by Robert Burns
35 With frantic joy I’d pay it thrice,
If human art or power could do!
Then take, Clarinda, friendship’s hand,
(Friendship, at least, I may avow;)
And lay no more your chill command,
40 I’ll write, whatever I’ve to do. —
Sylvander. Wednesday night
Although it traces the painful fluctuations of the sexually repressed relationship, this poem has the artificial, sentimental tone of most of the Burns/McLehose epistolary correspondence. It has none of the austere power of Ae Fond Kiss.
To Clarinda
With a Pair of Wine-Glasses
First printed by Stewart, 1802.
Fair Empress of the Poet’s soul,
And Queen of Poetesses;
Clarinda, take this little boon,
This humble pair of Glasses.
5 And fill them high with generous juice,
As generous as your mind;
And pledge them to the generous toast —
‘The whole of Humankind!’
‘To those who love us!’ — second fill;
10 But not to those whom we love,
Lest we love those who love not us: —
A third — ‘to thee and me, Love!’
Long may we live! Long may we love!
And long may we be happy!!!
15 And may we never want a Glass,
Well charg’d with generous Nappy!!!!
This was written by Burns to Mrs McLehose before he left Edinburgh in March 1788. The verses and present of glasses were given on 17th March, 1788. Mackay, surprisingly, has dropped the final stanza (See p. 321), an error found in Henley and Henderson (1896). The final stanza is included by most editors from 1834 onwards and is found in Kinsley (no. 219, p. 327–8).
The Bonie Lass of Albanie
Tune: Mary weep no more for me, or Mary’s Dream
First printed by Chambers, 1838.
MY heart is wae and unco wae, sad, mighty sad
To think upon the raging sea,
That roars between her gardens green,
An’ th’ bonie lass of ALBANIE. —
5 This lovely maid’s of noble blood,
That ruled Albion’s kingdoms three;
But Oh, Alas! for her bonie face!
They hae wranged the lass of ALBANIE. — have wronged
In the rolling tide of spreading Clyde
10 There sits an isle of high degree;1
And a town of fame2 whose princely name
Should grace the lass of ALBANIE. —
But there is a youth, a witless youth,3
That fills the place where she should be,
15 We’ll send him o’er to his native shore,
And bring our ain sweet ALBANIE. — own
Alas the day, and woe the day,
A false Usurper wan the gree, won the honours
Who now commands the towers and lands,
20 The royal right of ALBANIE. —
We’ll daily pray, we’ll nightly pray,
On bended knees most ferventlie,
That the time may come, with pipe and drum,
We’ll welcome hame fair ALBANIE. — home
Charlotte Stuart (1753–89) was the daughter of Charles Edward Stuart and his mistress Clementina Walkinshaw. On 6th December, 1787 she was officially titled Duchess of Albany. Charles Edward lived in exile from Scotland until his death on 31st January, 1788. Aware of the former Jacobite leader’s daughter being given this title, Burns wrote the above in dedication to the forlorn cause of the Stuarts and their claim to the British throne. Evidence from an as yet unpublished manuscript collection of letters between Burns and Robert Ainslie reveal that the poet considered naming one of his illegitimate children, if a girl, Charlotte, after the Duchess of Albany.
1 Isle of Bute.
2 Rothesay.
3 Prince George, later King George IV.
A Birthday Ode. December 31st 1787
First printed as a censored fragment by Currie, 1800.
AFAR th’ illustrious Exile roams,
Whom kingdoms on this day should hail!
An Inmate in the casual shed;
On transient Pity’s bounty fed;
5 Haunted by busy Mem’ry’s bitter tale!
Beasts of the forest have their savage homes,
But He who should imperial purple wear
Owns not the lap of earth where rests his royal head:
His wretched refuge, dark Despair,
10 While ravening Wrongs and Woes pursue,
And distant far the faithful Few
Who would his sorrows share!
False flatterer, Hope, away!
Nor think to lure us as in days of yore:
15 We solemnize this sorrowing natal day,
To prove our loyal truth — we can no more;
And, owning Heaven’s mysterious sway,
Submissive, low adore.
Ye honor’d, mighty Dead
20 Who nobly perish’d in the glorious cause,
Your King, your Country, and her Laws;
From great Dundee1 who smiling Victory led,
And fell a Martyr in her arms,
(What breast of northern ice but warms)
25 To bold Balmerino’s2 undying name,
Whose soul of fire, lighted at Heaven’s high flame,
Deserves the brightest wreath departed heroes claim;
Not unreveng’d your fate shall lie;
It only lags, the fatal hour:
30 Your blood shall with incessant cry
Awake at last th’ unsparing Power!
As from the cliff with thundering course
The snowy ruin smokes along,
With doubling speed and gathering force,
35 Till deep it crashing whelms the cottage in the vale;
So Vengeance’ arm, ensanguin’d, strong,
Shall with resistless might assail:
Usurping Brunswick’s3 head shall lowly lay,
And Stewart’s wrongs and yours with tenfold weight repay.
40 Perdition, baleful child of Night,
Rise and revenge the injur’d right
Of Stewart’s ROYAL RACE!
Lead on th’ unmuzzled hounds of Hell
Till all the frighted Echoes tell
45 The blood-notes of the chase!
Full on the quarry point their view,
Full on the base, usurping crew,
The tools of Faction, and the Nation’s curse:
Hark! how the cry grows on the wind;
50 They leave the lagging gale behind;
Their savage fury pitiless they pour,
With murdering eyes already they devour:
See, Brunswick spent, a wretched prey;
His life, one poor, despairing day
55 Where each avenging hour still ushers in a worse!
Such Havock, howling all abroad,
Their utter ruin bring;
The base Apostates to their God,
Or Rebels to their KING!
Currie printed only a fragment of this work in 1800, leaving out ll. 1–12, and ll. 36–59 due to their violent, anti-Hanoverian imagery which would have been construed as treasonable. They contain a wished-for image in which King George III’s brother-in-law, the Duke of Brunswick, has his head chopped off (l. 38). Henley and Henderson censored this image and doctored the poem with their own anodyne phrase to read that Brunswick’s ‘pride shall lay’ rather than his head ‘shall lowly lay’. Kinsley rightly corrects this, but it is copied in the Mackay edition which so often employs the 1896 Henderson and Henley texts. The poem was printed in full by Chambers-Wallace, after the Glenriddell manuscripts appeared. Scott Douglas reverted back to the Currie fragment in 1876.
Jacobitism was still politically taboo in 1800 and criticism of the British monarchy and their relations was for most of the nineteenth century, not the proper thing for a poet to indulge in. When Currie printed the fragmen
t he, quite pathetically, tried to add a Hanoverian gloss to the already censored piece by claiming that those who gathered with Burns in Edinburgh on 31st December, 1787 to celebrate the exiled Stuart King’s birthday, were all ‘perfectly loyal to the King [George] on the throne’. This is far from the case. As Donaldson comments, those who met to celebrate the birthday of Charles Edward Stuart (still living at this time, in France) were ‘not sentimental dabblers but the hard core of the party in Scotland and the poet was clearly persona grata amongst them’ (W. Donaldson, The Jacobite Song, p. 76). Aware he was among people related by blood to the Jacobites who died or lost lands after the 1745 rebellion, Burns wrote on his manuscript that was passed around that evening: ‘Burn the above verses when you have read them, as any little sense that is in them is rather heretical, and do me the justice to believe me sincere in my grateful remembrances of the many civilities you have honoured me with since I came to Edinburgh’ (Donaldson, p. 76).
Currie denigrates the poem’s literary quality, describing it as a ‘rant’ that was ‘deficient in the complicated rhythm and polished versification that such compositions require’ (Currie, Vol. 1, pp. lxi–lxii). Kinsley, who was not under any political pressure to denigrate the politics of Burns, flogs the same horse in his disdainful: ‘it is another of Burns’s calamitous attempts at the Pindaric Ode’ (Vol. III, p. 1256). For a contrary view of Burns and the Pindaric Ode, see notes to A Winter’s Night.
The cataclysmic forces of the avalanche are here shown to deluge the Hanoverians in vengeance for their treatment of the Stuarts (ll. 33–9) by a masterly kinetic use of language. The image of Scotland deluged in blood at the degenerate anarchy described in On the Death of Lord President Dundas is surpassed in what is only partly a Pindaric Ode, given that an adapted form of the Scots stanza of The Cherry and the Slae is neatly employed to bring the poem to its climax. The image of ‘Vengeance’ arm’ (l. 36) and the declamatory ‘Nation’s curse’ are repeated in the new The Ghost of Bruce, second version.
1 ‘Bonnie’ Dundee: John Grahman of Claverhouse, d. 1689.
2 Lord Balmerino, Arthur Elphinstone (168°–1746) fought at Sheriffmuir with the Earl of Mar. He was captured at Culloden and executed in London, 18th August, 1746.
3 The Duke of Brunswick (1735–1806) was brother-in-law to George III and led the Prussian and Austrian armies against France in 1792, boasting he would bring Paris to its knees through starvation.
Hunting Song
or The Bonie Moor-Hen
Tune: I Rede You Beware at the Hunting
First printed by Cromek, 1808.
The heather was blooming, the meadows were mawn, mown
Our lads gaed a-hunting, ae day at the dawn, gone, one
O’er moors and o’er mosses and mony a glen, many
At length they discovered a bonie moor-hen.
Chorus
5 I rede you beware at the hunting, young men;
I rede you beware at the hunting, young men;
Take some on the wing, and some as they spring,
But cannily steal on a bonie moor-hen. carefully
Sweet brushing the dew from the brown heather bells,
10 Her colours betray’d her on yon mossy fells;
Her plumage outlustred the pride o’ the spring,
And O! as she wanton’d sae gay on the wing. so
I rede you beware &c.
Auld Phoebus himsel, as he peep’d o’er the hill,
In spite at her plumage he tryed his skill;
15 He levell’d his rays where she bask’d on the brae — hillside
His rays were outshone, and but mark’d where she lay.
I rede you beware &c.
They hunted the valley, they hunted the hill;
The best of our lads wi’ the best o’ their skill;
But still as the fairest she sat in their sight,
20 Then, whirr! she was over, a mile at a flight.
I rede you beware &c.
Evidence suggests that Burns did not print it on the wishes of Agnes McLehose, who felt the sexual undertones of the hunting metaphor were indelicate (See headnote, Scott Douglas, Vol. II, p. 275). It has been suggested that other stanzas probably existed, as Cromek printed asterisks at the end to indicate suppressed verses. Kinsley records that Henley and Henderson saw a manuscript with no additional verses. Given Cromek’s notoriety in doctoring texts, there is every likelihood that verses were cut away from the original by him.
On Johnson’s Opinion of Hampden
First printed in The Scotsman, 22nd November 1882.
For shame!
Let Folly and Knavery
Freedom oppose:
’Tis suicide, Genius,
To mix with her foes.
Burns inscribed the above in a copy of Samuel Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets, next to a comment by Johnson that the poet Edmund Waller’s mother was a sister of John Hampden ‘the zealot of rebellion’. The edition is supposed to have been gifted by Burns to Alexander Cunningham (1594–1643). The exact date of composition is unknown. Dr Johnson was profoundly problematic for Burns (See Letters 94, 223, 325 and 413). He was intimately touched by his Lives of the Poets. On the other hand, the high Tory advocate, hostile to the Civil War and its multiple, radical consequences, seemed to Burns a ‘Genius’ (l. 4) self-destructively allied with the reactionary enemies of freedom. John Hampden was an iconic figure of inspiration among the radicals of the 1790s. Many pro-reform letters of this era employed ‘Hampden’ as a pen-name. Coleridge initially intended to name his first son after him.
An Extemporaneous Effusion
On Being Appointed to the Excise
First printed by Cromek, 1808.
Searching auld wives’ barrels, old
Ochon, the day! alas
That clarty barm should stain my laurels; dirty yeast
But — what’ll ye say!
These muvin’ things ca’d wives an’ weans called, children
Wad muve the very hearts o’ stanes! would, stones
Burns obtained his commission to join the Excise on 14th July, 1788, but had considered the Excise as a possible future career two years earlier, in 1786. He received training in Edinburgh for six weeks and it was probably at this time that he wrote these lines. In a letter to Margaret Chalmers he records stoically, ‘The question is not at what door of Fortune’s palace shall we enter in; but what doors does she open for us?… I got this without any hanging on, or mortifying solicitation; it is immediate bread, and though poor in comparison of the last eighteen months of my existence,’ tis luxury in comparison of all my preceding life: besides the commissioners are some of them my acquaintances …’ (Letter 207). Fiscal necessity forced Burns into the most loathed part of the government executive.
The degree of guilt and self-contempt evident in these lines can be gauged from l. 4 which exactly echoes Ramsay’s monologue of an Edinburgh prostitute Lucky Spence’s Last Advice. Hence Lucky’s stanza on the punitively sadistic consequences of selling oneself:
There’s ae sair cross attends the craft,
That curst Correction-house, where aft
Vild Hangy’s taz ye’r riggings saft
Makes black and blue,
Enough to pit a body daft;
But what ye’ll say.
Where Helen Lies
First printed in Thomson, 1805.
O That I were where Helen lies,
Night and day on me she cries;
O that I were where Helen lies
In fair Kirconnel lee. —
5 O Helen fair beyond compare,
A ringlet of thy flowing hair,
I’ll wear it still for ever mair
Untill the day I die. —
Curs’d be the hand that shot the shot,
10 And curs’d the gun that gave the crack!
Into my arms bird Helen lap,
And died for sake o’ me!
O think na ye but my heart was sair;
My Love fel
l down and spake nae mair;
15 There did she swoon wi’ meikle care
On fair Kirconnel lee. —
I lighted down, my sword did draw,
I cutted him in pieces sma’;
I cutted him in pieces sma’
20 On fair Kirconnel lee. —
O Helen chaste, thou were modest,
If I were with thee I were blest
Where thou lies low and takes thy rest
On fair Kirconnel lee. —
25 I wish my grave was growing green,
A winding sheet put o’er my een, eyes
And I in Helen’s arms lying
In fair Kirconnel lee!
I wish I were where Helen lies!
30Night and day on me she cries:
O that I were where Helen lies
On fair Kirconnel lee. —
This is largely a traditional song, reworked by Burns. It is based on the story of Ellen Irvine of Kirkconnel House, who was pursued by two male suitors. One, in an attempt to kill the other, accidentally shot and killed Ellen as she sat with Adam Fleming on the banks of the Kirtle water. Fleming rose and killed his rival but, fearing a jail sentence or worse, fled to Spain in panic. He eventually returned to Scotland and was interred with his lover. The story is printed in Thomas Penant’s A Tour in Scotland, published in 1774, pp. 88–9 – a source quoted by Kinsley (no. 203). Burns informed Thomson in 1793 that the version of this song printed in S.M.M. was not much better than the ‘silly’ traditional verses (Letter 569). The song has been updated by several authors including Walter Scott.
Your Friendship
or Interpolation