The Canongate Burns (30 page)
Read The Canongate Burns Online
Authors: Robert Burns
First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
All hail! inexorable lord!
At whose destruction-breathing word,
              The mightiest empires fall!
Thy cruel, woe-delighted train,
5
The ministers of Grief and Pain,
               A sullen welcome, all!
               With stern-resolv'd despairing eye,
I see each aimed dart;
For one has cut my
dearest tye
,
10
               And quivers in my heart.
                       Then low'ring and pouring,
                                 The
Storm
no more I dread;
                       Tho' thick'ning and black'ning
                                Round my devoted head.
15
And thou grim Pow'r, by Life abhorr'd,
               While Life a
pleasure
can afford,
Oh! hear a wretch's pray'r!
No more I shrink appall'd, afraid;
I court, I beg thy friendly aid,
20
               To close this scene of care!
When shall my soul, in silent peace,
               Resign Life's
joyless day
?
My weary heart its throbbings cease,
               Cold-mould'ring in the clay?
25
               No fear more, no tear more
                                To stain my lifeless face,
                Enclasped and grasped
                                Within thy cold embrace!
This was probably written in the winter of 1781â2. This melancholic work in the bob-wheel stanza of the old Scots poem
The Cherry and
the Slae
, reveals the poet's holistic view that a God of Nature influences both the pleasure and the woes of life from the fall of historic Empires to individual experience. It is a distinctive brush-stroke of Burns to move from universal comment to a specific incident. The hardship of eighteenth-century rural existence on a leased farm, particularly during winter periods, energises the poem. The subtext is the poet's rejection by a lover who is believed to be Alison Begbie.
First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
I lang hae thought, my youthfu' friend,
long have
               A Something to have sent you,
Tho' it should serve nae ither end
no other
               Than just a kind memento;
5
But how the subject-theme may gang,
go
               Let time and chance determine;
Perhaps it may turn out a Sang;
song
               Perhaps, turn out a Sermon.
Ye'll try the world soon, my lad;
10
               And, ANDREW dear believe me,
Ye'll find mankind an unco squad,
strange crowd
               And muckle they may grieve ye:
much
For care and trouble set your thought,
               Ev'n when your end's attained;
15
And a' your views may come to nought,
               Where ev'ry nerve is strained.
I'll no say, men are villains a':
               The real, harden'd wicked,
Wha hae nae check but
human law
,
who have no
20
               Are to a few restricked;
restricted
But, Och, mankind are unco weak
very
               An' little to be trusted;
If
Self
the wavering balance shake,
               It's rarely right adjusted!
25
Yet they wha fa' in Fortune's strife,
who fall
               Their fate we should na censure,
not
For still, th'
important end
of life
               They equally may answer:
A man may hae an
honest heart
,
have
30
               Tho' Poortith hourly stare him;
poverty, look over him
A man may tak a neebor's part,
neighbour's
               Yet hae nae
cash
to spare him.
have no
Ay free, aff han', your story tell,
always, off hand/casual
               When wi' a bosom crony;
close friend
35
But still keep something to yoursel
               Ye scarcely tell to ony:
any
Conceal yoursel as weel's ye can
well as
               Frae critical dissection:
from
But keek thro' ev'ry other man
look
40
               Wi' sharpen'd, sly inspection.
The sacred lowe
o' weel-plac'd love,
flame, well-
               Luxuriantly indulge it;
But never tempt th'
illicit rove
,
               Tho' naething should divulge it:
nothing
45
I waive the quantum o' the sin,
               The hazard of concealing;
But, Och! it hardens a'
within
,
               And petrifies the feeling!
To catch Dame Fortune's golden smile,
50
               Assiduous wait upon her;
And gather gear by ev'ry wile
worldly goods, skill
               That's justify'd by Honor:
Not for to
hide
it in a
hedge
,
not to be a miser
               Nor for a
train-attendant
;
not for showy wealth
55
But for the glorious privilege
               Of being
independent
.
The
fear o' Hell's
a hangman's whip
               To haud the wretch in order;
hold
But where ye feel your
Honour
grip,
60
               Let that ay be your border:
always
Its slightest touches, instant pause â
               Debar a' side-pretences;
consider no distraction
And resolutely keep its laws,
               Uncaring consequences.
65
The great CREATOR to revere
               Must sure become the
Creature
;
But still the preaching cant forbear,
               And ev'n the rigid feature:
Yet ne'er with Wits prophane to range
70
               Be complaisance extended;
An
atheist-laugh's
a poor exchange
               For
Deity offended
!
When ranting round in Pleasure's ring,
making merry/fun
               Religion may be blinded;
75
Or if she gie a
random-fling
,
give
               It may be little minded;
But when on Life we're tempest-driv'n,
               A Conscience but a canker â
peevishness
A correspondence fix'd wi' Heav'n
80
               Is sure a noble
anchor
!
Adieu, dear, amiable youth!
               Your
heart
can ne'er be wanting!
May Prudence, Fortitude, and Truth,
               Erect your brow undaunting!
85
In
ploughman phrase
, âGOD send you speed,'
               Still daily to grow wiser;
And may ye better reck the
rede
,
heed the advice
               Than ever did th'
Adviser
!
This was written for his friend Robert Aitken's son Andrew and was finished in May, 1786. Robert Aitken is the legal hero of
Holy
Willie's Prayer
. Prudent counsellor is not the most probable of Burns's multiple roles. The problems implicit in the poem are highlighted by a deeply cautionary letter sent four years later to his younger brother William who was moving from Newcastle to London to pursue his career as a saddler:
Now that you are setting out from that place, put on manly resolve, & determine to persevere; and in that case you will less or more be sure of success. â One or two things allow me to particularize to you. â London swarms with worthless wretches who prey on their fellow-creatures' thoughtlessness or inexperience. â Be cautious in forming connections with comrades and companions. â You can be pretty good company to yourself, & you cannot be too shy of letting any body know you farther than to know you as a Sadler. â Another caution; I give you great credit for you [sic] sobriety with respect to that universal vice, Bad Women ⦠â Whoring is a most ruinous expensive species of dissipation; is spending a poor fellow's money with which he ought clothe and support himself nothing? Whoring has ninety-nine chances in a hundred to bring on a man the most nauseous & excruciating diseases to which Human nature is liable; are disease & an impaired constitution trifling considerations? All this is independent of the criminality of it (Letter 391).
This, from a man so addicted to women, should not be seen simply as massive hypocrisy. From as yet unpublished sources, Burns does seem to have suffered the venereal self-disgust of the so infected. More importantly, as in such Romantic libertine figures centrally present in the life and work of Mozart, Boswell, Byron and Pushkin, there exists, as a result of such serial fornication, a sense of self-punitive, guilty emptiness. Or, as it is brilliantly, vernacularly, put here:
I wave the quantum o' the sin,
      The hazard of concealing;
But Och! It hardens
a' within
,
      And petrifies the feeling.
R.L. Stevenson diagnosed this element in Burns and wrote him off because of it (
Familiar Studies of Men and Books
). G. K. Chesterton, more perceptively objective about the Scottish context, wrote in a brilliant foreword to A.A. Thomson's profoundly bad
The Burns We
Love
(London: 1931):
Nor is it true to say, as some have said, that this self-reproach was merely of the morbid or mawkish sort. So far from being mawkish and morbid, it could sometimes be both acrid and coarse. He really had a sense of something grotesque and even grovelling in his own orgies; of something of farce and bathos about the bad ending of so many of his love stories; a sense of being hooted from heaven with a sort of harsh laughter. In a word, he had a realistic as well as a romantic strain in him; and it is not altogether his fault that the national legend of his has become almost entirely romantic, to the extent of often forgetting how far his own view of himself was realistic (p. 5â6).
As well as the dangers, physical and moral, of sexual excess, Burns, in both the letter to William and in this poem, defines prudence as a necessary form of self-preservation in a world so variedly hostile. In a deeply perceptive essay, âThe Dialectics of Morality', Steven R. McKenna defines the question of necessary prudence as being a core problem in Burns's writings. In support of this thesis he identifies ll. 33â40 as a vernacular paraphrase of Polonius's cautionary speech to his son, Laertes in
Hamlet
, Act I, Scene iii. In extending these
Hamlet
parallels he finally reads the epistle as reaching for a kind of middle way of individual conscience, which avoids the one extreme of sadistically repressive conformity and the other of
anarchic self-destruction. Burns himself appears to have understood how his repressed early life was partly responsible for his potentially self-destructive response to rigidly imposed order. As McKenna comments:
Honour and self-protection are the issues here, and they form essential elements of this scene in the play, for Laertes in his long-winded, cautionary advice to his sister Ophelia regarding her relationship with Hamlet tells her she âmust fear' Hamlet, his greatness and his will. Says he, âFear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister â¦/ Be wary then; best safety lies in fear' (I. 3.33, 42). A similar sentiment pervades Polonius's advice to her later in the scene: Hamlet's vows are to be held suspect that her honour is at stake. When taken together, these issues are a call to trust no one but oneself and to fear the power of others. And these are fundamental themes in Burns's âEpistle to a Young Friend'. As in the case of Shakespeare's play, Burns's advice preaches an essential mistrust of the world, hence leads to a stultifying and isolating philosophy of life. Leaving aside the very possibility that Burns may be engaging in a bit of tongue-in-cheek irony with the epistle, the philosophy upon which it is premised is a matter of crime and punishment, and this takes two forms. First, insofar as religion and, broadly speaking, morality are concerned, fear particularly as something that can be manipulated by institutions and powers beyond the individual's control, is that which key âTo haud the wretch in order' as Burns says (l. 58). The second fear, and for Burns apparently the more important of the two, is the fear of self-punishment. In other words, one's sense of honour and integrity appears to be paramount, superseding potentially the âfear o' hell' (l. 57). This is not to say Burns thumbs his nose at God, for stanzas nine and ten he sees the natural necessity of âthe Creature' revering the âCreator'. Rather, this aspect of his epistle centres squarely on pitting the individual and conscience in opposition to formalised, institutionalised dogma. As he says, â⦠still the preaching cant forbear, / And ev'n the rigid feature' (67â8). Thus, in this case, organised religion is not the solution but rather the problem. Another case of churches built to please the priest, to bestow upon the ecclesiastical class the power to control people's lives. In the face of this, Burns posits the apparently radical notion that one's conscience should be one's guide (See
Love and Liberty
, p. 159).
