The Canongate Burns (36 page)
Read The Canongate Burns Online
Authors: Robert Burns
First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
Know thou, O stranger to the fame
Of this much lov'd, much honour'd name!
(For none that knew him need be told),
A warmer heart Death ne'er made cold
âThe Cotter's Saturday Night' is dedicated to Robert Aitken (1739â1807), an intimate friend and correspondent of Burns who was a lawyer in Ayr. Only Aitken's initials were given in the publication to preserve anonymity.
First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
Is there a whim-inspired fool,
Owre fast for thought, owre hot for rule,
over/too
Owre blate to seek, owre proud to snool,
over, shy, tamely submit
               Let him draw near;
5
And owre this grassy heap sing dool,
over, sadly/lament
               And drap a tear.
drop
Is there a Bard of rustic song,
Who, noteless, steals the crowds among,
That weekly this area throng,
10
               O, pass not by!
But with a frater-feeling strong,
brother-feeling
               Here, heave a sigh.
Is there a man, whose judgment clear
Can others teach the course to steer,
15
Yet runs, himself, life's mad career
               Wild as the wave,
Here pause â and, thro' the starting tear,
               Survey this grave.
The poor Inhabitant below
20
Was quick to learn and wise to know,
And keenly felt the friendly glow
               And
softer flame
;
But thoughtless follies laid him low,
               And stain'd his name!
25
Reader, attend â whether thy soul
Soars Fancy's flights beyond the pole,
Or darkling grubs this earthly hole,
               In low pursuit,
Know, prudent, cautious,
self-controul
30
               Is Wisdom's root.
This is the final work of the Kilmarnock edition. It is a strangely sombre ending to such a virile collection. After writing an actual epitaph for his father and an apparent one for Robert Aitken, he then writes his own. His sense of the symmetry of the Kilmarnock edition may be partly responsible for this. Having begun by celebrating in
Nature's Bard
a formally unrestricted poet galvanised by nature's energy, he ends by elegising the (self) image of a poet brought to disaster by the promiscuity of both his creative mind and randy body combined with a complete lack of prudence. One of the sources for the poem is the Epitaph for the young country poet Gray placed at the end of
Epitaph Written in a Country Churchyard
. That poem, with its ineradicably melancholic sense that historical invisibility is the common fate for people of worth, talent, even and especially, poetic genius, âsome mute, inglorious Milton', was seminal for Burns. It has also been suggested that Burns thought of another deathly piece,
Elegy on the Death of Robert Ruisseaux
, to end the volume. As we shall see, that poem is essentially an account of the external pressures that brought âRuisseaux' (the French for streams, i.e. burns) low. Here, however, he chooses to take upon himself the alleged burden of his self-defined failure.
While Victorian editors had no trouble with a concluding poem of such self-denigratory didacticism, it has been either forgotten or peremptorily dismissed by most modern commentators. Daiches (pp. 150â1) sees the poem as manifesting the symptoms of
The
Cotter's Saturday Night
and thus spoiled by âa combination of Scots literary influences and an exhibitionism directed at the literati and their tastes'. He further notes that it employs âa Scots literary form' but is âotherwise English in inspiration and timidly genteel in attitude'. In actual fact, the first stanza, puzzlingly, is wholly vernacular. There was one near contemporaneous reader, however, over whom the poem had an extraordinary, almost magnetic, attraction. Wordsworth must have felt that, in some psychic way,
he
was the âBard of rustic song' summoned to the graveside. In his 1803 Scottish tour he and Dorothy went to Burns's graveside which caused him to write three complex, fraught poems:
At the Grave of
Burns 1803; Thoughts Suggested the Day Following, on the Banks of
the Nith, Near the Poet's Residence; To the Sons of Burns, After
Visiting the Grave of their Father
. The degree to which Wordsworth was troubled by these poems is partly manifested in their publishing history. The first two did not appear till 1842; only the third appeared close to the event in 1807. Stanzas two and eight of the first poem intensely catch the âfrater-feeling strong' that Wordsworth had for Burns:Â
And have I then thy bones so near,
And thou forbidden to appear?
As if it were thyself that's here
               I shrink with pain;
And both my wishes and my fear
               Alike are vain.
⦠True friends though diversely inclined:
But heart with heart and mind with mind,
Where the main fibres are entwined,
               Through Nature's skill,
May even by contraries be joined
               More closely still.Â
Describing this as a âweird little Gothic lyric', Kenneth R. Johnston,
The Hidden Wordsworth
(N.Y./London: 1998), p. 799 asks âwhere, exactly, is the “here” of line 3? Does it point to Burns's corpse under the sod or to Wordsworth's identification with it; or is he imagining that he himself is Burns standing on his own grave?' This, remember, is from the most self-composed of poets. George Dekker in
Coleridge and the Literature of Sensibility
(London: 1978), p. 67 gives this convincing answer to this complex identification:
The career of Burns ⦠offered a lesson that Wordsworth ⦠could apply immediately to his own life. So different to Burns in most essentials, Wordsworth cannot have failed to notice a few striking parallels between his current experience and that of the Ayrshire peasant. He suffered from the same mysterious chest and headaches that presaged Burns's early dissolution; he too had been long prevented from marrying by untoward circumstances; and he was a man with âJacobin' sympathies to live down.
Burns, then, for Wordsworth is both the beloved creative brother and also the dark, dangerous stranger who embodied his own
shadowy inner-self, a self passionate to the point of sexual and radical political violence, which after about 1800 he, conservatively, increasingly denied. For some understanding of the psychological, literary and creative ambivalence of Wordsworth towards Burns see Andrew Noble's âWordsworth and Burns: The Anxiety of Being Under the Influence',
Critical Essays on Robert Burns
, ed. McGurk (N.Y., 1998), pp. 49â62.
There is, literally, a final testimony to this deeply ambivalent relationship. In
A Bard's Epitaph
the poem is based on a series of interrogative requests as the poet appropriate to mourning his deceased brother-poet. Wordsworth was haunted by these questions because they seemed directed at his own poetic ambitions and hidden anxieties about his inner passions. Wordsworth's
A Poet's
Epitaph
is also based on a series of questions as to the sort of person (statesman, lawyer, soldier, priest, merchant, scientist) appropriate to the act of mourning. As Kenneth Johnston has remarked (pp. 86â7): âBoth poems are indebted to the pastoral tradition of one shepherd piping a lament at the grave of another. But Burns invoked this tradition mainly to distinguish his poems from it: âThe following trifles are not the production of the Poet, who, with all the advantages of learned art, and perhaps amid the elegancies and idlenesses of upper life, look down for a rural theme, with an eye to Theocritus or Vergil.' This, the lead sentence of Burns's preface, helped prepare the way for Wordsworth's great preface of 1800.' This is undoubtedly part of the reason that the necessary mourner in Wordsworth's Epitaph is not simply the poet but
a russet-coated
poet who, not only in costume but in nature, is unmistakably, in his mixture of frailties and genius, Burns himself:
But who is He, with modest looks
And clad in homely russet brown?
He murmurs near the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.
He is retired as noontide dew,
Or fountain in a noon-day grove;
And you must love him, ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.
The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.
In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart,â
The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart.
But he is weak; both Man and Boy,
Hath been an idler in the land;
Contented if he might enjoy
The things which others understand.
âCome hither in thy hour of strength;
Come, weak as is a breaking wave!
Here stretch thy body at full length;
Or build thy house upon this grave.
Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt
My Lords And Gentlemen,
A SCOTTISH BARD, proud of the name, and whose highest ambition is to sing in his Country's service, where shall he so properly look for patronage as to the illustrious Names of his native Land; those who bear the honours and inherit the virtues of their Ancestors? The Poetic Genius of my Country found me as the prophetic bard Elijah did Elisha â at the
plough
; and threw her inspiring
mantle
over me. She bade me sing the loves, the joys, the rural scenes and rural pleasures of my native Soil, in my native tongue: I tuned my wildness, artless notes, as she inspired. â She whispered me to come to this ancient metropolis of Caledonia, and lay my Songs under your honoured protection: I now obey her dictates.
Though much indebted to your goodness, I do not approach you, my Lords and Gentlemen, in the usual stile of dedication, to thank you for past favours; that path is so hackneyed by prostituted Learning, that honest Rusticity is ashamed of it. âNor do I present this Address with the venal soul of a servile Author, looking for a continuation of those favours: I was bred to the Plough, and am independent. I come to claim the common Scottish name with you, my illustrious Countrymen; and to tell the world that I glory in the title. âI come to congratulate my Country, that the blood of her ancient heroes still runs uncontaminated; and that from your courage, knowledge, and public spirit, she may expect protection, wealth and liberty. âIn the last place, I come to proffer my warmest wishes to the Great Fountain of Honour, the Monarch of the Universe, for your welfare and happiness.
When you go forth to waken the Echoes, in the ancient and favourite amusements of your Forefathers, may Pleasure ever be of your party; and may Social-joy await your return! When harassed in courts or camps with the justlings of bad men and bad measures, may the honest consciousness of injured Worth attend your return to your native Seats; and may Domestic Happiness, with a smiling
welcome, meet you at your gates! May Corruption shrink at your kindling indignant glance; and may tyranny in the Ruler and licentiousness in the People equally find you an inexorable foe!
I have the honour to be,
   With the sincerest gratitude and highest respect,
                      MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN,
          Your most devoted humble servant,
                      ROBERT BURNS.
                              EDINBURGH
April
4.1787
A True Story
First printed in the Edinburgh edition, 1787.Â
SOME books are lies frae end to end,
from
And some great lies were never penn'd:
Ev'n Ministers, they hae been kenn'd,
have been known
            In holy rapture,
5
A rousing whid, at times, to vend,
lie
              And nail't wi' Scripture.
But this that I am gaun to tell,
going
Which lately on a night befel,
occurred
Is just as true's the Deil's in hell
10
              Or Dublin city:
That e'er he nearer comes oursel
ourselves
              'S a muckle pity.
it is, great
The Clachan yill had made me canty,
village ale, jolly
I was na fou, but just had plenty;
not drunk
15
I stacher'd whyles, but yet took tent ay
staggered whiles, was careful
              To free the ditches;
An' hillocks, stanes, an' bushes kend ay
stones, knew always
              Frae ghaists an' witches.
from ghosts
The rising Moon began to glowr
stare/glow
20
The distant
Cumnock
hills out-owre;
out-over
To count her horns, wi' a' my pow'r
              I set mysel,
But whether she had three or four,
              I cou'd na tell.
could not
25
I was come round about the hill,
And todlin down on
Willie's mill
,
walking sprightly
Setting my staff wi' a' my skill,
with all
              To keep me sicker;
steady
Tho' leeward whyles, against my will,
at tmes
30
              I took a bicker.
unbalanced run
I there wi'
Something
does forgather,
meet
That pat me in an eerie swither;
put, ghostly dread
An awfu' scythe, out-owre ae shouther,
across one shoulder
              Clear-dangling, hang;
35
A three-tae'd leister on the ither
three pronged spear, other
              Lay, large an' lang.
long
Its stature seem'd lang Scotch ells twa;
long, 37 inches, two
The queerest shape that e'er I saw,
For fient a wame it had ava;
hardly a belly at all
40
              And then its shanks,
legs
They were as thin, as sharp an' sma'
small
              As cheeks o' branks.
parts of a horse bridle
âGuid-een,' quo' I; âFriend! hae ye been mawin,
good evening, have you, mowing
When ither folk are busy sawin?'
1
other, sowing
45
It seem'd to mak a kind o' stan',
make, stand
              But naething spak;
nothing spoke
At length, says I: âFriend! whare ye gaun?
where, going
              Will ye go back?'
It spak right howe: âMy name is
Death
,
spoke, hollow
50
But be na' fley'd.' â Quoth I, âGuid faith,
not frightened
Ye're may be come to stap my breath;
stop
              But tent me, billie;
heed, comrade
I red ye weel, tak care o' skaith,
counsel you well, injury
              See, there's a gully!'
large knife
55
âGudeman,' quo' he, âput up your whittle,
blade/knife
I'm no design'd to try its mettle;
But if I did, I wad be kittle
would be inclined
              To be mislear'd,
mischievous
I wad na mind it, no that spittle
would not
60
              Out-owre my beard.
out-over
âWeel, weel!' says I, âa bargain be't;
Come, gie's your hand, an' say we're gree't;
give me, agreed
We'll ease our shanks, an' tak a seat:
legs, take
              Come, gie's your news!
give me
65
This while ye hae been monie a gate,
many
              At monie a house.
2
many
âAy, ay!' quo' he, an' shook his head,
âIt's e'en a lang, lang time indeed
even a long, long
Sin' I began to nick the thread
70
              An' choke the breath:
Folk maun do something for their bread,
must
              An' sae maun
Death
.
so must
âSax thousand years are near hand fled
Sin' I was to the butching bred,
since
75
An' monie a scheme in vain's been laid,
many
              To stap or scar me;
stop, scare
Till ane Hornbook's ta'en up the trade,
3
one, taken up
              And faith! he'll waur me.
surpass me
âYe ken
Jock Hornbook
i' the Clachan,
know, village
80
Deil mak his king's-hood in a spleuchan!
make his scrotum, tobacco-pouch
He's grown sae weel acquaint wi'
Buchan
,
4
so well
              And ither chaps,
other
The weans haud out their fingers laughin,
children hold
              An' pouk my hips.
poke/prod
85
âSee, here's a scythe, an' there's a dart,
They hae pierc'd monie a gallant heart;
have, many
But Doctor
Hornbook
wi' his art
              An' cursed skill,
Has made them baith no worth a fart,
both
90
              Damn'd haet they'll kill!
damn all/nothing
â'Twas but yestreen, nae farther gane,
no, gone
I threw a noble throw at ane;
one
Wi' less, I'm sure, I've hundreds slain;
              But Deil-ma-care!
95
It just played dirl on the bane,
went tinkle on the bone
              But did nae mair.
no more
â
Hornbook
was by wi' ready art,
An' had sae fortify'd the part,
so
That when I lookèd to my dart,
100
              It was sae blunt,
so
Fient haet o't wad hae pierc'd the heart
little of it would have
              Of a kail-runt.
cabbage stalk
âI drew my scythe in sic a fury,
such
I near-hand cowpit wi' my hurry,
almost, toppled
105
But yet the bauld
Apothecary
              Withstood the shock;
I might as weel hae try'd a quarry
well have
              O' hard whin-rock
âEv'n them he canna get attended,
cannot
110
Altho' their face he ne'er had kend it,
known
Just shit in a kail-blade an' send it,
cabbage leaf
              As soon's he smells't,
Baith their disease, and what will mend it,
both
              At once he tells't.
115
âAnd then a' doctor's saws and whittles,
all
Of a' dimensions, shapes, an' mettles,
all
A' kinds o' boxes, mugs, and bottles,
              He's sure to hae;
have
Their Latin names as fast he rattles
120
              As A B C.
âCalces o' fossils, earths, and trees;
bone meal
True Sal-marinum o' the seas;
salt-water
The Farina of beans an' pease,
vegetable meal
              He has't in plenty;
125
Aqua-font is, what you please,
fresh water
              He can content ye.
âForbye some new, uncommon weapons,
Urinus Spiritus of capons;
urine
Or Mite-horn shavings, filings, scrapings,
130
              Distill'd
per se
;
Sal-alkali o' Midge-tail-clippings,
salt
              And monie mae.'
many more
âWaes me for
Johnie Ged's Hole
now,'
5
woe is
Quoth I, âif that thae news be true!
these
135
His braw calf-ward whare gowans grew
fine grazing plot, where daisies
              Sae white and bonie,
so
Nae doubt they'll rive it wi' the plew:
no split, plough
              They'll ruin
Johnie
!'
The creature grain'd an eldritch laugh,
groaned, unearthly
140
And says: âYe needna yoke the pleugh,
need not, plough
Kirkyards will soon be till'd eneugh,
enough
              Tak ye nae fear:
no
They'll a' be trench'd wi monie a sheugh
all, with many, ditch
              In twa-three year.
145
âWhare I kill'd ane, a fair strae-death
where, one, straw
By loss o' blood, or want o' breath,
This night I'm free to tak my aith,
take my oath
              That
Hornbook's
skill
Has clad a score i' their last claith,
clothed, clothes
150
              By drap an' pill.
drop/potion
âAn honest Wabster to his trade,
weaver
Whase wife's twa nieves were scarce weel-bred,
whose, two fists, well-bred
Gat tippence-worth to mend her head,
got tuppence
              When it was sair;
sor
e
155
The wife slade cannie to her bed,
crept quietly
              But ne'er spak mair.
spoke more
âA countra Laird had taen the batts,
country, taken colic
Or some curmurring in his guts,
commotion
His only son for
Hornbook
sets,
160
              An' pays him well,
The lad, for twa guid gimmer-pets,
two good pet-ewes
              Was Laird himsel.
âA bonie lass, ye kend her name â
know
Some ill-brewn drink had hov'd her wame,
swollen her stomach
165
She trusts hersel, to hide the shame,
              In
Hornbook's
care;
Horn
sent her aff to her lang hame
off, long home/grave
              To hide it there.
âThat's just a swatch o'
Hornbook's
way,
sample
170
Thus goes he on from day to day,
Thus does he poison, kill, an' slay,
              An's weel paid for't;
and is well
Yet stops me o' my lawfu' prey,
              Wi' his damn'd dirt!
175
âBut, hark! I'll tell you of a plot,
Tho' dinna ye be speakin o't;
I'll nail the self-conceited Sot,
              As dead's a herrin:
Niest time we meet, I'll wad a groat,
next, wager fourpence
180
              He gets his fairin!'
reward
But just as he began to tell,
The auld kirk-hammer strak the bell
old, struck
Some wee short hour ayont the
twal
,
beyond twelve
              Which raised us baith:
both, made us stand up
185
I took the way that pleas'd mysel,
              And sae did
Death
.
so
