The Columbia History of British Poetry (23 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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it carefully and submitted themselves to the spell of its language and rhythms agree at least on one point: there is nothing quite like this poem anywhere in European literature.
Montgomerie was also master of the sonnet, a pioneer of this form in Scotland. Many of his sonnets are full of wordplay, sometimes more ingenious than attractive. French models are preferred rather than the Italian preferred by English sonneteers. There are sonnets of compliment, of praise, of love, of complaint, and of satire, the complaints (often addressed to the king after he had withdrawn his favor and Montgomerie's pension) being on the whole the most vivid.
Other members of James VI's Castalian Band tried to put into effect some of the royal recipes for poetry, which the king summarized in a sonnet "painting out the perfect Poet" as involving ripe intelligence, wit, appropriateness, skill, "pithie wordes," appropriate tone, suitable figures of speech, and rhetorical sophistication. John Stewart of Baldynneis produced his "abbregement" of Ariosto's
Orlando Furioso
as his contribution to the king's program for rendering European poetic masterpieces into Scots. It is a remarkable performance, done with verve and skill and a conscious delight in poetic craftsmanship, cunningly reordering themes found in Ariosto's poem. It is in alternately rhyming decasyllabic lines that show a strain of high courtliness with self-conscious craftsmanship reflecting a Renaissance manner with roots in the courtly love tradition of the Middle Ages. Throughout the poem Stewart consciously strives to implement the precepts of his royal master, sometimes (as in the account of Roland's madness) with astonishing linguistic virtuosity that combines alliteration, onomatopoeia, and the use of parallel words in sequence known as ''underwriting" in a bravura performance. Stewart's sonnet appealing to the king for help, beginning, "Dull dolor dalie dois delyt destroy / Will wantith wit wais worn with wickit wo," was calculated to please James with its high artifice. He asks the king to "grant grievous gronyng gratious guerdon guid" in the context of a courtly suppliant seeking royal "guerdon": a final moment of high courtliness in Scots poetry. After 1603 there was no one in Scotland to whom a poet could appeal for "gratious guerdon."
William Fowler (1560-1612) replaced Montgomerie as the king's favorite, and translated Petrarch's
Trionfi
at the king's request. He also arranged ceremonies for the Court and wrote sonnets under Italian influence. But after he left for England with the king to take up a posi-
 
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tion in the queen's household, his language became increasingly anglicized. His best-known poem is a sonnet written during his stay in Orkney (before his departure for England), describing his position "upon the utmost corners of the world" and ending with a version of a well-known Horatian line: "So this I sie; quhaire ever I remove / I chainge bot sees, but can not change my love."
Another younger Castalian was Alexander Hume, who abandoned courtly Scots poetry not for poetry in English but (having become a Presbyterian minister) for religious poetry in Scots. Together with some indifferent "sacred verse" he wrote one fine poem combining quiet religious feeling with perfect command of tone and language to evoke the course of a summer's day from dawn to dusk in a Scottish rural landscape. Titled "Of the Day Estivall" (summer's day), it is written in simple quatrains, beginning with an invocation to light:
O perfite light, quhilk schaid away
The darkenes from the light,
And set a ruler ou'r the day,
Ane uther ou'r the night.
The poem ends with a quiet benediction. The movement here is that of the Scottish metrical version of the Psalms, but the fifty-eight limpid stanzas are thoroughly domiciled in Scottish place and feeling. There is nothing like this poem in the work of the other Castalians or in earlier Scottish poetry.
One other memorable poem of this periodthe only surviving poem in Scots by a poet whose other verse is in Latinis a sonnet by Mark Alexander Boyd beginning, "Fra banc to banc, fra wod to wod, I rin," and ending,
Unhappy is the man for evirmaire
That teils the sand and sawis in the aire;
Bot twyse unhappier is he, I lairn,
That feidis in his hairt a mad desyre
And follows on a woman throw the fyre,
Led be a blind and teichit be a bairn.
This is a courtly love complaint with a difference, the powerful last line balancing the whole poem on the edge of despair. It is quite unlike King James's sonnets or those written to please him, and stands alone in the Scots poetry of James's reign.
 
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The steady replacement of Scots by English as the literary language of Scottish writers is accompanied by a change of function for Scots still written. "The Life and Death of Habbie Simson the Piper of Kilbarchan," a nostalgic poem of the mid-seventeenth century by Robert Sempill of Beltrees laments, both sadly and humorously, the death of a famous piper and the loss of all the traditional tunes associated with his piping. Its stanza form, which Allan Ramsay called "Standart Habby" and which we know as the Burns stanza, became popular in eighteenth-century Scotland, and its mode, a half-humorous elegy, a common one. "Habbie Simson" was included in James Watson's
Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems
, published in three volumes between 1706 and 1711 with the patriotic purpose of bringing together poems ''in our own Native Scots Dialect," and so reminding Scottish readers of a literary heritage increasingly receding into the past. It is a very mixed collection and does not, in spite of the aim set out in the preface, confine itself to poems in Scots. But it does include "Christ's Kirk on the Green" (we give Watson's version of the titles), "The Cherry and the Slae," "The Solsequium," "The Flyting between Polwart and Montgomery," and Hamilton of Gilbertfield's "The Last Dying Words of Bonny Heck." Neither Henryson, Dunbar, nor (surprisingly) Lindsay is represented, but this jumble of what the editor found available is a symptom of the uneasiness felt in some quarters about what was happening to Scottish poetry.
Allan Ramsay (1686-1758) is a more interesting symptom. He combined a nostalgia for older Scottish poetry (which he both edited and imitated) with a desire to imitate the elegance and wit of the English poets of the Age of Queen Anne. Ramsay wrote English poems aiming at a Popian elegance, poems in Scots in the folk tradition, poems in Scots describing urban scenes of low life, genteel English versions of Scots folk songs, and his pastoral verse drama
The Gentle Shepherd
, which skillfully used a modified Scots in presenting Scottish rural life. Ramsay's collection of poems and songs entitled
The Tea-Table Miscellany
(1724-1737) contains some genuine old Scots folk material, some poems and songs of his own in a traditional Scots folk style, and some reworkings and "genteelizings" of Scots folk songs in an English neoclassic idiom.
In his preface to a volume of his poems published in 1721 Ramsay warmly defended the expressive capacities of Scots, yet he was on the defensive about his "Scotticisms." They may, he said, "offend some over-nice Ear," but they "give new life and grace to the Poetry, and become
 
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their Place as well as the
Doric
dialect of
Theocritus
, so much admired by the best judges." One cannot imagine Dunbar defending his Scots language in this way. Ramsay served Scottish poetry more unambiguously in editing
The Ever Green
(1724), a collection of older poetry in Scots largely taken from the Bannatyne Manuscript of 1568. The patriotic intention is made clear in his preface: "When these good old Bards wrote, we had not made Use of imported Trimming upon our Cloaths, nor of foreign Embroidery in our Writings." Ramsay is of course both right and wrong. The poetry of the older poets is anchored firmly in their own speech and country, yet it had a clearly European dimension.
The Ever Green
introduced eighteenth-century Scottish readers to the poetry of Scotland's golden age, including a good selection from Dunbar, a less good one from Henryson, several poems by Alexander Scott, and the historical ballad "The Battle of Harlaw." Ramsay modified his texts as he saw fit, and even on occasion added stanzas of his own. But he did remind Scottish readers of at least a part of their lost Scottish heritage. In his own poetic practice, varied and sometimes confused as it was, he showed some uses for Scots in poetry of his own centuryin vivid description of urban low life ("Elegy on Maggie Johnstoun"she kept a pub just south of Edinburgh"Elegy on Lucky Wood," "Lucky Spence's Last Advice"she was ''an Auld Bawd") and in songs of a folk flavor, such as "Up in the Air" and "The Young Laird and Edinburgh Katy." The role of the Scots languageor dialect, as it had becomeseemed to be established.
It was the achievement of Robert Fergusson in his tragically brief life (1750-1774) to provide a new dimension to the use of Scots in poetry that, while it did not restore the rich comprehensive language of Dunbar and Gavin Douglas, nevertheless made Scots something more than a medium for nostalgia, pastiche, pastoral, and colorful pictures of low life. Fergusson, educated at Dundee Grammar School and St. Andrews University, had no need to be defensive about his lack of knowledge of the Latin classics in the original (as both Ramsay and Burns were), and in his Scots poems he was able to introduce a
gravitas
both of tone and of diction that poetry in Scots had lacked since the early seventeenth century. Using a Scots based on Edinburgh speech but enriched by his parents' Aberdeenshire and the dialects of Forfar and of Fife as well as by his reading of older Scots poets, he produced a Scots poetry of considerable resonance. While he wrote elegies in the Habbie Simson tradition and vivid accounts of Edinburgh life done with humor and gusto,

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