The Canongate Burns (76 page)

The final burlesque on Burke is that no matter how loud the public laughs at his extremism, the more he rants, oblivious to ‘Common Sense', which, in
The Holy Fair
was off and up the ‘Cowgate', but here, is simply lost to Burke. Not only does the poem end with such Burns-like rhymes as ‘nappy' and ‘happy', but its closing sentiment dovetails with his known sentiments concerning the British constitution: he inscribed a copy of De Lolme's
The
British Constitution
, ‘Mr Burns presents this book to the Library, & begs they will take it as a creed of British Liberty – untill they find a better'. Ll. 83–5 of
The Dagger
reads ‘And may our Constitution stand / The warld's pride and wonder, / Ilk coming day'. The final point which convinced McGuirk of the poem's provenance is Burns's peculiar skill, clear in the final stanza, of ‘providing ironic assent to a position he really is attacking'. (See McGuirk, op cit, p. 15.) Daiches too, in conversation with the editors, emphasised this characteristic poetic device evident in
The Dagger.

Of the following cluster of three ‘Bruce' poems now presented, the middle and long-known one was anonymously published in
The Morning
Chronicle
on 8thMay, 1794 though froma letter of Burns to George Thomson of late August 1793 we know it was composed around that date. Burns's explanation of the creative impulsion for that poemis also wholly relevant to the other two poems, published pseudonymously in
The Edinburgh Gazetteer
, despite the fact that their resonance is not that of Scottish vernacular poetry but of Miltonic blank verse:

After quoting the poem, Burns adds: ‘So may God ever defend the cause of TRUTH and LIBERTY, as he did that day!—Amen!' The other two blank verse poems are, literally, the answer to this prayer as the solder/saint victor, rather than the martyred Wallace, returns as visionary upholder of Scotland's endangered freedom. How endangered it was can be gauged that these poems were written at the nadir of reformist, radical fortunes with the terrible impact of the Sedition Trials and Braxfield running fast and loose with a Scottish legal system inherently inadequate in itself regarding the definition of treason.

While Bruce never quite occupied the place of Wallace in Burns's soul, the seeds of his devotion to him were early sown in this self-dramatising account of an early visit to Bannockburn:

Further, the intrusion of spiritual aid at a moment of a dark night for the
national
soul had also appeared in
The Vision
. As McGuirk (p. 208) suggests, Burns derived this from a Ramsay forgery also titled
The Vision
which deals with the national crisis caused by John Balliol's appeasement of the English king. If Ramsay's lines influenced
The Vision
, they resonate even more deeply in the two Bruce poems:

(
Ever Green
, 1724; reprinted in
Longer Scottish Poems
, Vol. 2, ed. Crawford, Hewitt, and Law, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1987, p. 33.) 

Given that (see
To Robert Graham of Fintry
) Burns had under severe Excise scrutiny lied about his connection to Captain Johnston's
Edinburgh Gazetteer
, there is no reason to disbelieve that he would not subsequently pursue a course of pseudonymous publication in that newspaper. He continued such activity in
The Morning Chroni
cle
. See, for example, the following key 1794 poem
Bruce's Address to
His Troops at Bannockburn
. The name ‘Agrestis' is hardly a heavy disguise given its farming allusion and its obvious connection to the ‘Agricola' pseudonym which he had used in
Ode on The Departed
Regency Bill and Epitaph for Dr. Adam Smith
.

Burns's use of Miltonic resonant blank verse is ambivalent. On the one hand, it is a medium with which he would not be normally associated. His use of the medium was desultory and insignificant. Like his poetic generation, however, Burns was haunted by the shadow of the great republican poet. Leaving historical accuracy aside, if a Scottish King is to become manifest, it should be within a democratic, heightened tone and form. There is, given spiritual intrusion into the political realm, another distinctly Miltonic touch, to be echoed in the other poem, in the fact that the work is deliberately dated 16th April, 1793 which was Easter Sunday. The resurrected Christ/Bruce is to rise in an act of desperately needed national salvation. There are in the text several other Burnsian ‘fingerprints'.

The question ‘Art thou a Scot?' is taken from William Hamilton's
The Life and Heroic Actions of Sir William Wallace
, a work Burns not only knew but adapted two lines from for
Scots Wha Hae
. Abbreviating the world ‘to' to merely the ‘t” is common in the poetry of Burns but is exceptionally rare in the general poetry of this era, as in the above example, ‘Are forging fast t' enslave his Native Land'. In Bruce's personal description of ‘brave unconquer'd Caledonia' there is a remarkable echo of Burns's earlier song
Caledonia
which reads ‘Bold, independent,
unconquer'd
and free'. The fact that Scotland was ‘unconquered' under Bruce was evidently a key historical point for Burns and this point is stressed from the mouth of Bruce himself. If we add to this accumulative evidence the somewhat minor observation that the final ‘e' from ‘uncon-quer'd' is dropped by Burns in his song and is dropped from pronunciation in
The Ghost of Bruce,
this type of consistency is surely expected if Burns is the author. Such practice was not commonplace typography among newspaper printers. The powerful image of historical Scottish martial resistence to tyranny, evoked here by the return of Bruce's ‘Shade' to address the poet, is reminiscent in tone and language of the lines Burns wrote in
Prologue Spoken by Mr. Woods:

The exact date and place of composition is unknown. There is, however, evidence to suggest that the lyric was radically reworked. A MS. of the song, sold by Puttock and Simpson in London in 1862, contains this early version:

MacDiarmid's early insistence of the superiority of vernacular Scots to standard English is certainly, in this instance, borne out by the evolved, final song. As we have seen Burns's whole intention was to draw analogies with Scottish freedom past and Scottish freedom present. Even more riskily, he was alluding to contemporary French struggles. The last line of the poem, ‘Let US DO—or DIE!!!' is, triple exclamatory, the tennis court oath of the French revolution-aries. Hence discussing his sending it to Perry's
Morning Chronicle,
he wrote to Patrick Miller Jnr. in mid-March 1794: ‘they are most welcome to my Ode; only let them insert it as a thing they have met with by accident & unknown to me'. When Perry did publish it on 8th May, 1794, he did preserve the poet's anonymity:

This complimentary but, surely for Burns, frighteningly transparent description, was followed by a weird printing error which read ‘Scene-Lewis Garden' rather than ‘Tune-Lewie Gordon'. This was corrected in the
Chronicle
of 10th May, 1794. Why there was a nine-month delay in the song's publication is unknown, but, as the least seditious of the three Bruce pieces, it is entirely possible that its publication in, for example
The Edinburgh Gazetteer
would have alerted authorities to link him with the other Bruce poems. The song did, however, reappear in
The Chronicle
with Burns's name attached a few months after he was safely dead.

As we saw in the Introduction, government critics were well able
to discern the seditious nature of the song: ‘So complete and deplorable was his delusion, that he thought he was doing honour to the ancient heroes of his native land, when he confounded them with the slaves of Robespierre, whom he thought the soldiers of liberty! and on whose arms he implored the benediction of God' (Low, p. 156). The song reappeared in Thomson's 1803 collection, not 1799 as Scott Douglas indicated. With Burns dead, Thomson had no compunction in impertinently perverting its political meaning into an
anti-French
song in a manner symptomatic of the whole nineteenth-century tendency in ‘domesticating' the poet to Anglo-Scottish tribal pieties:

One could hardly think of a more direct linkage of linguistic and political emasculation. Not only of Burns himself, but of the Scottish tradition in that Burns had informed Thomson that he had adapted two lines from William Hamilton of Gilbertfield's epic poem on William Wallace to compose his own final stanza: ‘A false usurper sinks in every foe/ And liberty returns with every blow' (Book VI, chapter 2, ll. 92–3). With his customary eclecticism, however, there is also a Scottish translation, noted by Hogg, from Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar
(Act III, scene ii) where Brutus asks the gathered crowds ‘Who is here so base as would be a bondsman?' which turns into ‘Wha sae base as be a slave?'

So powerful was the democratic impulse of the song that John Mayne, in his
A Patriotic Address to the Inhabitants of the United
Kingdom
(1799), attempted by means of turgid verses to invert its meaning: