The Canongate Burns (80 page)

This appears anonymously in
The Morning Chronicle,
10th July, 1794. It was first ascribed to Burns by Professor Lucylle Werkmeister in her 1966 paper
Robert Burns and the London Daily Press
(Modern Philology
, LXIII, p. 328). Werkmeister does not provide a textual argument for her case, but a formally contextual one as we shall see in notes to the immediately following ‘A Cabinet Dinner'. It was subsequently ascribed to Burns in Scott Hogg's
The Lost
Poems
(1997).

Textually, the song is based on an old song named
Will Ye Go to
the Ewe Bughts, Marion
and its tune of the same name, which melody Burns had already set to
Will Ye Go to the Indies, My
Mary.
This new version is significantly adapted from Allan Ramsay's earlier
Ewe Bughts, Marion
. Like Burns's treatment of
Logan
Braes
, the new lyric has been transformed into a war-broken love song. The simple language and style is enhanced by the evocative use of the feminine voice; a characteristic trait of Burns's lyrics. Ramsay's version is written in the male voice. No poet of the eighteenth century possessed Burns's skill in employing the female voice in song.

L. 20 is almost straight from Burns's
The Ronnals of the Bennals,
which reads ‘For mair than this towmond, or twa'. Burns employs the name ‘Sandy' (l. 5) on many occasions; it was a stock-in-trade name within pastoral narrative or dialogue during the century (See Burns's
Sandy and Jockie
). Moreover, he sent a copy of
Ewe Bughts
Marion
to James Johnson in 1795, commenting ‘Another song – “Ewe Bughts Marion” – a quite different set from the one you have already published' (Letter 684). He also mentions it to Thomson (Letter 511) and in his reply to Burns, Thomson commented, ‘What you say of The Ewe Bughts is just … All I requested was that you would try your hand on some of the inferior stanzas' (Currie, 1800, Correspondence, Letter VII, p. 191). Burns was aware that at least two older versions existed and wrote of the earliest text that he was ‘not sure if this old and charming air be of the South, as it is commonly said, or of the North of Scotland. There is a song
apparently as ancient as “Ewe Bughts Marion”, which sings to the same time, and is evidently of the North' (Hogg,
The Lost Poems,
1997, p. 158). The Ramsay collected version reads:

This is clearly the model for the new radical text. Such a radical revision would not have been sent to Thomson given his prudish slight on Burns's anti-war
Logan
Braes
. The obvious outlet, given the demise of
The Edinburgh Gazetteer
in January 1794, was
The
Morning Chronicle
. After all, as already shown, he did promise to send them such pieces. McGuirk describes
The Ewe Bughts
as a jewel among the recently recovered poems, stating it has ‘the strongest claim' to be one of the ‘previously unknown poems by Robert Burns' (
Books in Review, Eighteenth Century Scottish Studies
Newsletter
, 1997, p. 15).

This was, as Professor Werkmeister comments in her 1966 paper,
Robert Burns and the London Daily Press
, printed next to
Ewe Bughts Marion
, ‘paired but unsigned' (p. 328). On this basis she argues it is by the same author as
Ewe Bughts Marion
and ascribes it to Burns. It was the newspaper custom to pair poems or songs, set them out next to each other without a line across the page to indicate they are by the same author. In the second
Heron Ballad
(l. 76). Burns also refers to ‘the fishes and loaves'. Loughborough (l. 4) was Alexander Wedderburn, the Lord Chancellor.

The ‘loaves and fishes' reference is, of course, a brutally ironic inversion of Christ's miraculous feeding of the poor. This
anti
-Christian governing class is predatorily grabbing everything for itself. It is a bitter double irony, and complete confirmation of Werkmeister's suggestion of Burns's authorship, that in 1795 an Ulster poet, believing, on the sole evidence of
The Dumfries Volunteers
, that Burns had betrayed the democratic cause, wrote these lines:

For a full account of this Ulster context see Liam McIlvanney, ‘Robert Burns and the Ulster-Scots Literary Revival of the 1790s',
Bullán
, Vol. IV, No. 2, pp. 125–43.

Several major poems by Burns are recorded with variant stanzas or lines, depending on whether the poem was drafted on several occasions and modified significantly before publication, or changed after publication. The poem given here does not fall into the category of being merely a variant reading of
A Winter Night
, first published in 1787. It is an updated version, published by Burns himself in August 1794 also in
The Gentleman's Magazine,
some three months after
Sonnet on the Death of Robert Riddell.
Robert Riddell was a subscriber and contributor to the journal and would have made the poet familiar with its pages during their meetings at Friar's Carse. The poem
Humanity:
An Ode
is not found in manuscript. It does not feature in any previous edition of Burns and lay undiscovered until Scott Hogg's 1997 research.

The main, obvious difference between the new version and
A Winter
Night
is that the body of the poem is no longer presented as a
voice
heard at night by the poet. The opening stanzas of
A Winter Night
in Standard Habbie format are cut away and the consolatory ending is dropped. What remains is an exclusively dissident text expressing the humanitarian sentiment of the poem, hence the new title,
Humanity:
An Ode.
There are, on close examination, several minor textual changes from the 1787 version to this final work, including new lines and a new ending to the poem. The differences are: ‘as now' is dropped from the line ‘Not all your rage, [as now] united, shews'; ‘iron grip' is modified to ‘iron lip'; ‘Or mad Ambition's gory hand' becomes ‘See mad Ambition's gory hand'; ‘How pamper'd Luxury' is changed to ‘How Luxury, with Flattery by her side'; ‘rustic hind'
becomes ‘lowly hind'; ‘thus far' is omitted from ‘Plac'd for her Lordly use [thus far,] thus vile below!'; ‘Regardless of the tears' is changed to ‘Regardless all of tears …'; ‘wretched fate' is changed to ‘hapless fate'; ‘piles the drifty heap!' becomes ‘falls the drifty heap!' A new line, adding emphasis is given, ‘Think on the terrors of the mine.' The question ‘But shall thy legal rage pursue' is dropped for the more direct and forceful, ‘Nor let thy legal rage pursue.' The phrase ‘crushed low' is now ‘beaten low'. The final section of the question ending with ‘By cruel Fortune's undeserved blow?' is altered to the indignant expression ‘By dire Misfortune's undeserved blow!' The poem concludes with a new, improved ending:

The structural and stylistic changes made to the poem serve to sharpen the moral outrage of the values expressed. The rhythmical strophes of
A Winter Night,
lines supposedly heard by the narrator, are now presented as the unequivocal voice of the poet. While the original head quotation from
King Lear
has been left out, the new, additional footnotes add to the increased energy of the piece within the wholly new context of Britain's mendacious involvement in the European conflagration. Condemnation of war and its concomitant desolation of human affairs is given a new impetus in a 1794 context, where ‘stern Oppression' and ‘mad Ambition's gory hand' were responsible for unleashing ‘Woe, Want and Murder, o'er a land!' Burns reinforces this by reference to Young's ‘imperial butchers', implying criticism on contemporary warmongers, surrounded by indulgent ‘pleasure' and ‘power' from Thomson's ironic couplet. The Shakespearean debt of
Humanity:
An Ode
(see notes to
A
Winter Night
) is re-emphasised by the footnote ‘Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war' (
Julius Caesar
, Act III. Sc. I, 1.273) alluding to an earlier state overwhelmed with bloody civil strife. Battle had also been joined with France.