The Canongate Burns (22 page)

While the surface and formal, linguistic energy of these early Ayrshire epistles is cheerful and, even, boisterous, almost all of them are marked with a degree of black anxiety about not only the external social, economic and political forces acting on his achieving identity and recognition as a true poet but the often anarchic, even chaotic, internal forces which, while creatively necessary, were incompatible with the prudence and self-restraint necessary for a secure existence. Or, as he brilliantly defined it, in
The Vision
:

This epistle was written in the winter of 1785–6. Smith was (ll. 163–74) a key member of the ‘ram-stam boys'. This testosterone charged group, especially Gavin Hamilton, were in constant conflict with the ministry. Burns's comment on Smith being small but perfectly formed (ll. 13–18) may be partly a response to clerical condemnation of his friend. The extent of Smith's friendship also extended to Jean Armour. Burns was to order from Smith, then a partner in a Calico works, his first present for Jean: ‘ 'tis my first present to her since I have irrevocably called her mine, and I have a kind of whimsical wish to get it from an old and much valued friend of hers and mine, a Trusty Trojan, on whose friendship I count myself possessed on a life-rent lease' (Letter 237). The ‘Trusty Trojan' was his sole Mauchline friend as the dispute with the Armour family deepened.

McGuirk (‘Loose Canons: Milton and Burns, Artsong and Folk-song',
Love and Liberty
, pp. 317–20) has drawn attention to parallels between this poem and Milton's
Lycidas
as a poem which not only ‘addresses issues of friendship and bereavement, fame and obscurity, poetic immortality and premature death' but also includes a harsher satire on corrupt religiosity (ll. 151–68) and on the capricious, lethal intrusions of blind fate into human life.

The central dialectic of the poem is based on Burns's chronic anxiety, equally pervasive in his letters, about the problematic nature of forging a poetic identity for himself. At this particular point in his life he was considering trying ‘fate in guid, black prent' and the poem charts his disbelief that even the printed page will grant him the laurel bow of poetic immortality so that the poem celebrates the compensatory, rural, russet-coated anonymous rhyming funster (ll. 31–6). The black star of ill-luck, his sense of being under a Job-like curse, is, however, not so easily dismissed. The pervasive melancholy of Gray's
Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard
alluded to in ll. 59–60, ‘I'll lay me with th' inglorious dead,/Forgot and gone!' suggests also Gray's line ‘Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest' as his own fate. Also, as in contemporary English sentimental poetry, Burns makes the equation between the inability of the poet to become socially visible with the similar fate of the mass of the common people not to appear as individually identifiable in the stream of history. Thus the poem links Burns the invisible poet, with not only Burns the impoverished, unknown farmer but the mass of the people who are neither to be identified nor rewarded by history. Life is appallingly ill-divided between the poor and the over-rewarded rich (ll. 127–38). Dempster (l. 133) known as ‘Honest George' Dempster was a Whig M.P. for Forfar Burghs 1761–90 and an agricultural improver. Pitt, at this stage in his prime-ministerial career, was the object of Burns's approval; it was he in the darkening 1790s, not Burns, who was to change political identity. As well as this fatalistic sense in the poem of political and economic forces too strong to be resisted, Burns in ll. 109–14 mentions his own Shandean proclivities for eccentric forward motion wholly unconducive to making a prosperous, if not a poetic, life.

On reading, in the public papers, the Laureate's Ode with the other parade of June 4th, 1786, the Author was no sooner dropt asleep, than he imagined himself transported to the Birth-day Levee; and, in his dreaming fancy, made the following Address: — 

Byron must have read this with admiration; he himself never wrote anything funnier or, amidst the laughter, landed on the Hanoverians, he also so loathed, so many palpable hits. Describing it as a ‘dream' allows Burns, as in the headquote, to claim its non-serious nature and intent. It also, of course, allows him direct, deadly access as ‘humble poet' into the royal birthday levee.

George's birthday on 4th June 1786 had been celebrated by the laureate, Thomas Warton with a Pindaric ode. Burns's almost immediate response to this sycophantic work enabled him to insert the poem into the Kilmarnock edition. These were not the sentiments of a complicit ‘heaven taught ploughman' and Mrs Dunlop was quick to warn him as to the commercial consequences of such satire. On 26th February 1787 she wrote to him urging that A Dream should be excluded from the second edition:

Burns's response was peremptory and unyielding: 

It is hard to see what sort of convincing defence Burns could have mounted concerning the danger to his incipient poetic career with regard to the flagrantly disloyal, anti-Hanoverian elements of this poem. Beginning with the general weakened fiscal state of the nation resulting from the disastrously lost American war and
Pitt's subsequent punitive taxation policies and naval cuts (ll. 60–2) with an inverted political order where the lowest types are at the top of the government, Burns launches into a highly specific assault on the varied cupidities and promiscuities of what he consistently perceived as an irretrievably dysfunctional family of German upstarts. L. 26 contrasts the virtues of Charles Edward Stuart.   

The treatment of the King and Queen is mild compared to that doled out to their children. Driven by infantile, Oedipal rage, the Prince of Wales, had flung himself into the grossly licentious world of whoring and gambling of ‘Charlie' Fox's opposing Whigs. Brilliantly, ironically, Burns (ll. 91–9) compresses an allusion to post-Falstaffian redemption to
this
Prince of Wales. The ploughman poet, tellingly, feels he needs to explain this reference to
Henry IV
to his cultivated audience. The ‘right rev'rend Osnaburg' is Frederick Augustus (1763–1827) who was ‘elected' to the bishopric of Asna-burg in Westphalia by his father, George III, in 1764. He added to this clerical distinction by taking up with Letita Derby, the ex-mistress of Rann the highwayman. The ‘Royal TARRY-BREEKS' (l. 109) is another prodigally gifted son, Prince William (1765–1837), who became William IV in 1830. He had become naughtily, nautically involved with Sarah Martin, daughter of the commissioner of the Portsmouth dockyard. This encounter may have been derived from what Kinsley describes as the ‘ingenious model' in Robert Sempill's
Ballat Maid Upoun Margaret Fleming, callit the
Fleming Bark in Edinburgh
, which was modernised in Ramsay's
The Ever Green
(1724). Similar metaphors of dropped tackle and predatory boarding parties can also be found in Donne, followed by Pope.