The Canongate Burns (97 page)

This was written after
Epistle to J. Ranken,
in either late 1784 or early 1785, in reply to Ranken's continued correspondence about Elizabeth Paton. The earlier work was provoked by news of the pregnancy, while this was written after news of the birth. The first stanza engages in expressing a Biblical notion that ‘whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all' (
James,
ch. 2, verse x.) The final stanza is a confession of having been in front of the Church clergy once or twice for alleged fornication. This time, however, there is real danger as the woman is pregnant.

This is often described as lines written by Burns when on his death-bed and forwarded to Ranken in Ayrshire after the poet died. Given there is no evidence that Burns kept in touch with Ranken after leaving Ayrshire this story can be discarded as folklore.

To the Right Honorable the Earl of Breadalbane, President of the Right Honorable the HIGHLAND SOCIETY, which met on the 23rd of May last, at the Shakespeare, Covent Garden, to concert
ways and means to frustrate the designs of FIVE HUNDRED HIGHLANDERS who, as the Society were informed by Mr. M'Kenzie of Applecross, were so audacious as to attempt an escape from their lawful lords and masters whose property they were, by emigrating from the lands of Mr. Macdonald of Glengary to the wilds of CANADA, in search of that fantastic thing — LIBERTY.

That this poem did not appear till 1818 is evidence of the virulent intensity of its political dissent. Carol McGuirk has considered it Burns's perhaps most underrated dramatic monologue. It should, in fact, be seen as doing for reactionary, repressive political values what
Holy Willie's Prayer
does for the values of ‘Auld Licht' Calvinism. If the devil is implicit in Willie's perverted, inverted values, here he is present in all his crazed, persuasive, sadistic rhetorical splendour. Unlike Pope, there is little direct evidence of Burns's knowledge of Swift but Swift, especially the monologue form and content of his demonic prose masterpiece,
A Modest
Proposal,
is the obvious comparison. Like Swift, Burns demolishes his opponent's case by allowing him full reign for his social values. Like Swift he is making a persona who, out of his own eloquent mouth, destroys the case he is making. Again like Swift, Burns also concentrates his image of the most acute social deprivation on the Celtic part of their society; people – ‘highland hounds' – treated literally as animals.

Some critics have misunderstood Burns's ferocious anger in this poem because they did not understand, unlike the subsequent Clearances, the desire in the Highland population to escape the breakdown of post-Culloden Highland society by emigrating to Canada and North America. For the actual context see ‘British Diaspora: Emigration from Britain, 1680–1815', in
The Eighteenth
Century, The Oxford History of the British Empire,
ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford, 1998). At this point the feudal chieftains, unknowing of the commercial value of sheep, wish, while utterly careless of their needs, to keep their retainers at home. Consciously or not, this poem echoes another great poem of the late eighteenth-century diaspora, Goldsmith's
The Deserted Village.
Burns adored Goldsmith's poetry but his vision in this poem, as his general politics, is quite different. Goldsmith's exiles vanish into the jungle; Burns's Highlanders arrive in a landscape which mirrors their democratic ambitions. This also allows him to place in opposition his sense of an ideal America as opposed to extreme British distress and corruption. As in his first political poem ‘When Guilford Good' he celebrates both American democratic values and American military success. Thus three leaders of the American revolution are eulogised: John Hancock (1737–93), Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) and George Washington (1732–99). Richard Montgomery, the Ayrshire American hero, we have already met with in ‘When Guilford Good'. North, Sackville, Howe and Clinton also featured in that poem as British villains of the piece. Burns, in a sort of brilliant double irony, postulates that the very British politicians and soldiers who had lost America might bring the escaped Highlanders to order. This is to add satirical insult to the injury he had already delivered to the British imperial cause.

In a slightly later poem
A Winter Night,
Burns blows up a rhetorical storm to describe the sufferings of the common man at the hands of growing aristocratic, commercial power, partly by use of Augustan personification:

Here, however, his dense use of vernacular Scots makes extraordinarily tangible the sufferings of these Gaelic-speakers driven Southward in search for survival under the terms of varied sadistic punishments. Dispossession and exile were ever present in Burns's consciousness as central elements of his time's common experience. The Highland women in Drury Lane (l. 44) have resorted to prostitution. This ironically echoes the real prostitution of the absentee landlords who populate another but genuinely degenerate London.

The last lines of the poem list comparable
imperial
villains from the often genocidal régimes of Rome, Greece and Spain. Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee, executed John the Baptist and judged Jesus. Polycrates used his fleets in the fifth century B.C. to establish an Aegean empire. Diego D'Almargo (1475–1538) was put to death by his commander, Francisco Pizarro (1478–1541) during the conquest
of Peru. It is with such monsters that our Highland Chiefs are to toast themselves in the after-life fireside of hell. Burns's apparently peculiar assortment of such historical figures is explained by his reading about their histories in an article in
The Annual Register.
Publication of this poem during the poet's life would have infuriated members of the Highland Society, so that it is somewhat ironic that one of the poet's first reviewers, Henry Mackenzie, later became President of the Highland Society.

John Dove is reputed to have been a native of Paisley. He became landlord of the Whitefoord Arms where Burns held meetings of the Bachelors' Debating Club.

The Schoolmaster of MACHLEN [sic], in Ayrshire, was an intimate companion of the lately deceased Caledonian bard, ROBERT BURNS. One Evening after a long, convivial Repast, the former observed that, it was most probable his Friend, the Poet, would survive him, and he was persuaded that his Muse would be
invoked to celebrate his Virtues, and the endearing Society in which they had together passed so many festive Hours. ‘Come BURNS (said he) let me
hear
what you will say upon that
melancholy
occasion'. Burns took up the Pen; and, alluding to the Schoolmaster's general character as an
Admirer
of the softer sex, wrote the following:

This is the text printed in the London newspaper. It differs from the text normally printed, given below for comparison. Previous editors are wrong to record that it was first printed by Thomas Stewart, 1801. The version in the opposition London newspaper the
Telegraph,
a few weeks after the poet's death, reveal the poet's peculiar use of capitals and the italicisation of
‘Perhaps'
, pointing to an original manuscript. Hitherto the possible candidates for this randy Mauchline ‘wag' were James Smith, the poet's friend, or ‘Clockie Brown' as Kinsley's suggests. With the rediscovery of this first printed version it is evidently about Smith the schoolmaster. It may even have been sent to the newspaper by Smith.

The standard version is: 

This standard text may have been a version updated and improved by Burns.