by Robert Burns
The Dean of the Faculty –
A New Ballad
Tune: The Dragon of Wantley
First printed by Cromek, 1808.
Dire was the hate at old Harlaw
That Scot to Scot did carry;
And dire the discord Langside saw,
For beauteous, hapless Mary:
5 But Scot with Scot ne’er met so hot,
Or were more in fury seen, Sir,
Than ’twixt HAL and BOB for the famous job —
Who should be the FACULTY’S DEAN, Sir. —
This HAL for genius, wit, and lore
10 Among the first was number’d;
But pious BOB,’ mid Learning’s store,
Commandment the Tenth remember’d.
Yet simple BOB the victory got,
And won his heart’s desire;
15 Which shews that Heaven can boil the pot
Though the Deil piss in the fire. — devil urinate
Squire HAL besides had in this case
Pretensions rather brassy,
For talents to deserve a place
20 Are qualifications saucy;
So their Worships of the Faculty,
Quite sick of Merit’s rudeness,
Chose one who should owe it all, d’ye see,
To their gratis grace and goodness. —
25 As once on Pisgah purg’d was the sight
Of a son of Circumcision,
So may be, on this Pisgah height,
BOB’s purblind, mental vision:
Nay, BOBBY’s mouth may be opened yet
30 Till for eloquence you hail him,
And swear that he has the angel met
That met the Ass of Balaam. —
In your heretic sins may ye live and die,
Ye heretic Eight and Thirty!
35 But accept, ye Sublime Majority,
My congratulations hearty. —
With your Honors and a certain King
In your servants this is striking —
The more incapacity they bring,
40 The more they’re to your liking. —
This song is a work Burns probably wrote for newspaper publication. There is, as yet, no evidence that it was actually printed, but given the two missing years of The Glasgow Advertiser (1795–6), it may have been printed in that radical broadsheet anonymously after composition in January 1796. The Glasgow Magazine, which first printed A Man’s a Man, is also missing for this period.
On 12th January, 1796, Henry Erskine (the ‘Hal’ of l. 7), a friend of Burns’s, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates in Scotland, lost his electoral office to the Lord Advocate, Robert Dundas (1758–1819), nephew of Henry Dundas. Robert is colloquially referred to as ‘Bob’ (l. 7). Henry Erskine was a leading radical Whig, brother to the brilliant lawyer Thomas Erskine (See Here’s a Health Tae Them That’s Awa). Henry Erskine was effectively voted out by the majority of Tory loyalists including Walter Scott because of his known sympathies for the radical cause. Old Harlaw (l. 1) was a battle fought near Aberdeen in 1411. Mary Queen of Scots was defeated at Langside (l. 3) in 1568. Pisgah (l. 25) is a Biblical mountain, Deuteronomy, iii, v. 27. The ‘heretic Eight-and-Thirty’ were those who voted for Henry Erskine.
Cromek’s edition of this late radical song is missing the final stanza which he probably censored. Scott Douglas comments that the final verse appeared, courtesy of Allan Cunningham’s son, in 1842 (See Vol. II, footnote, p. 285). It is entirely in keeping with editorial censorship during the 19th century that the slight on the Tory administration and King George, in the final lines, would be cut. Despite the jocular use of diminutives and of Scottish historical and Biblical allusions, this poem records a brutal and terminal defeat for the forces of reform. Ll. 21–4 record the failure of optimistic, progressive hope that had grown through the eighteenth century that talent, not birth, independence not sycophancy, would be the basis of the new (republican) society.
PART SEVEN
The Merry Muses of Caledonia
The Merry Muses of Caledonia
If the politics of Burns were completely unpalatable to some contemporaries and subsequent generations of nineteenth-century critics, the story of his involvement in bawdy lyrics is one of parallel hypocritical censorship and private smoking-room laughter. The Merry Muses of Caledonia (the title is not Burns’s) originated from the poet’s private collection of bawdy lyrics within which the majority of texts are simply that, songs collected by Burns. Professor De Lancey Ferguson, still the key authority in this area, wrote in ‘They Censored Burns’ (Scotland’s Magazine, Vol. 51, 1955, p. 38):
The bawdry has had undue attention, mainly because of the efforts to suppress it. Like most attempts at censorship, these have exaggerated the importance of the censored material without succeeding in abolishing it. Burns frankly admitted his fondness for this type of humour, which is deeply rooted in the Scottish folk tradition; most of the extant specimens may be described as good, clean barnyard dirt; there is nothing perverse or psychopathic about them. He collected bawdy songs as eagerly as he collected clean ones: his own compositions in that vein he reserved for private circulation.
Almost all of the published editions that have appeared since the poet’s death were printed exclusively for ‘gentlemen’, to be kept out of view of women, clerics and the young. Even as late as the 1920s Duncan McNaught of the Burns Federation printed another largely private edition, to which, in the wake of the Lady Chatterley fracas, he would not append his name to as editor. It is now generally accepted that the first genuinely public version appeared in 1959, edited by Sidney Goodsir Smith and James Barke, introduced by Professor De Lancey Ferguson. This is a part truth. The more public edition was the 1965 reprint by W.H. Allen. The 1959 edition, which is still the best, was meant mainly for an exclusive group in Edinburgh who termed themselves the Auk Society. Sidney Goodsir Smith was a leading member of that society. The 1959 edition was a semi-private edition, though copies were eventually placed in most university libraries. It was after the 1965 re-issue that Kinsley included most of the Ferguson-ascribed texts in his edition of Burns. Subsequent editors of the poet’s works have concurred with the selection of bawdy lyrics, particularly those marked by De Lancey Ferguson, as by Burns, or, probably traditional, but re-written by him.
During the eighteenth century bawdy songs performed two key roles: partly a psychological release from the harsh, brutal physical world of manual work and a form of self-exculpation from the rigid clerical strictures imposed on sexual activity outside marriage. Unsurprisingly, Dr Currie attempted to airbrush out Burns’s interest in this genre. It led him, as De Lancey Ferguson has shown, to insert a sentence in a letter by Burns to John McMurdo, which the poet never wrote: ‘A very few of them are my own’ (See MMC, 1959, p. 12). The letter to McMurdo, of February 1792, actually read:
I think I once mentioned something to you of a Collection of Scots Songs I have for some years been making: I send you a perusal of what I have gathered. I could not conveniently spare them above five or six days, and five or six glances of them will probably more than suffice you. When you are tired of them please leave them with Mr Clint of the King’s Arms. – There is not another collection of them in the world (Letter 499A).
A select group of friends were privy to the poet’s collection. Robert Cleghorn, the farmer and radical activist who lived near Edinburgh, was one of the circle. Burns admitted to Cleghorn in October 1793:
There is, there must be, some truth in original sin. My violent propensity to B [awd] y convinces me of it. – Lack a day! if that species of Composition be the sin against ‘the Haly Ghaist,’ I am the most offending soul alive (Letter 592).
Moreover, in writing to Robert Maxwell of Lochmaben, 20th December, 1789, Burns refers to his interest in bawdy song and its long tradition:
A Subject, the turtle-feast of the Sons of Satan, and the delicious, secret Sugar-plumb of the Babes of Grace; a Subject, sparkling with all the jewels that Wit ca
n find in the mines of Genius, and pregnant with all the stores of Learning, from Moses & Confucius to Franklin and Priestly – in short, may it please your Lordship, I intend to write BAUDY! (Letter 378).
The first song in this genre copied by Burns into his First Commonplace Book in 1784 was a version of My Girl She’s Airy. Other lyrics by him are scattered among his letters. Hence, while his involvement in writing bawdy song is not in doubt, a clear distinction is required between what he wrote himself and what he collected.
Despite the existence of the original small book The Merry Muses of Caledonia where and when it was actually printed is still not absolutely certain. It first appeared as a posthumous, clandestine publication. It was a pocket-size volume printed around 1800. The publication date is assumed to correspond with the watermark on the printed paper, ‘1800’. The place of publication was either Dumfries or Edinburgh, probably Edinburgh. Even the poet’s original manuscript collection has not survived. De Lancey Ferguson argues cogently that there are textual differences between the extant manuscripts by Burns and the printed texts in The Merry Muses. In the 1959 edition, he urges caution:
… the ‘1800’ edition ceases to have any unique authority. Whatever the source of its contents, it was not printed from Burns’s own manuscript collection of bawdy verse. We may have to accept its versions in default of better; we must never trust them.
Our present edition can make no sweeping claim to accuracy or completeness. For about a score of pieces, however, it offers texts directly based on Burns’s own manuscripts. That is more than can be said of any of its predecessors (p. 16).
The manuscripts mentioned by Ferguson are the texts retrieved from among the poet’s letters.
Accordingly, following the definitive edition of The Merry Muses, we have not relied upon the original texts printed in the ‘1800’ edition. That early volume does not contain a few of the known Burns works in the bawdy genre, such as My Girl She’s Airy, There Was Twa Wives and Why Should Na Poor Folk Mowe. Instead, we have relied upon manuscript texts or those transcribed from such sources. Printed here, then, is Burns’s contribution to the texts of The Merry Muses of Caledonia, where the majority of bawdy lyrics are not by Burns.
There is little of critical quality on the bawdy Burns of The Merry Muses. The invariably erudite Professor R.D.S. Jack has a stimulating essay, ‘Burns and Bawdy’, in The Art of Robert Burns (London, New York, 1982), pp. 98–126. Also, as Liam McIlvanney’s doctoral work has shown, Bakhtin’s notions of the implicit dissidence in the carnivalesque world of common people (see Rabelais and his World (Indiana U.P., 1984)) has peculiar relevance to Burns. He is much closer to the real language of men than the sanitised Wordsworth.
My Girl She’s Airy
Tune: Black Joke
First printed by Delancey Ferguson in the P.M.L.A. Journal, 1936.
My girl she’s airy, she’s buxom and gay;
Her breath is as sweet as the blossoms in May.
A touch of her lips it ravishes quite.
She’s always good natur’d, good humor’d and free:
5 She dances, she glances, she smiles with a glee:
Her eyes are the lightnings of joy and delight:
Her slender neck, her handsome waist,
Her hair well buckled, her stays well lac’d,
Her taper white leg with an et, and a, c,
10 For her a, b, e, d, and her c, u, n, t,
And Oh, for the joys of a long winter night!!!
This is dated sometime in 1784 when the poet courted Elizabeth Paton, mother of his first child. The song was included in a letter to Robert Ainslie, 29th July, 1787, from Mauchline (Letter 122). A transcript of the original manuscript letter, containing the song, did not appear in public until November 1934, when it was sold at Sotheby’s. It was printed by Professor J. De Lancey Ferguson in the P.M.L.A. journal two years later. Barke’s edition gave the song a wider audience, with the ‘naughty’ lines omitted. The letter to Ainslie congratulates him on becoming a father: ‘Give you joy. Give you joy, my dear Brother. May your child be as strong a man as Samson, as wise a Man as Solomon & as honest a man as his father. – I have double health & spirits at the news. – Welcome, Sir, to the Society, the venerable Society of fathers!!!!’ (Letter 122). Regarding l. 9, Kinsley notes that the following appears in Romeo and Juliet, II. i. 37–8: ‘O that she were an open et cætera, thou a poperin pear’.
I’ll Tell You a Tale of a Wife
Tune: Auld Sir Symon
I’ll tell you a tale of a Wife,
And she was a Whig and a Saunt; saint
She lived a most sanctify’d life,
But whyles she was fash’d wi her c [un] t. troubled
5 Fal lal &c.
Poor woman! she gaed to the Priest, went
And till him she made her complaint;
‘There’s naething that troubles my breast nothing
Sae sair as the sins o my c [un] t’. so sore (much)
10 ‘Sin that I was herdin at hame, since, home
‘Till now I’m three score and ayont, beyond
I own it wi’ sin and wi’ shame
‘I’ve led a sad life wi’ my c [un] t’.
He bade her to clear up her brow,
15 And no be discourag’d upon ’t:
For holy gude women enow
Were mony times waur’t wi’ their c [un] t. — many, worse
It’s naught but Beelzebub’s art,
But that’s the mair sign of a saunt, more, saint
20 He kens that ye’re pure at the heart, knows
Sae levels his darts at your c [un] t. so
What signifies Morals and Works,
Our works are no wordy a runt! worthy
It ’s Faith that is sound, orthodox,
25 That covers the fauts o your c [un] t. — faults
Were ye o’ the Reprobate race
Created to sin and be brunt, burned
O then it would alter the case
If ye should gae wrang wi your c [un] t. go wrong
30 But you that is Called and Free
Elekit and chosen a saunt, elected, saint
Will ’t break the Eternal Decree
Whatever ye do wi your c [un] t.
And now with a sanctify’d kiss
35 Let’s kneel and renew covenant:
It ’s this — and it ’s this — and it ’s this —
That settles the pride o’ your c [un] t.
Devotion blew up to a flame;
No words can do justice upon ’t;
40 The honest auld woman gaed hame old, went home
Rejoicing and clawin her c [un] t.
Then high to her memory charge;
And may he who takes it affront,
Still ride in Love’s channel at large,
45 And never make port in a c [un] t!!!
[Then ho, for a merry good fellow,
And hey, for a glass of good strunt:
May never We Sons of APOLLO
E’er want a good friend and a cunt.]
This lyric was included in a letter by Burns to Robert Maxwell of Lochmaben, on 20th December, 1789. The Merry Muses text is deficient of verses 3, 6 and 7; suggesting that the printed volume was either transcribed from an early draft collection by Burns, or not from his manuscripts at all. The final stanza, in brackets, quoted in a letter of 29th July 1787 to Robert Ainslie, is assumed to be an alternative ending. It may have merely been dropped from the song by Burns.
Bonie Mary
Tune: Minnie’s ay glowerin o’er me
When Mary cam over the border,
When Mary cam over the border;
As eith ’twas approachin the C [un] t of a hurchin easy, hedgehog
Her a[rse] was in sic a disorder. such
Chorus
5 Come cowe me, minnie, come cowe me; mother
Come cowe me, minnie, come cowe me;
The hair o’ my a[rse] is grown into my c[un] t,
And they
canna win to, to mowe me. have sex with
But wanton Wattie cam west on ’t
10 But wanton Wattie cam west on ’t,
He did it sae tickle, he left nae as meikle not as much
’S a spider wad bigget a nest on ’t. build
And was nae Watt a Clinker not
He m[o] w’d frae the Queen to the tinkler, had sex, gypsy
15 Then sat down, in grief, like the Macedon chief
For want o mae warlds to conquer more worlds
And O, what a jewel was Mary!
And O, what a jewel was Mary!
Her face it was fine, and her bosom divine,
20 And her c[u]nt it was theekit wi’ glory. thatched
In this example Burns has taken an old chorus and grafted his own bawdy song to fit the tune Minnie’s ay glowerin o’er me. The song is vernacularly introduced by Burns in a letter to Robert Cleghorn on October 25th, 1793:
A fine chiel, a hand-wail’d friend & crony o’ my ain, gat o’er the lugs in loove wi’ a braw, bonie, fodgel hizzie frae the English-side, weel-ken’d I’ the brugh of Annan by the name o Bonie Mary, & I tauld the tale as follows. N.B. The chorus is old (Letter 592).
Mackay quotes from this same letter (p. 506): ‘Mair for taken of my violent propensity to Baudy’, which jumbles together two remarks by Burns into one sentence. De Lancey Ferguson postulates that ‘Wattie’ in the song may have been Walter Auld, a saddler in Dumfries, known to Burns, as the letter to Cleghorn records.