The Canongate Burns (49 page)

Tam o' Shanter
, ‘Burns's most sustained single poetic effort', as Daiches rightly comments, was written as a result of Burns being prompted to write a superstitious story for the English antiquarian Francis Grose, to accompany a sketch of Alloway Kirk in his forthcoming
Antiquities of Scotland
. From the prose evolved the poem, not in a day's work, as has been foolishly suggested, but over several months of composition and correction. Between the edition printed by Grose and the 1793 edition there are 59 noticeable differences in words and punctuation. An example of reworking is evident in a letter Mrs Dunlop wrote to Burns quoting back to him some lines of what is clearly an early draft:

The narrative tale behind the poem, given above to introduce the poem and explain its origin, reveals the poet's astonishing skill in translating prose into poetry. As Daiches notes (p. 251):

Unlike Wordsworth, Burns was not given to narrative poetry of this kind – it is his only example. When, however, Wordsworth tried to get some of the story and comic feel of
Tam
into
The Waggoner
it was almost a complete flop. Edwin Muir commented aptly on the poem thus:

Probably the earliest criticism of
Tam
is still the most accurate. As early as March 1791, it was apparent to A.F. Tytler that in this tale Burns had ored the purest poetic gold:

McGuirk's contextual and textual remarks on the poem in her
Selected Poems
and
Robert Burns and the Sentimental Era
are particularly cogent and stimulating.

This work was written during April of 1789, at Ellisland, after the poet witnessed the shooting of a hare. He wrote to Alexander Cunningham on 4th May 1789:

Later in the same letter Burns remarks ‘I am doubtful whether it would not be an improvement to keep out the last stanza but one, altogether'. The dropped stanza develops the idea of the hare's ‘little nurslings' being left to fend for themselves alone, without ‘That life a mother only can bestow' (H & H, Vol. I, Notes, p. 443). Indeed, the same early draft contains the line ‘The cold earth with thy blood-stain'd bosom warm', evoking a more graphic image of the dying hare's blood, running warm into the earth. So, in a sense, the final work is the less graphic and personal.

The sentiments expressed to Cunningham reveal again the importance of the poet's holistic world view on his poetry: he judges all
creatures of creation as ‘individuals' or creatures of God. This is seen in poems such as
To A Mouse
,

The real spark of indignation, though, is not that the hare has been shot
per se
, but that it has been shot
out of season
. This is mentioned specifically by Burns in the comment ‘the inhuman fellow, who could shoot a hare
at this season
when they all of them have young ones'. There has always been a rural, country code of those who shoot, that animals are not shot during the period when they are having or rearing young ones. Such behaviour is generally condemned as it is so eloquently here.

Burns partly moderates his outrage when commenting on the poem to Mrs Dunlop, merely to placate the hare-shooting, Major Dunlop: ‘this set my humanity in tears and my indignation in arms…. please read [it] to the young ladies. I believe you may include the Major too, as whatever I have said of shooting hares I have not spoken one irreverent word against coursing them' (Letter 330). Despite this, it is evident that Burns was opposed to killing ‘game' for mere
sport
. The ‘slaughtering guns' of
Westlin Winds
remains a telling image.

The occasion of this poem was to prove ill-fated. David Erskine, Earl of Buchan, was the elder brother of the more celebrated Henry and Thomas. He had the family egotism without perhaps the talent. His celebration of James Thomson was spoiled by the bust being shattered the night before the unveiling ceremony. Burns had been commissioned to write a poem but could not appear, allegedly because of harvest business. Burns had referred Buchan to Collins's
Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson
, which he despaired of equalling. Burns's four seasonal stanzas neatly replicate the more prolix chronology of Thomson's best-known poem. The attempt in the last stanza to repatriate Thomson was foredoomed to failure. Complicit with the forces of agrarian capitalism and a propagandist for Anglo-British imperialism (he actually wrote
Rule Britannia
for his
Masque of Alfred
), Thomson had, a poetic pig in clover, absolutely no notion of returning to his austere native land. In political and social values he is almost Burns's antithesis which may in part account for Burns's creative hesitancy and non-appearance.

Francis Grose (1731–1791) was born at Greenford, Middlesex, the son of a jeweller who emigrated from Switzerland to England. After obtaining the rank of Captain in service to the Surrey Militia, he used his inheritance to follow an interest in the arts and became a travelling antiquarian, publishing the well-received
The Antiquities
of England and Wales
(1773–87).

Various publications of this poem appeared in newspapers and journals throughout Britain after it first featured in the
Edinburgh
Evening Courant
in August 1789, under the pen-name Thomas A. Linn, including appearing in the radical Irish newspaper,
The
Northern Star
, issue April 14th–18th 1792. Scott Douglas mentions that it appears also in
The Kelso Chronicle
, 4th September, 1789. (Vol. 1, p. 360). The initial title by Burns was an
Address to the
People of Scotland
.

Although the comic tone of the poem is added to by the deliberate naïveté of its point of view (ll. 29–30), Burns himself was influenced by the antiquarian, collecting tendencies of the late eighteenth century. Arguably antiquarianism bears a hidden anxiety that the past is not only different but retreating from us so that we need to preserve its artefacts. Burns was also well aware of the absurdity inherent in some forms of supposed preservation as in the brilliant send-up of Biblical bric-a-brac in ll. 37–48. For Tubalcain (l. 37),
see
Gen
. iv.22.; Balaam's Ass,
Num
. xxii. 21ff; The Witch of Endor, 1
Sam
. xxviii.7ff. Burns's deeply affectionate caricature of Grose in a letter to Mrs Dunlop is a small comic gem in itself. It also reveals his intense, admiring reading of the English eighteenth-century novel and its fundamental contribution to his sensibility as well as his own deep interest in local history of place. ‘… if you discover a chearful-looking gig of an old, fat fellow, the precise figure of Dr Slop, wheeling about your avenue in his own carriage with a pencil & paper in his hand, you may conclude, “Thou art the man!” (II
Samuel
12:7).' It has also been suggested that ‘Tubalcain' was Burns deliberately identifying a key word of Masonic ritual employed by both Grose and himself.