gillicrankie or The Earl of Glencairn’s.

  Printed in the Edinburgh edition, 1787.

  When Guilford good our Pilot stood,1

  An’ did our hellim thraw, man, helm turn

  Ae night, at tea, began a plea,2 one

  Within America, man:

  5 Then up they gat the maskin-pat, got, tea-pot

  And in the sea did jaw, man; dash

  An’ did nae less, in full Congress, no

  Than quite refuse our law, man.

  Then thro’ the lakes Montgomery takes,3

  10 I wat he was na slaw, man; wot, not slow

  Down Lowrie’s Burn he took a turn, St Lawrence river

  And Carleton did ca’, man:4 call

  But yet, whatreck, he at Quebec what matter

  Montgomery-like did fa’, man, fall

  15 Wi’ sword in hand, before his band,

  Amang his en’mies a’, man. among, all

  Poor Tammy Gage within a cage5

  Was kept at Boston-ha’, man; hall

  Till Willie Howe took o’er the knowe6 hill edge

  20 For Philadelphia, man:

  Wi’ sword an’ gun he thought a sin

  Guid Christian bluid to draw, man; good, blood

  But at New-York wi’ knife an’ fork

  Sir Loin he hacked sma’, man.7 small

  25 Burgoyne gaed up, like spur an’ whip,8 went

  Till Fraser brave did fa’, man;9 fall

  Then lost his way, ae misty day, one

  In Saratoga shaw, man. wood

  Cornwallis fought as lang’s he dought,10 long as he could

  30 An’ did the Buckskins claw, man; colonists

  But Clinton’s glaive frae rust to save,11 sword, from

  He hung it to the wa’ man. wall

  Then Montague, an’ Guilford too,12

  Began to fear a fa’, man; fall

  35 And Sackville doure, wha stood the stoure13 obstinate, who fought

  The German Chief to thraw, man: thwart

  For Paddy Burke, like ony Turk,14 any

  Nae mercy had at a’, man; no, all

  An’ Charlie Fox threw by the box,15

  40 An’ lows’d his tinkler jaw, man. let loose, gypsy mouth

  Then Rockingham took up the game;16

  Till Death did on him ca’, man; call

  When Shelburne meek held up his cheek,17

  Conform to Gospel law, man:

  45 Saint Stephen’s boys, wi’ jarring noise, M.P.’s, loud

  They did his measures thraw, man; thwart/turn

  For North an’ Fox united stocks,

  An’ bore him to the wa,’ man. wall

  Then Clubs an’ Hearts were Charlie’s cartes, cards

  50 He swept the stakes awa’, man, away

  Till the Diamond’s Ace, of Indian race, Fox’s East India Bill

  Led him a sair faux pas, man: sore

  The Saxon lads, wi loud placads, cheers

  On Chatham’s Boy did ca’, man;18 call

  55 An’ Scotland drew her pipe an’ blew:

  ‘Up, Willie, waur them a’, man!’ worst

  Behind the throne then Grenville’s gone,19

  A secret word or twa, man; two

  While slee Dundas arous’d the class20 sly

  60 Be-north the Roman wa’, man: wall

  An’ Chatham’s wraith, in heav’nly graith, ghost, garments

  (Inspired Bardies saw, man),

  Wi’ kindling eyes, cry’d, ‘Willie, rise!

  Would I hae fear’d them a’, man!’ have

  65 But, word an’ blow, North, Fox, and Co.

  Gowff’d Willie like a ba’, man, golfed, ball

  Till Suthron raise an’ coost their claise rose, cast their clothes

  Behind him in a raw, man: naked

  An’ Caledon threw by the drone, bagpipe sound

  70 An’ did her whittle draw, man; knife

  An’ swoor fu’ rude, thro’ dirt an’ bluid, swore full, blood

  To mak it guid in law, man. good

  Though he did not risk publishing it in the Kilmarnock edition, this is Burns’s first political poem. It is, thus, seminal in several important ways. For the first time it brings not only the world of late eighteenth-century British but international politics before the wickedly reductive court of Burns’s Scottish vernacular energies. Second, it demonstrates for the first time his astonishing powers of compressed narrative. Here he records in a mere nine stanzas not only the genesis of the American War of Independence and politically significant campaigns in that war but also the extreme disruption provoked in British politics by the loss of America. Third, it signals his acutely self-endangering ambition, from his marginal social position, to comment politically on the world of kings and counsellors. As he was soon to write:

  But Politics, truce! we’re on dangerous ground;

  Who knows how the fashions may alter:

  The doctrines today that are loyalty sound,

  Tomorrow may bring us a halter.

  Further, that this is a song with its th
umping (‘man’) alternate line repetition entails that he desires maximum public exposure for it. This engenders a triple-headed problem that would increasingly preoccupy him. Would he be allowed to publish it? What final strategies might he employ to disguise the explosive nature of the material? If such strategies, most frequently that of the smiler with the knife, were impossible, how might he get such explosive political material into the political realm without disclosing his authorship?

  This song emphasises the first of these problems. He had some thought of placing it in the Kilmarnock edition. He then consulted his Whig patron, the Earl of Glencairn, subsequently writing to his Masonic associate in the Canongate Lodge, Henry Erskine:

  I showed the enclosed political ballad to my Lord Glencairn, to have his opinion whether I should publish it; as I suspect my political tenets, such as they are, may be rather heretical in the opinion of some of my best friends. I have a few first principles in Religion and Politics which, I believe, I would not easily part with; but for the etiquette of, by whom, in what manners &c. I would not have a dissocial word about it with any one of God’s creatures, particularly an honoured Patron, or a respected Friend (Letter 70).

  That he might upset Glencairn and Erskine, Whig sympathisers with the American cause, seems odd until we consider his treatment of the parliamentarian Rockingham Whigs, Fox and Burke, in the latter part of the poem. He did certainly, however, upset the Tory pro-Hanoverian Edinburgh establishment. It was of this poem that, according to Lockhart (Vol. I, p. 205), Hugh Blair remarked ‘Burns’s politics always smell of the smithy’. His card was thus marked from the outset.

  This snooty disdain for the allegedly sooty is, embryonically, that pervasive state of mind which, consciously and otherwise, has so successfully sought to exclude Burns as socially inferior poet, no matter his political intelligence, from commenting on his alleged betters. With regard to American affairs, as we have seen in the Introduction, Burns was passionately pro-American. Further, by denying this political element in Burns, Blair was also disguising the strong pro-American republican culture in Edinburgh which Burns knew about both by his membership of the Crochallan Fencibles and his avaricious reading of the Edinburgh press. Alfred A. Kline in a stimulating Columbia University doctorate written as long ago as 1953, The English Romantics and the American Republic: An Analysis of the Concept of America in the Work of Blake, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley is deeply salutary in two respects. In general terms, it reminds us of the political company which Burns’s poetry keeps. Blake’s America, for example, though mythopoetically distinct from Burns’s, is profoundly similar in content. Central to Wordsworth’s Guilt and Sorrow or Incidents Upon Salisbury Plain (See commentary on A Winter Night) is a hellish vision of the American war as recalled by the returned widowed vagrant of one of the dead British redcoats who, revealingly, became termed in that conflict, ‘bloody-backs’: ‘dog-like wading at the heels of War … a cursed existence with the brood/ That lap, their very nourishment, their brother’s blood’.

  Kline also provides evidence of the degree to which radical elements in Edinburgh were attracted to the American cause. Thus Richard Price’s Letter to the Secretary of the Committee of Citizens in Edinburgh, The Scots Magazine (April, 1784), comments:

  God grant that this spirit may increase till it has abolished all despotic government and exterminated the slavery which debase mankind. This spirit first rose in America – it soon reached Ireland – it has diffused itself in some foreign countries, and your letter informs me that it is now animating Scotland (p. 179).

  As we saw in the Introduction, Price was influential for Burns. In January 1791 we find (Letter 430) Burns ordering from Peter Hill Dr Price’s Dissertations on Providence, Prayer, Death & Miracles. Whether Burns also read Price’s subtle, balanced Observations an the Importance of the American Revolution and the Means of Making It A Benefit to the World is uncertain. What is certain is that he would have agreed with its provocative sentiments (See Richard Price: Political Writings, ed. D.O. Thomas, Cambridge: 1991). Kline also quotes Professor W.P. Ker, whose scholarship led him to define Burns as a Tory Unionist, saying ‘Burns must have read the newspapers … and The Scots Magazine with extraordinary care’, to which Kline adds that this included back issues. Thus the first part of this poem is again dependent on Burns transmuting newspaper prose into poetry, as, indeed, is the latter part dealing with the political shambles in Britain consequent to the American defeat.

  The first stanza deals with the good Guilford, the Prime Minister, and Lord North, whose wrecking seamanship led to the loss of North America. After the inception of the war by the taxation policy leading to the Boston Tea Party, Burns narrates the campaign leading up to the Americans’ (‘Buckskins’) culminating in victory with Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, 10th October 1781 with Clinton unable to break though from New York to relieve him.

  The second stanza deals with a double pronged American attack in 1775 into Canada against Quebec and Montreal. What is of particular significance is that the second-in-command of the Montreal force was Richard Montgomery, one of the Montgomerys of Coylfield celebrated by Burns in his eulogy to the greatness sprung from Ayrshire soil in The Vision. Montreal surrendered to Montgomery who then set down ‘Lowrie’s Burn’ to support Arnold at Quebec, where he was killed in the assault. What, of course, Burns is implying is the heroism of not just a Scottish but an Ayrshire martyr dying for the American cause.

  The third stanza deals with the passive General Gage being replaced by Sir William Howe who, despite his victories over the Americans at Bunker Hill and near Philadelphia could not change the course of the war. Despite his deep reservations at spilling American blood, Howe’s army ‘butchered’ three thousand colonists and captured many cattle at Peerskill Fort on the Hudson in November 1776.

  The fourth stanza narrates the triumph of American arms. General Burgoyne advancing into Albany in the autumn of 1777 was forced to surrender to an American army three times his size at Saratoga on 17th October. Simon Frazer (another Scottish hero) was killed at the battle of Freeman’s Farm.

  The defeat in America was of such catastrophic proportions that it threw the British political system into extreme factionalism, especially given George III’s hatred of the Whigs in general and Fox in particular. Added to this there was the problem of making peace with France, combined with the matter of India and the East India Company and the chronic Irish problem. This produced spasmodically rapid changes of administration based on the unlikeliest of alliances, in particular that between North and Fox. What is poetically astonishing about this, is that Burns, from a provincial viewpoint at the beginning of his poetic career, can compress the roller-coaster clamour of St Stephen’s (then the site of Parliament) into a mere five stanzas. Undoubtedly he was aided by not only the newspapers but the cartoons. As for example, L.G. Mitchell (in Charles James Fox, London, 1992) notes:

  True, some cartoons appeared showing Fox as Cromwell or Carlo Khan, riding down Leadenhall St on the back of an Indian elephant but others portrayed him as the new Demosthenes or as the ‘Champion of the People’. Against anti-Coalition songs must be set images showing Pitt, riding the white horse of Despotic Hanover, battling with Fox, sitting aside the British Lion … Hitherto, these two young men had jointly been the hope of the reformers. Now, they were opponents and shackled by alliances to non-reformers. Which of them would prove to be the long-term friend of reformers had to be debated at public meetings all over England, and the divisions set up at these assemblies fatally harmed the reform movement as a whole. Christopher Wyvill opted for Pitt, declaring that Fox wished to change our limited Monarchy into a mere Aristocratic Republic. William Mason thought that all politics would be corruption if ‘Charles Fox had the Indies at his disposal’ (pp. 68–9).

  Mitchell’s lucid remarks should also alert us to the fact that Burns’s political responses to British party politics, often represented as eccentric and quixotic, were based
on the national dilemma between the relative potential of Fox and Pitt to deliver reform. Fox, with his swarthy, ‘tinkler jaw’ remained, to a degree, oportunistic and licentious. Pitt, to many, including Burns, at this time looked the more reforming politician. Certainly Burns was not one of the ‘inspired Bardies’ when he wrote this. He was not to know how catastrophically his and Scotland’s support for ‘Willie’ Pitt and, far worse, ‘slee’ Dundas was to rebound on them both. Compared to the political opportunism of the age, Burns is, however, a figure of profound stability. Who could, for example, switch positions more than ‘Paddy’ Burke? As we shall see this exclusive identification of Burke by his Irish forename diminutive is tellingly to reappear in the recently recovered poem The Dagger (see Anonymous and Pseudonymous Section).

  1 Frederick, Lord North (1732–92).

  2 The Boston tea party of 1773.

  3 Richard Montgomery.

  4 Guy Carleton.

  5 General Gage (1721–88), Governor of Massachusetts.

  6 Sir William Howe (d. 1814).

  7 This alludes to the seizure of rebel cattle by the Hudson, at Peekskill, 1776.

  8 Sir John Burgoyne (1722–92).

  9 Brigadier Simon Fraser.

  10 Charles Conrnwallis (1738–1805).

  11 Sir Henry Clinton (1738–95).

  12 John Montague, Earl of Sandwich.

  13 Lord George Sackville (1716–85) who was at Culloden with the Duke of Cumberland.

  14 Edmund Burke (1727–97); alluding to his Irish origin.

  15 Charles James Fox (1749–1806), Whig Leader.

  16 The Marquis of Rockingham, Charles Watson Wentworth (1730–82).

  17 The Earl of Shelbourne (1737–1805).

  18 William Pitt, the Younger (1759–1806).

  19 William Wyndham (1759–1834) Lord Grenville.