The Canongate Burns (79 page)

This poem was first ascribed to Burns in Hogg's
Robert Burns:
The
Lost Poems
(1997). It appears in
The Glasgow Advertiser
of 27th January, 1794. It was composed after a public plea for charity to feed the hungry in and around areas of Glasgow during the harsh winter of 1793–4. To launch the initial call for public charity Burns's poem
The Cottar's Saturday Night
was reprinted in Dr James Anderson's magazine The Bee, where the charity appeal originated in December 1793. Burns knew Anderson and added (Letter 426) a few friends' names to Anderson's subscriber list. By the time
Remember the Poor
was printed, over a month after the appeal went public, The Bee had been forcibly closed down in Edinburgh for its part in serialising the ferocious political critique on government by James Thomson Callender,
The Political Progress of Britain
. Hence perhaps, the poem's appearance in
The Glasgow Advertiser.

There are several reasons to suggest this work is by Burns. He would have known
The Cottar's Saturday Night
was part of the charity appeal and his egalitarian sentiments were such that he would have surely wished to contribute. On several occasions Burns remarks that the only ‘coin' a poet can pay with is
rhyme
(Letter 571). As we see in the Introduction,
The Book of Job
is compulsively present in Burns's poetry and letters (Letters 248, 362, 446). This identification of his own and his father's suffering with that of Job would make this an obvious choice of pen-name.

In addition, it is now known that Burns not only published prose in
The Glasgow Advertiser
but its subject was
poverty
. Here is the full text from the newspaper on 29th April–2nd May, 1791:

Although anonymous, this flyting critique on poverty and social oppression, bar a few minor textual and typographical differences, is found in a letter by Burns to Peter Hill, Edinburgh, dated for 17th January, 1791, some three months prior to appearing in the Glasgow publication (see Letter 430). Given the poet's habit of making fair copies of many of his letters and his tendency to repeat himself, it is pretty certain he sent this material to the
Advertiser
. The only known manuscript is without address and unsigned. Hence, here is now definitive proof that Burns covertly published prose in
The Glasgow Advertiser
during 1791.

The first stanza of the poem is its best. The winter scene is set within a powerful image of the god of the North Wind riding, ‘howling', through icy Greenland with an elemental power so wild that they have decimated, as far away as Scotland, any flowers that might have survived. This confidently flowing image is reminiscent of Burns's characteristic painting of a winter scene to create a mood fit for the human despair and loss in the ensuing verses. The description of ‘Bauld Boreas, wi' his surly train' is echoed in Burns's ‘Cauld Boreas, wi' his boisterous crew' from
The Fête Champêtre,
which was published posthumously. The phrase ‘Bauld Boreas' is
found only in Ramsay's (1686–1758)
The Nipping Frost and Driving
Sna
'. The description ‘the mirk domain, / And leads and guides the weir' (ll. 5–6) is adapted from Fergusson's ‘… bleak domain / And guides the weir',
The Daft Days,
stanza 3. Also, the phrase (l. 10) ‘Or charm our rovin' een' is partly adapted from Fergusson's
Leith Races
, ‘To charm our rovin' een'. Such echoes of Ramsay and Fergusson are everywhere in Burns.

A further distinct feature of Burns in poetry and prose is his constant attack on the ‘great folk' or ‘highly favour'd Great', as seen here. Or in
Elegy on the Death of Captain Matthew Henderson
, ‘Go to your sculptur'd tombs, ye Great, / In a' the tinsel trash o' state'. Ll. 15–20 read like a condensed version of the social and economic oppression suffered by the poor in
A Winter Night,
‘Oh ye! who, sunk in beds of down, / Feel not a want but what yourselves create, /Think, for a moment, on his wretched fate, / Whom friends and fortune quite disown!' This type of comment in Burns is found along with his motif of despair for the poor in general and himself in particular, his personal angst, suffering at the hands of ‘Fortune', as seen at ll. 21–8, a passage which is autobiographical as in Burns's: ‘snarl an' quarrell / Wi' Fortune, that blind wh—ore'. The anonymously published prose by Burns, given above from
The Glasgow
Advertiser
is a perfect example of Burns ‘enrag'd' at the effects of poverty. (Further examples of this sentiment expressed in poetry and prose are found in
Lines Written on a Banknote, My Father Was
A Farmer, The Creed of Poverty,
comments in the FCB and Letters 244, 335, 358, 347, 510 319, 605 and 638). As he wrote to Mrs Dunlop, ‘Poverty, is to be my attendant to the grave' (Letter 638). Ll. 15–28 are a self-portrait of a poet unable to give cash to the charity plea who is deeply indignant at the semi-feudal economic structure which is implicitly blamed as the cause of poverty.

Whereas the most beautiful gem stones are the result of the raw geological power in the vortex of Earth's volatile central core, the genesis of this poetic gem is the intense crucible of political antagonism that came to a head in December 1793 and January 1794 in Edinburgh. Continuing the theme of
The Scotian Muse
, it laments the oppression of radical activists and in particular, those convicted of sedition and sentenced to transportation to the penal colony of Botany Bay, namely Thomas Muir, the Rev. Fysche Palmer, William Skirving and Maurice Margarot. It also accords Muir the honour of being compared to the great hero-martyr of the Whig tradition Algernon Sydney (1622–83), the English statesman, who was an icon of the French as well as British radical movement at this period.

Having tried and convicted Muir and Palmer for sedition and served upon them sentences of 14 years' and 7 years' transportation respectively, the Scottish Friends of the People branches – those ‘Friends of the Slighted people' (l. 1) – were galvanised and grew, despite the key Edinburgh branch, central to organisation of the Scottish radicals, being infiltrated by the cousin of James Boswell, Claude Irvine Boswell, Depute Sheriff of Fife. Another government spy, P. Moir, described the Rev. Fysche Palmer bizarrely as a bankrupt butcher from Birmingham paid by Joseph Priestley's
radical group (see RH 2/4/70/f.48, dated 8th March, 1793). The government moved to arrest William Skirving and Maurice Margarot when they were about to convene a meeting of the National Convention of the Friends of the People in Edinburgh near the end of 1793. The government feared the setting up of a Jacobin-derived government. Robert Dundas (nephew to Henry) wrote in early January 1794:

Political anxiety was running at such a pitch that at one point, it was thought Glasgow radicals were tunnelling from Glasgow to the Edinburgh Tolbooth to liberate Thomas Muir (such a crazy alarm is described in
The Edinburgh Gazetteer
October 1793). Prior to the arrests there were reports that ‘Paisley & its neighbourhood' were in a ‘state of tumult and unrest' (RH 2/4/74/f.76). Even worse, reports came in from a Charles Ogilvie of the Customs in Greenock that local people were supplying provisions to French naval ships at the town docks (RH 2/4/74/f.95). Edinburgh Supporters of the accused gathered at Calton Hill, Edinburgh as the trial went on. Scott, the Fiscal, ordered ‘to have people on the watch' and list who was in attendance (Laing II, 500, f.533). In the following week, legal action against the editor of
The Edinburgh Gazetteer
was successful and it was forcibly closed. Being charged with sedition, James Thomson Callender (1758–1803), author of the savage critique on political corruption,
The Political Progress of Britain,
fled the country and was declared a fugitive. (See Michael Durey,
With the Hammer of
Truth. James Thomson Callender,
University of Virginia, 1990.) Amid such tumult, upwards of ‘10,000' people helped take Maurice Margarot in a carriage to parliament square in Edinburgh on the opening of his trial: all ‘well wishers … where we were received with such a universal shout … entered into the court & having taken my seat at the Bar between two soldiers with drawn bayonets' the court was adjourned due to a ‘sudden illness of the Lord Advocate [Robert Dundas]' (TS 11/959/3505: Margarot to Thomas Hardy, LCS, London, January 1794). Despite their varied and eloquent defences, expressed in Enlightenment concepts and Biblical allusion, the accused were all found guilty of sedition. As a result, this and later political suppression of radicalism put back the
cause of British democratic progress for over a generation. Burns, watching from Dumfries, was conscious of these events and wrote wryly in
From Esopus to Maria,
that ‘his heresies in Church and State, / Might well award him Muir and Palmer's fate'.

The introductory quotation from Milton is an apt description of Burns's personal predicament in Dumfries, where his relationship with, inter alia, John Syme, was strained. He cast a keen glance at the London treason trials during early 1795, as he remarked to Mrs Dunlop:

It is evident from the extent of censorship outlined in our Introduction that Burns almost certainly had his say on these matters and that missing letters to Mary Wollstonecraft, William Roscoe, William Masterton, William Smellie and others, probably contained commentary and/or poetry on the Scottish sedition trials.

The language employed here is seen in the elegiac style of
Elegy on
the Death of Sir James Hunter-Blair,
where the Muse of Caledonia loudly laments:

Indeed, these stanzas might almost be placed within the new poem and read with natural continuity, despite the fact that the poems were written some four years apart.

What makes this a typical Burnsian political poem is that, despite his creative anxieties of being worthy of his theme, the poet's metaphorical darkness precedes a radical dawn. Thus, the poem ends with the beautiful image of poetry itself succouring the sea-borne exiles. The feel is akin to Coleridge and, indeed, we might here recall the first lines of Coleridge's sonnet,
To the Honourable
Mr [Thomas]
Erskine
which also deals with the exiled Scots:

Coleridge's sonnet appeared in
The Morning Chronicle
at the end of the same year, 1794. As well as demonstrating poetic affinity between the two men, it records the enormous impact the Scottish Sedition Trials had on British radical consciousness.