The Canongate Burns (41 page)

As noted, the instigator of this barbarism (‘Letters four do form his name') is William Pitt. As we shall see in the
Anonymous &
Pseudonymous
section, the multiple consequences of Pitt's warmongering were to become also the objects of Burns's satire in the 1790s. Not even he was, however, prepared to speak so directly about Irish matters as Coleridge. Ireland was, in fact, the epicentre of the intended radical insurrection of the 1790s, trying and failing to provoke similar militant resistance in England and Scotland. In 1798 30,000 dissident Irish were to pay with their lives at Wicklow. (See Roger Wells,
Insurrection: The British Experience, 1795–1803
(Gloucester: 1983).)

Like Burns, Coleridge's poetry is impregnated with Biblical allusion; not least
Revelations
. Like Burns he also saw in
King
Lear
another text which strengthened his sense of apocalypse now. As he wrote of III.iv., Lear's despair and growing madness in the storm:

The ‘howlings of convulsed nature' is what
Fire, Famine and
Slaughter, A Winter Night
and
Guilt and Sorrow
; or
Incidents upon
Salisbury Plain
are about. Further, these convulsions are elemental and political. Writing to John Thelwall, one of the chief radicals of the day and a keen enthusiast for Burns's poetry, Coleridge remarked that he would send him
Guilt and Sorrow
from the as yet unknown Wordsworth who ‘thinks that the lines from 364 to 375 & from 403 to 428 the best in the Volume—indeed worth all the rest— And this man is a Republican & at least a
Semi-
atheist.—' Indeed the poem is so radical that it was not published in full till 1842. Its dreadful nightscape is replete with the economically uprooted and militarily press-ganged, in Hazlitt's bitter term, the redundant part of the population. Mary Jacobus had found echoes of
King Lear
in it but it is surely a
Lear
partly mediated through Burns's
A Winter's
Night
; a world where animals but not men have a place to lay their heads. Even more singular is Wordsworth's evolution of Burns's theme of guilt in the poem: ‘Think on the dungeon's grim confine … By cruel Fortune's undeserved blow?'

A final fact about this interpretation of
A Winter's Nigh
t is that Burns chose, as we shall see in the
Anonymous & Pseudonymous
section in
The Gentleman's Magazine
for August 1794, to update the poem and print it under a new title,
Humanity: An Ode
. It is partially identified by his initials and is stripped of its vernacular opening and its falsely consolatory vernacular ending with some other significant changes to the intervening Pindaric poem. Burns must have felt its scream of rage even more politically relevant to 1794 than to 1787. Thus, ironically, the poem which was arguably its partial genesis, reappears the year following
The Female Vagrant
section of
Guilt and Sorrow
.

The title is normally
Stanzas on the Same Occasion
, to follow
A
Prayer, in the Prospect of Death
. Composition is thus during the same period, or as the poet was recuperating from illness. The Stair Ms. has the title ‘Misgivings of Despondency on the Approach of the Monarch of the Grave'. It is clearly evident in these early illness-inspired works that Burns employed his introspective thoughts in trying to comprehend the tensions between his own impulsive character traits and what he deemed the proper religious behaviour expected in the wider society. It is hard to disagree with Daiches that this and the following four poems, ‘show Burns writing in conventional neo-classic English with no spark of genius or originality' (p. 218). He may have retrieved these very early, orthodoxly pious poems simply to pad out the Edinburgh edition. Or, it may have been as cover against the persistent complaints of the Hugh Blairites against his, at best, deeply unorthodox sallies into
Old
Testement
exegesis.

As the subtitle records, the poet composed and left these verses in the home of the Rev. Dr George Lawrie (1722–99), who was minister at Loudon, near Galston (by Kilmarnock). Currie quotes confirmation of this (Vol. III, p. 386) from Gilbert Burns who states that his brother first heard the spinnet played at Dr Lawrie's home when he visited there a few months after the publication of the Kilmarnock edition in the Autumn of 1786. George Lawrie's son Archibald became a friend of Burns.

A summation of the sentiments in the First Psalm placed in rhyme, this work is generally dated from the 1781–2 period. While mainly employing Biblical language, Burns neatly employs some 18th century phraseology to give the verses a contemporary context. The terms ‘guilty lore', ‘scornful pride', ‘stubble', ‘sweeping blast' and ‘truly blest' are not found in the original Psalm.

In the
FCB
, dated March 1784, the poet introduces this poem: ‘There was a certain period of my life that my spirit was broke by repeated losses and disasters, which threatened, and indeed effected the utter ruin of my fortune. My body too was attacked by that most dreadful distemper, a Hypochondria, or confirmed Melancholy: in this wretched state, the recollection of which makes me yet shudder, I hung my Harp on the Willow trees, except in some lucid intervals, in one of which I composed the following.'

Yet another example of the poet's versified religious inculcation. For all the critical attacks on Burns in Ayrshire by some elements of the clergy prior to his successful poetic career, works like this reveal his in-depth knowledge of Biblical subjects and his keen ability to interpret and paraphrase Biblical text. In the strict social stratification of 18th century society, members of the peasantry were meant to follow religious dictates, not question or debate them as Burns did. As the poet wryly recorded, ‘ambitious of shining in conversation parties on Sundays between sermons, funerals, &c. used in a few years more to puzzle Calvinism with so much heat and indiscretion that I raised a hue and cry of heresy against me which has not ceased to this hour' (Letter 125).

Miss Susan Logan was the younger sister of Major William Logan of Park, a friend of Mrs Dunlop and the recipient of a copy of Beattie's
Poems
sent by Burns from Edinburgh.