The Columbia History of British Poetry (24 page)

BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry

8.95Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

ads

Page 102

Fergusson also produced Scots poems that show him as a serious critic of his age who deplored many of the features of Scottish life that had developed since the Union of 1707. As a member of the socially mixed Cape Club, of which he was the official singer, "Sir Precentor," he mingled with a variety of Edinburgh characters, including musicians, painters, actors, and antiquaries, and felt himself part of a living community. At the same time he was deeply conservative; in such a poem as "The Ghaists, a Kirk-yard Eclogue" he showed his dislike of new economic and cultural developments.

Some of Fergusson's earliest poems were in standard English, but he soon established himself as a poet in Scots with regular poetic contributions to Ruddiman's
Weekly Magazine or Edinburgh Amusement
, beginning with "The Daft Days," a lively account of Edinburgh in the winter period between Christmas and early new year. The Scots here is assured, balanced, and confident, occasionally weighted with a Latinism that takes its place quietly in the run of the verse. His "Elegy on the Death of Scots Music" has as epigraph the lines from
Twelfth Night
beginning, "Mark it, Caesario, it is old and plain," thus setting the tone of elegiac stateliness not previously found in the "Standart Habby" stanza of this poem. "The King's Birth-Day in Edinburgh,'' also in "Standart Habby," has a mischievous assurance in its use of Scots and its handling of properties from classical mythology in a familiar Scottish context: "O Muse, be kind, and dinna fash us / To flee awa'beyont Parnassus." To rhyme the Scots phrase "dinna fash us" ("don't bother us") with "Parnassus," boldly claiming the right to use classical references in a rollicking Scots poem, indicates the influence on Fergusson of a Scots-Latin "vernacular humanism" developed early in the century by the editor Thomas Ruddiman and others. This movement had no future in a Scotland now so far from the Renaissance and the courtly tradition, but it left a brief legacy with Fergusson.

Fergusson's "Caller [fresh] Oysters" is another of his convivial poems; its opening shows him handling "Standart Habby" with a slowness and an openness not often found in this verse form:


Of a' the waters that can hobble A fishin yale or salmon coble, And can reward the fisher's trouble Or south or north, There's nane sae spacious or sae noble As Firth o' Forth.

Page 103

The poem "Braid Claith," again in "Standart Habby," is a pungent satire on the way in which clothes make the man. "Hallow Fair" celebrates an annual November market in the old Scots tradition of popular revelry, effortlessly combining vernacular raciness, local references, and classical allusions. "Caller Water," a poem of great charm in praise of fresh water, opens with a stanza about Adam in the Garden of Eden that taught Burns how to domicile scriptural characters in a familiar Scottish context: "When father
Adie
first pat spade in / The bonny yeard of antient Eden. . . .'' "Mutual Complaint of Plainstanes and Causey" (sidewalk and street) is a dialogue in octosyllabic couplets that gave Burns the idea for "The Twa Dogs." The two companion poems "The Rising of the Session" and "The Sitting of the Session" give accounts of the life of Edinburgh when the Court of Session (Scotland's supreme court in civil cases) is and is not sitting.

Fergusson is perhaps best known for his grave descriptive poem in Spenserian stanzas, "The Farmer's Ingle," which gave Burns the idea for "The Cotter's Saturday Night." This is a deliberately conservative poem, describing with nostalgic affection a way of life that was changing rapidly. Like "The Ghaists" and other of his poems it reflects Fergusson's political and economic conservatism and that Scottish patriotism with which he associates it. Other significant poems of Fergusson are "Leith Races," in the same tradition and stanza as "Hallow Fair"and the model for Burns's "Holy Fair"and Fergusson's masterpiece "Auld Reikie" about his native city, in adroitly handled octosyllabic couplets derived from an English tradition developed by Butler, Swift, Prior, and Gay, among others. The couplets, shifting in tempo in accordance with the particular scene before the poet's eye, carry the expressive Scots forcefully to the ear, while the imagery, fixing the scene with its most significant component or appropriate symbol, builds up the city's sights, sounds, and smells. This is more than a Dickensian exploration of urban oddities or the search for a striking scene or incident: the whole poem is set in a framework of acceptanceacceptance of the whole of life, with its color, gaiety, debauchery, dreariness, pretentiousness, and weakness, companionship, loneliness, and sheer unadulterated humanity. Here Fergusson's often-indulged satirical impulses are subsumed in a wider humanist objective.

Fergusson in his short life left a handful of poems now recognized as some of the finest produced after the decline of the old court poetry. It was Burns's discovery of Fergusson's poems in Scots that, as Burns himself tells us, led him to realize what could be done in that idiom. With-

Page 104

out Fergusson, "by far my elder brother in the Muse," as Burns called him, there would have been no Burns.

Robert Burns (1759-1796) has become so much of a Scottish national myth that the reality of his achievement is often obscured in the mists of sentimental rhetoric. Son of a tenant farmer in southwest Scotland, Burns shared during his early years the hard-working and materially ill-rewarded life of his class. Yet, with that zeal for education which distinguished the Scottish peasantry at that time, his father arranged with other farmers of the region to have his children taught from their early years by a well-educated young man, who drilled his pupils thoroughly in reading, writing, and English composition, and who introduced them to a wide selection of English literature from Shakespeare to contemporary English poets. It is a measure of the confused situation of Scottish culture that Burns, son of a Scottish peasant, received a formal education in English, learning by heart English poetry and learning to write an elegant Addisonian English prose. His letters, of which some seven hundred survive, are, except for a single one written to a close friend in racy Scots, composed in Augustan English of considerable formality. All around him Burns encountered Scots folk traditions in song and story, and he acquired some knowledge of older Scottish poetry from versions circulated in chapbooks and in collections such as Ramsay's
Ever Green
, but his formal education was an English education. The poet he quotes most in his letters and even sometimes paraphrases in his poetry is Pope.

Burns's earliest efforts had been influenced partly by the Scottish folk tradition and partly by his reading of English poetry. After his discovery of Fergusson's Scots poems he developed a poetic language of great variety, combining Scots and English in different ways. He showed remarkable skill in the verse letter, a form used earlier in the century by minor Scots versifiers, combining, as none of his predecessors had done, the formality of rhyme and meter, and of stanza forms derived from older Scots poetry, with the informality of tone suitable to letters to friends. These lettersthe "Epistle to Davie," the "Epistle to J. Lapraik," ''To James Smith," among many othersare written either in the "Standart Habby" stanza or in a modified form of the complex stanza of
The Cherrie and the Slae
, by Montgomerie. They generally begin by setting the scene, giving the season of the year in terms of the farmer's activities, then moving from the farmhouse, where he is writing, outward to Scotland and the world in general, to place at the cen-

Page 105

ter of the poem some declaration of faith or generalization about life or poetry or happiness.


What's a' your jargon o' your Schools, Your Latin names for horns an' stools; If honest Nature made you fools, What sairs your grammars? Ye'd better taen up spades and shools, Or knappin-hammers.


A set o' dull, conceited hashes, Confuse their brains in colledge-classes! They gang in stirks, and come out asses, Plain truth to speak; An' syne they think to climb Parnassus By dint o' Greek!

The poet then adroitly maneuvers the poem back to himself and his correspondent before wittily signing off.

Burns also cultivated an old Scottish tradition of poetry about animals"The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie" (a sheep), "To a Mouse," "The Auld Farmer's New-Year-Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare, Maggie"in which he showed humor and sensitivity and a farmer's feeling for the animals he encountered or worked with. But most of all in his early poetry he developed a rich vein of satire. A passionate egalitarian from childhoodprecociously aware that the landowners' children he played with would, when they grew up, treat him, son of a struggling tenant farmer, with condescensionhe bitterly resented class divisions based on wealth and rank. "A Man's a Man for a' That" is more than a piece of eloquent sloganizing: it is a passionately satirical expression of a central theme in Burns's thought.

Burns also resented the stern Calvinist creed of predestination that flourished in his part of Scotland. He preached instead, as in the "Second Epistle to J. Lapraik," the doctrine that