The Canongate Burns (77 page)

This poem is a very close variation on the first ‘Bruce' poem but is
more dangerously outspoken in that (l. 5) Pitt and Dundas are named. It also opens with a specific echo of Milton in the first line of
Paradise Regained:
‘I who erewhile the happy garden sung'. Hence the concept of Bruce as risen, redemptive figure is re-emphasised in the first line. The Miltonic ‘feel' of the two poems, a world penetrated by supernatural entities, is also as close to Blakean Milton influenced mytho-poetry as Burns ever came. ‘When the clouds should burst/ That awful hover'd over Britain's Isle' could, indeed, come directly from Blake's
America
. Even more telling in identifying Burns as author is the fact that four lines from Addison's
Cato
are adapted and integrated into the poem. As Liam McIlvanney's forthcoming study shows, Addison, in particular, and eighteenth-century republican literature were the deliberate Murdoch selected texts in Masson's reader used in Burns's schooling.
Cato
is also mentioned four times in Burns's letters. The lines in question are those spoken by Marcus, Cato's son, to his brother Portious:

These lines areadapted and quoted by Burns/Agrestis. Addison was the first poet to inspire Burns towrite poetry in his youth when he read his
Vision of Mirza
. Burns quotes Addison in his autobiographical letter to Dr Moore, stating that his lines ‘for though in dreadful whirls we hung,/ High on the broken wave', were ‘music to my boyish ears'. There are 22 references to Addison in the poet's letters, more than for Fergusson, Ramsay, Young or Milton. A further Burns–Addison–Robert the Bruce link occurs. Burns wrote to Captain Patrick Miller enclosing a copy of Scots
Wha Hae
and casually quotes Addison's poem
Letter
from Italy to Lord Halifax,
‘O Liberty—, / Thou mak'st the gloomy face of Nature gay, / Giv'st beauty to the sun, & pleasure to the day' (Letter 613). Addison was not the most popular poet in Scotlandat this time, so the notion that another poet
other than Burns
would link Addison's poetry with the story of Bruce in the context of a critique on contemporary politics in the way that Burns does in relation to
Scots Wha Hae, at this exact time
is, in the face of the textual evidence almost bizarre. The language of liberty might have been ubiquitous during the 1790s, but an association between Addison, Robert the Bruce and contemporary political problems in Scotland at this time is a triangle pointing one way, towards Burns.

In his explanatory letter to George Thomson, quoted earlier,
Burns refers to composing
Scots Wha Hae
during his yesternight's evening walk when he linked Bruce's fight for freedom and liberty with the modern struggle for the same ideals. This same experience, linking Bruce to contemporary political tumult, is woven into and narrated in this version of the second Bruce poem. How coincidental that Agrestis was, like Burns, wandering alone
the other night,
contemplating the ‘ills' of contemporary Scotland, thinking of King Robert De Bruce. Agrestis, it would appear, was able not only to read the poet's mind, but his letters also.

Hogg also reveals in
The Lost Poems that The Ghost of Bruce
switches from the general use of ‘Britons' to ‘each patriot Scot' in ll. 22–5, a change of emphasis echoed by Burns in his earlier prose ‘… let every Briton, and particularly every Scotsman' (Letter 283). The phrase ‘thick mists obscure involv'd me round', from
Lament for
James, Earl of Glencairn
, is very akin to the image of Bruce appearing ‘thick, involv'd in mist'. In such a tight description one would not expect three words to be repeated in this similar imagery, ‘thick', ‘involv'd' and ‘mist'. The words ‘thick' and ‘mist' are commonplace and predictable, but ‘involv'd' is the unexpected and quite improbable repetition in both examples, once again suggesting one author. Even the description of Bruce as the ‘Chief o' Men' can be traced to the first version of
A Man's A Man,
where Burns wrote ‘The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor, / Is chief o' men for a' that'. Not only is this exact phrase employed here, prior to the composition of the democratic anthem, but when Burns changed the phrase ‘chief o' men' in
A
Man's A Man
, he switched the word ‘king' for ‘chief': ‘Is king o' men for a' that'. Having described King Robert the Bruce as a ‘chief', the change in
A Man's A Man
from ‘chief' to ‘king' would appear to be almost a natural, subconscious word association. Furthermore, the image of the battle louring in
Scots
Wha
Hae
— ‘See the front of battle lour'—that is, the enemy coming towards the Scottish troops like an ominous, dark and angry cloud, is one developed in more detail by Agrestis in
The Ghost of Bruce
, ll. 29–33.

Another trope in Burns, a powerful man given to the practice of explosive shot-putting (he left his shot-putt at Ellisland farm), is that of the sometimes vengeful, justice-giving arm. It is found, for example, in
A Birthday Ode
when in an analogous political situation, he envisages the return of the Stuarts and the overthrow of the present royal family:

It is highly significant that this poem does not call for a similar act of restorative violence but rather for fortitude and patience till the nightmare political hurricane blows itself out. L. 31, with the phrase ‘United as in One', may also be deeply relevant as not derived from history but contemporary radical rhetoric. Consider this passage from
Address from the Society of United Irishmen in Dublin, 1792
which was designed to provoke the Convention of Friends of the People in Scotland into action:

This radical vision of the enlightened end of history with each democratically united nation in a consequent equal, pacific union with nations similarly inclined, hence an end to both Anglo-British imperialism and Irish religious self-division, is to reappear in one of Burns's most important political poems,
Ode on General Washing
ton's Birthday
in the posthumous section. This poem, however, is one that, with American exceptionalism, is of the British Isles as the scene of tri-national tragedy. The above quotation is taken from Appendix II of Elaine W. McFarland's indispensable
Ireland and
Scotland in the Age of Revolution
(Edinburgh, 1994). 

As a natural appendix to these ‘Bruce' poems, we add the following hitherto unpublished letter by Burns. This letter remained with its recipient Dr Hughes until his death in 1843 and was sold later in the century to a New York collector, Mr John Kennedy. In January 1928, the Hereford Burns Club published the letter with its history. A copy of this is available in the Mitchell Library, Glasgow and a facsimile of the letter is displayed in the Burns Room of the Murray Arms Hotel, Gatehouse of Fleet, in Galloway. Why the letter has not been included in the poet's collected letters is unknown. It is
certainly genuine. It was written as an explanation to
Bruce's
Address to His Troops at Bannockburn
and dated 1795:

This appears in the
Edinburgh
Gazetteer
a few weeks after the second
Ghost
of Bruce.
The subject of the lament is the injustice of the transportation sentences to Botany Bay served upon the radical lawyer Thomas Muir and the Rev. Fysche Palmer on charges of sedition. The theme of the lament is the spirit of ‘Freedom' departing Scotland in sorrow, but that the essential spirit of Scottish poetry, incarnated in Burns himself, gives them constant succour. This is in harmony with the bard's plaintive language, ‘Where is the soul of freedom fled? / Immingled with the mighty dead' from the
Ode to General Washington
on His Birthday,
written shortly after
The Scotian Muse
. The title is echoed in the first line of
To Miss Graham of Fintry
by Burns, ‘Here, where the Scottish Muse immortal lives'. The language of this work is found in many verses by Burns, such as
Elegy on Captain Matthew
Henderson
, ‘Where haply, Pity strays forlorn'; and in
A Dedication to
Gavin Hamilton
, ‘The last, sad mournful rites bestow'. The lamentation is similar to
On the Death of Lord President Dundas
, ‘Sad to your sympathetic glooms I fly' where the expression ‘grim Oppression' is also found. There are other echoes in Burns's
Elegy on the Death of Sir
James Hunter-Blair
, ‘I saw fair Freedom's blossoms richly blow', and ‘Her form majestic droop'd in pensive woe', which compare to the
Scotian Muses's
‘She saw fair Genius fly his native shade'. In
The
Scotian Muse
the description an ‘iron hand / Of stern Oppression' (ll. 17–18) is echoed in
A Winter Night
, ‘See stern Oppression's iron grip'. L. 15's ‘gild the gloom' is also found in Burns's
The Lament.
While it may be argued that these similarities are the result of contemporary standardised elegiac language, the high number of Miltonic lexical similarities point to Burns's hand. As in the
Gazet
teer
‘Bruce' poems, this is absolutely the only Scottish published radical poetry derived from high Miltonic style.

There is, however, in this poem and the two rediscovered Bruce poems a similar pattern of a sense of the nightmare darkness of oppression before the final dawn of freedom. This is very similar to the patttern found in Shelley's response to the terrible events of 1819. Compare, for example, these stanzas from
The Revolt of Islam,
at the end of Canto ix:

The pen-name Lysander (echoing Sylvander?) may well be derived from Burns's early schooling. As Liam McIlvanney's forthcoming
The Radical Burns
will show, Burns's school-reader, an anthology of liberal sentiment,
Masson's Collection of Prose and Verse from the
Best English Authors for the Use of School
had both a seminal and persistent influence on Burns. Lysander features in the book as an exemplary English gentleman of fine feeling and good works.