Robert Burns

The Canongate Burns


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give my counsels all in one,

      They tuneful-flame still careful fan;

      Preserve the dignity of Man,

      With Soul erect

      And trust the Universal Plan

      Will all protect.

      Partly energised by his experience, social and intellectual, with Free Masonry this is a pre-Whitmanian dream of progressive, enlightened social and political virtue and not the thing itself. Ayrshire, of which Burns himself is the best witness, was a deeply frictive culture marked by severe economic instability even for the prosperous and much poverty for the rest. It was also subject to extreme clerical bigotry. The aesthetic stresses we feel in the second Duan derive from the forced, if not false, historical vision Burns here uncharacteristically adopts. There is, of course, the problem, significantly discussed in Issac Kramnick’s Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Cornell U.P.: 1990), as to whether such reformists could deliver their partly practical, partly Utopian project. They were not to be given the opportunity. By the mid 1790s these progressives were, with their poet laureate, in the deepest of trouble as Burkean derived hierarchy and economics brutally reinherited the world. Dugald Stewart like his fellow Whig academics was suspiciously confined. At least, unlike the octogenarian Thomas Reid, he was not roughed up. The admired James Beattie (1735–1803), whose The Minstrel influenced Wordsworth, and, as ll. 123–6 state, allegedly defeated David Hume’s atheism, relapsed, like James Boswell, into a semi-hysterical Toryism to the degree of involving himself in drinking bouts with the frequently besotted Henry Dundas.

       Halloween

      First published in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786

       Yes! let the Rich deride, the Proud disdain,

       The simple pleasures of the lowly train:

       To me more dear, congenial to my heart,

       One native charm, than all the gloss of art.

      GOLDSMITH.

      ‘The following poem will, by many readers, be well enough understood; but for the sake of those unaquainted with the manners and traditions of the country [region] where the scene is cast, notes are added, to give some account of the principal charms and spells of that night, so big with prophecy to the peasantry of the west of Scotland. The passion of prying into futurity makes a striking part of the history of human nature in its rude state, in all ages and nations; and it may be some entertainment to a philosophic mind, if any such honour the author with a perusal, to see the remains of it, among the more unenlightened in our own.’

      To this headnote, Burns defines Halloween thus: ‘Is thought to be a night when Witches, Devils, and other mischief-making beings, are all abroad on their baneful, midnight errands: particularly, those aerial people, the fairies, are said, on that night, to hold a grand anniversary.’

      R.B.

      Upon that night, when Fairies light

      Or owre the lays, in splendid blaze, over, fields

      On sprightly coursers prance;

      5 Or for Colean the rout is taen, Culzean, taken

      Beneath the moon’s pale beams;

      Amang the rocks and streams

      To sport that night:

      10 Amang the bonie winding banks,

      Where Doon rins, wimplin, clear; runs, winding

      An’ shook his Carrick spear;

      Some merry, friendly, country-folks

      15 Together did convene,

      To burn their nits, an’ pou their stocks, nuts, pull

      An’ haud their Halloween hold

      Fu’ blythe that night.

      The lassies feat, an’ cleanly neat, trim

      20 Mair braw than when they’re fine; more fair

      Their faces blythe fu’ sweetly kythe show

      Hearts leal, an’ warm, an’ kin’: loyal, kind

      The lads sae trig, wi’ wooer-babs so spruce, love-knots

      Weel-knotted on their garten; well, garters

      25 Some unco blate, an’ some wi’ gabs very shy, chatting up

      Gar lasses’ hearts gang startin make, go beating

      Whyles fast at night. sometimes

      Then,