Read The Canongate Burns Online
Authors: Robert Burns
The Canongate Burns (40 page)
First printed in the Edinburgh edition, 1787.Â
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pityless storm!
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?
SHAKESPEARE.
When biting
Boreas
, fell and doure,
the North wind, keen, hard
Sharp shivers thro' the leafless bow'r;
When
Phoebus
gies a short-liv'd glow'r,
the Sun, gives, stare
              Far south the lift,
horizon/sky
5
Dim-dark'ning thro' the flaky show'r,
              Or whirling drift.
Ae night the Storm the steeples rocked,
one
Poor Labour sweet in sleep was locked,
While burns, wi' snawy wreeths up-choked,
with snowy
10
              Wild-eddying swirl,
Or, thro' the mining outlet bocked,
vomited
              Down headlong hurl.
List'ning the doors an' winnocks rattle,
windows
I thought me on the ourie cattle,
shivering
15
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle
who endure, noise
              O' winter war,
And thro the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle,
scramble
              Beneath a scar.
jutting rock (for shelter)
Ilk happing bird, wee, helpless thing!
each hopping
20
That, in the merry months o' spring,
Delighted me to hear thee sing,
              What comes o' thee?
Whare wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing,
where
              An' close thy e'e?
eye
25
Ev'n you, on murd'ring errands toil'd,
Lone from your savage homes exil'd,
The blood-stain'd roost and sheep-cote spoil'd,
              My heart forgets,
While pityless the tempest wild
30
              Sore on you beats.
Now
Phoebe
, in her midnight reign,
the Moon
Dark-muffl'd, view'd the dreary plain;
Still crouding thoughts, a pensive train,
crowding
              Rose in my soul,
35
When on my ear this plaintive strain,
              Slow-solemn, stole â
âBlow, blow, ye Winds, with heavier gust!
âAnd freeze, thou bitter-biting Frost!
âDescend, ye chilly, smothering Snows!
40
âNot all your rage, as now, united shows
              âMore hard unkindness unrelenting,
              âVengeful malice, unrepenting,
âThan heaven-illumin'd Man on brother Man bestows!
See stern Oppression's iron grip,
45
      âOr mad Ambition's gory hand,
âSending, like blood-hounds from the slip,
      âWoe, Want, and Murder o'er a land!
âEv'n in the peaceful rural vale,
âTruth, weeping tells the mournful tale,
50
âHow pamper'd Luxury, Flatt'ry by her side,
      âThe parasite empoisoning her ear,
      âWith all the servile wretches in the rear,
âLooks o'er proud Property, extended wide;
      âAnd eyes the simple, rustic Hind,
55
âWhose toil upholds the glitt'ring show,
      âA creature of another kind,
âSome coarser substance, unrefin'd,
âPlac'd for her lordly use, thus far, thus vile, below!'Â
âWhere, where is Love's fond, tender throe,
60
âWith lordly Honor's lofty brow,
      âThe pow'rs you proudly own?
âIs there, beneath Love's noble name,
âCan harbour, dark, the selfish aim,
      âTo bless himself alone!
65
âMark Maiden-Innocence a prey
      âTo love-pretending snares,
      âThis boasted Honor turns away,
      âShunning soft Pity's rising sway,
âRegardless of the tears and unavailing pray'rs!
70
      âPerhaps this hour, in Mis'ry's squalid nest,
      âShe strains your infant to her joyless breast,
âAnd with a mother's fears shrinks at the rocking blast!
              âOh ye! who, sunk in beds of down,
      âFeel not a want but what yourselves create,
75
      âThink, for a moment, on his wretched fate,
          âWhom friends and fortune quite disown!
âIll-satisfy'd, keen nature's clam'rous call,
      âStretch'd on his straw, he lays himself to sleep,
           âWhile through the ragged roof and chinky wall,
80
      âChill, o'er his slumbers piles the drifty heap!
      âThink on the Dungeon's grim confine,
      âWhere Guilt and poor Misfortune pine!
      âGuilt, erring Man, relenting view!
      âBut shall thy legal rage pursue
85
      âThe Wretch, already crushed low
      âBy cruel Fortune's undeservèd blow?
âAffliction's sons are brothers in distress;
âA Brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss!'
I heard nae mair, for
Chanticleer
no more
90
      Shook off the pouthery snaw,
powdery snow
And hail'd the morning with a cheer,
      A cottage-rousing craw.
crow
But deep this truth impress'd my mind â
      Thro' all His works abroad,
95
The heart benevolent and kind
      The most resembles GOD.Â
Given that in successful poetry form and content are always mutually expressive, this poem has been seen as a puzzling failure because of its apparently disparate elements. Beginning with an epigraph from
King Lear
, the poem moves to five vernacular stanzas in the âHabbie Simpson' form brilliantly detailing the impact of a stormy winter night on the exposed beasts and birds. We then, in standard English, having another linking âHabbie Simpson' stanza which introduces an internal voice which, in the form of a Pindaric Ode, presents a hellish vision of a society overwhelmed by corruption and predatory sexuality manifest in the relation of the aristocratic rich to the destitute poor. Finally, the poem switches back to
two âHabbie Simpson' vernacular stanzas which reassuringly suggest the whole thing should be viewed as a dream from which we have wakened to find ourselves in the presence of a benevolent God.
On the face of it this seems a âmixtie maxie' well beyond
The Brigs
of Ayr
. However, the thread of
King Lear
leads us through this apparent maze. In the Kilmarnock edition Burns has already used Shakespearean allusion with telling effect in, for example,
A Dream
/
Henry IV
and
Epistle to a Young Friend
/
Hamlet
. Despite making no comment on the Lear epigraph Kinsley picks up this and another bitter Shakespearean echo in ll. 37â43 of
A Winter Night
:
Blow, blow ye Winds, &c. Cf. King Lear, III. ii, 1â9, âBlow windes ⦠all germaines spill at one/That makes ingrateful Man; the song in
As You Like It
, II. vii:
Blow, blow, thou winter winde,
Thou art not so unkinde, as mans ingratitude â¦
Freize, freize, thou bitter skie that does not
Bight so night as benefitts forgot â¦Â
Unfortunately, however, Kinsley, despite his enormous erudition expressed in the allusory density he brings to Burns's poetry, consistently identifies Burns's relationship to other writers in an apolitical way. In the 1790s,
King Lear
was the most politically loaded and relevant of Shakespeare's plays. First, it was, given a contemporarily, if transiently, mad king on the throne, another mad one could not be provocatively put on stage. Second, what is revealed in
King Lear
is the utter failure of an allegedly patriarchal ruling class so demonically selfish that, in a hellish, a hallucinatory night scene, the terrible condition of the common people is revealed in their uprooted homelessness, naked hunger and alienated grief bordering on madness.
King Lear
, at the heart of Shakespeare's darkness, reveals what happens when ânatural' man becomes a
creature
of unbridled predatory, libidinous appetites. In Burns's ânight' poem the animals are, as always, empathetically treated, and, unlike the wolfish humanity of the Pindaric section, even the barn-robbing vernacular fox is seen more as victim than villain.
It is further characteristic of Kinsley that having not explored this sort of poetic terrain, he further denies such an obvious political reading by means of arguments based on aesthetic deficiency. He describes this particular instance of his sense of Burns's chronic general incapacity to write in the Pindaric form thus:
Burns's strophes have rhythmical strengthâthough that is not always sustainedârather than exalted energy; his images are too predictable, his diction too conventional. The success of the opening scene, in his familiar style ⦠only emphasized his failure to rise above the commonplace in the Pindaric part.
Two things need to be said about this. First, if Burns failed with the Pindaric Ode he was not alone in this. As Geoffrey Hartman noted: âThe sublime or greater or Pindaric ode flourished in the eighteenth century like a turgid weed.' (
The Fate of Reading
(Chicago: 1975), p. 138.) The criticism levelled at Burns by Kinsley could be easily replicated dealing with Coleridge's dissident poetry of the 1790s with its terminal, apocalyptic sense of communal breakdown due to established economic, military violence unchecked by either the duty or compassion of the ruling class.
Kinsley has no patience with Burns's radically dissenting poetry because he is wilfully ignorant of its radical context. He makes little of Burns's multiple connections with other radical writers of the period or, as in the case of Dr Walcot (Peter Pindar), a still deeply underestimated political satirist, he dismisses him, quite ignoring Burns's own high evaluation of him (Letter 578) with a crass Boswellian put-down: âa contemptible scribbler (who), having disgraced and deserted the clerical character ⦠picks up in London a scanty livelihood by scurrilous lampoons under a feigned name (Vol. III p. 1423)'. Missing the unjustly forgotten, if lesser, radical writers, Kinsley compounds his mistake by not perceiving how close the now canonical Romantic poets were in theme and form to Burns in the mid-1790s. As well as the now better-understood complexity of Wordsworth's relationship to Burns, we should contemplate the proximity of Coleridge to Burns as political satirist and commentator (Perry, as noted, wanted them both on the London staff of
The Morning Chronicle
) and poet of the mid-1790s' radical apocalypse. Consider, for example, Coleridge's
Fire,
Famine, and Slaughter
with its ferocious, catastrophic sense of the consequences of the unnamed Pitt's policies in Ireland and against the French Revolution by supporting the monarchists in the terrible civil war raging in the Vendé e. This poem, written the year after Burns's death, is not subjective hysteria but at the core of a national nightmare of unrewarded blood, toil and tears. Coleridge was horrified by the Scottish sedition trials of 1793â4 and hated and feared âbrazen-faced' Dundas, but it was Pitt (âLetters four do form his name') for whom, in this poem, he reserved his most savage assault:
Slau
. Letters four do form his nameâAnd who sent you?
Both
. The same! the same!
Slau
. He came by stealth, and unlocked my den,
And I have drunk the blood since then
Of thrice three hundred thousand men.
Both
. Who bade you do't?
Slau
. The same! the same!
Letters four do form his name.
He let me loose, and cried Halloo!
To him alone the praise is due.
Fam
. Thanks, sister, thanks! the men have bled,
Their wives and their children faint for bread.
I stood in a swampy field of battle;
With bones and skulls I made a rattle,
To frighten the wolf and carrion-crow
And the homeless dogâbut they would not go.
So off I flew: for how could I bear
To see them gorge their dainty fare?
I heard a groan and a peevish squall,
And through the chink of a cottage-wallâ
Can you guess what I saw there?
Both
. Whisper it, sister! in our ear.
Fam
. A baby beat its dying mother:
I had starved the one and was starving the other!
Both
. Who bade you do't?
Fam
. The same! the same!
Letters four do form his name.
He let me loose, and cried, Halloo!
To him alone the praise is due.
Fire
. Sisters! I from Ireland came!
Hedge and corn-fields all on flame,
I triumph'd o'er the setting sun!
And all the while the work was done,
On as I strode with my huge strides,
I flung back my head and I held my sides,
It was so rare a piece of fun
To see the sweltered cattle run
With uncouth gallop through the night,
Scared by the light of his own blazing cot
Was many a naked Rebel shot:
The house-stream met the flame and hissed,
While crash! fell in the roof, I wist,
On some of those old bed-rid nurses,
That deal in discontent and curses.
Both
. Who bade you do't?
Fire
. The same! the same!
Letters four do spell his name.
He let me loose, and cried Halloo!
To him alone the praise is due.
All. He let us loose, and cried Halloo!
How shall we yield him honour due?
Fam
. Wisdom comes with lack of food.
I'll gnaw, I'll gnaw the multitude,
Till the cup of rage o'erbrim:
They shall seize him and his broodâ
Slau
. They shall tear him limb from limb!
Fire
. O thankless beldames and untrue!
And this is all that you can do
For him, who did so much for you?
Ninety months he, by my troth!
Hath richly catered for you both;
And in an hour would you repay
An eight years' work?âAway! away!
I alone am faithful! I
Cling to him everlastingly.Â
