The Canongate Burns (34 page)

He celebrates his great eighteenth century vernacular predecessors, Ramsay, Hamilton of Gilbertfield but above all his wholly beloved Robert Fergusson to whom, as soon as he got to Edinburgh, he paid for a tombstone for his unmarked grave. Ironically Fergusson's fate at the hands of genteel Edinburgh (ll. 19–24) was to be a sorry prelude to his own.

Burns's genteel contemporaries thought his pastoral poetry imitatively conventional. John Logan wrote to Henry Mackenzie: ‘Mr Burns is a clever fellow, a Man of Observation, and a Country Libertine, but I am much mistaken if he has anything of the Penseroso in his character' (Low,
Robert Burns: The Critical Heritage
, p. 79). Actually, Burns's intense intimate rural realism they shied away from; the harsh life of man and beast is not what they wished to countenance. Burns himself would not have disavowed the libertine. L. 29. ‘I kittle up my
rustic reed
' arguably endorses his opinion that erotic and creative energy were always synergetic for him: in this case, ejaculatively so.

As in
The Vision
the poem looks forward to a Bardic celebration of Ayrshire, in this case as a poetic-newfoundland. Wordsworth when he came to pay pilgrimage to the poet to whom he owed so much was perturbed that Burns had not creatively, unlike himself, lifted his eyes unto the hills. The Arran Mountains were for the English poet disturbingly above Burns's line of vision. Burns is, however, like MacDiarmid a poet given to water music:

Thus Coila's (Ayrshire's) rivers are to receive the poetic celebration given already to bardically celebrated Scottish and European streams. So, too, is Ayrshire's archetypal hero, William Wallace. Wallace haunts Burns's poetry and letters. A biography of Wallace
was one of the first things he read: ‘the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the floodgates of life shut in eternal rest' (See Letters 55, 78, 125). Burns hoped that Wallace's example would energise the struggle for freedom of his own generation. More darkly, he perhaps came to associate Scotland's dismembered hero with his own fate. As in all these early Ayrshire epistles a compensatory natural freedom is celebrated in the face of the greedy (Mandevillism) of the prosperously secure (ll. 90–6).

The poem's Postscript is a deeply comic account of the controversy between Auld and New Licht Theology in terms of the analogy of a quarrel between the old and new thought about the nature of the moon. Ancestral thought believed that the moon, when it waned, was discarded and replaced by a completely new one in the sky. The Auld Lichts cling to this unscientific cosmology. The traditionalists then decide to set off into space in a balloon to prove their case empirically. There is controversy regarding how much Swift Burns knew. Certainly they were, for different reasons, both profoundly displaced persons which allowed them to view eccentrically worlds to which they never fully belonged and which they agonisingly saw as suffused with inequity and iniquity. Certainly also, as in this balloon fantasy, Burns is distinctively Swiftian in his send-up of the madness of scientific hyperrationalism. Burns, as he footnotes, is also defending the theology of ‘Dr Taylor of Norwich (1722)' whose tract
The Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin Proposed
to Free and Candid Examination
(1740) provided the foundation for liberalising ‘New Licht' doctrine.

John Rankin (d. 1810) was a tenant farmer in Adamhill, Tarbolton. He was friendly with Burns in the Lochlea years. His sister Margaret was, appropriately, the first wife of John Lapraik since both Lapraik and Rankin belonged to that anarchic, anti-clerical ‘ramstam' Ayrshire group. The specific occasion of the poem is Burns's ‘allegorical' account of his impregnation of Betty Paton resulting in the birth of an illegitimate daughter represented in terms of the poacher and his gun. Hugh Blair was first uncomprehending and then horrified as understanding slowly dawned: ‘The description of shooting the hen is understood, I find, to convey an indecent meaning tho' in reading the poem … I took it literally, and the indecency did not strike me. But … the whole poem ought undoubtedly to be left out of the new edition' (J. De Lancey Ferguson, ‘Burns and Hugh Blair',
Modern Language Notes
, xlv (1930), 441–3). It was not in the least of Burns's resistances to Blair that he kept the poem in.

L. 5. is a direct reference to
Numbers
xvi, 29–33, again demonstrating the range of Burns's allusive grasp of the Bible. The initial part of the poem, especially ll. 13–18, is an attack on the clergy akin to Blake's
Songs of Experience
. These holy devils reassert themselves later in the poem as ‘the Poacher-Court' kirk session which punished apprehended fornicators by putting them on black-gowned display.

While this Ayrshire epistle is much less concerned than the others with Burns's anxieties about his ability to create for himself a poetic career in such a hostile environment, American allusions betray doubts about both the worth of his creativity and its capacity to earn him a living. Thus ll. 35–6, ‘I'd better gaen an' sair't the King/At Bunker's Hill' is, given both the fate of British arms and Burns's espousal of the American cause, a particularly self-denigrating remark. Troubling in a different way are ll. 65–66, ‘Tho' I should herd the
buckskin
kye/For 't in Virginia!' which are arguably the least politically correct lines the Bard wrote. He is, of course, referring to his intended emigration as escape from Ayrshire's cloying fiscal and clerical restraints to become a ‘poor Negro-driver' (Letter 125). On the other hand, he went on to write
The Slave's Lament
, praised by Maya Angelou because of its grasp not only of the substance but the very rhythm of Black American experience.

This joyful reminiscence of love has been one of the poet's most popular songs, perfectly matching his lyric to traditional music. The poem's Annie is supposed to be John Rankine's daughter. (See
Epistle to John Ranken
).