Burns a Revealer of Pure Love.
Many people yet believe that Burns was a universal and inconstant lover. He really did not love many women. He loved deeply, but he had not a great many really serious experiences of love. He loved Nellie Kirkpatrick when he was fifteen, and Peggy Thomson when he was seventeen. He says his love of Nellie made him a poet. There is no other experience that will kindle the strongest element in a human soul during the adolescent period so fully, and so permanently, as genuine love. Love will not make all young people poets, but it will kindle with its most developing glow whatever is the strongest natural power in each individual soul. Parents should foster such love in young people during the adolescent period, instead of ridiculing it, as is too often done. God may not mean that the love is to be permanent, but there is no other agency that can be so productive at the time of adolescence as love that is reverenced by parents who, by due reverence, sympathy, and comradeship, help love to do its best work.
These two adolescent loves did their work in developing Burns, but they were not loves of maturity. From seventeen till he was twenty-one he was not really in love. Then he met, and deeply and reverently loved, Alison Begbie. She was a servant girl of charm, sweetness, and dignity, in a home not far from Lochlea farm. He wrote three poems to her: ‘The Lass o’ Cessnock Banks,’ ‘Peggy Alison,’ and ‘Mary Morrison.’ He reversed her name for the second title, because it possessed neither the elements of metre nor of rhyme. He gave his third poem to her the title ‘Mary Morrison’ to make it conform to the same metre as ‘Peggy Alison.’ There was a Mary Morrison who was nine years of age when Burns wrote ‘Mary Morrison.’ She is buried in Mauchline Churchyard, and on her tombstone it is stated that she was ‘the Mary Morrison of Burns.’ His brother Gilbert knew better. He said the poem was written to the lady to whom ‘Peggy Alison’ was written. It is impossible to believe that Burns would write ‘Mary Morrison’ to a child only nine years old.
Burns wrote five love-letters to Alison Begbie. Beautiful and reverent letters they were, too. In the fourth, he asked her to become his wife. In Chapter III. it has been explained that he was too shy, even at twenty-two, to ask the woman whom he loved to marry him when he was with her. This does not indicate that he had a new love each week, as many yet believe. Miss Begbie refused to marry him, and his reply should win him the respect of every reasonable man or woman who reads it. It is the dignified and reverent outpouring of a loving heart, held in control by a well-balanced and considerate mind.
Although Burns had no lover from seventeen to twenty-one years of age, he wrote love-songs during those years, but even his mother could not tell the name of any young woman who kindled his muse during these four years. Neither could the other members of his family.
He wrote one poem, ‘My Nannie O,’ during this period. He first wrote for the first line:
Beyond the hills where Stinchar flows.
He did not like the word ‘Stinchar,’ so he changed it to ‘Lugar,’ a much more euphonious word. He had no lover named ‘Nannie.’ Lugar and Stinchar were several miles apart. He was really writing about love, not the love of any one woman, during those four years; and he was writing about other great subjects more than about love, mainly religious and ethical ideals.
From the age of twenty-two he was for three years without a lover. At twenty-five he met Jean Armour, then eighteen. Jean spoke first to the respectfully shy man. At the annual dance on Fair night in Mauchline, Burns was one of the young men who were present. His dog, Luath, who loved him, and whom he loved in return, traced his master upstairs to the dance hall. Of course the dance was interrupted when Luath got on the floor and found his master. Burns kindly led the dog out, and as he was going he said, ‘I wish I could find a lassie to loe me as well as my dog.’ A short time afterwards Burns was going along a street in Mauchline, and was passing Jean Armour without speaking to her, because he had not been introduced to her. She was at the village pump getting water to sprinkle her clothes on the village green, and as he was passing her she asked, ‘Hae you found a lassie yet to loe you as well as your dog?’ Burns then stopped and conversed with her. She was a handsome, bright young woman. Their acquaintance soon developed a strong love between them, and resulted in a test of the real manhood of the character of Burns. When he realised that Jean was to become a mother, he did not hesitate as to his duty. He gave her a legal certificate of marriage, signed by himself and regularly witnessed, which was as valid as a marriage certificate of a clergyman or a magistrate in Scottish law.
Jean’s father compelled her to destroy, or let him destroy, the certificate. This, and her father’s threatened legal prosecution, nearly upset the mind of Burns. He undoubtedly loved Jean Armour. In a letter written at the time to David Brice, a friend in Glasgow, he wrote: ‘Never man loved, or rather adored, a woman more than I did her; and, to confess a truth between you and me, I do still love her to distraction after all.... May Almighty God forgive her ingratitude and perjury to me, as I from my very soul forgive her; and may His grace be with her, and bless her in all her future life.’
He had arranged to leave Scotland for Jamaica to escape from his mental torture, when two things came into his life: Mary Campbell, and the suggestion that he should publish his poems. The first filled his heart, the second gave him the best tonic for his mind—deeply and joyously interesting occupation.
Mary Campbell, ‘Highland Mary,’ he had met when she was a nursemaid in the home of his friend Gavin Hamilton. Meeting her again, when she was a servant in Montgomery Castle, he became acquainted with her, and they soon loved each other. It is not remarkable that Burns should love Mary Campbell, because she was a winsome, quiet, refined young woman, and his heart was desolate at the loss of Jean Armour. He, at the time he made love to Mary, had no hope of reconciliation with Jean. The greater his love for Jean had been, and still was, the greater his need was for another love to fill his heart, and he found a pure and satisfying lover in Mary. Their love was deep and short, lasting only about two months. Two busy months they were, as Burns was preparing his poems for the Kilmarnock edition, till he and Mary agreed to be married. They parted for the last time on 14th May 1785. The day was Sunday. They spent the afternoon in the fine park of Montgomery Castle, through which the Fail River runs for a mile and a half. In the evening they went out of the grounds about half a mile to Failford, a little village at the junction of the Fail with the Ayr. The Fail runs parallel to the Ayr, and in the opposite direction after leaving the castle grounds, until it reaches Failford. There it meets a solid rock formation, which compels it to turn squarely to the right and flow into the Ayr, about three hundred yards away. At a narrow place where the Fail had cut a passage through the soft rock on its way to the Ayr, Burns and Highland Mary parted. He stood on one side of the river and Mary on the other, and after they had exchanged Bibles, they made their vows of intention to marry, he holding one side of an open Bible and she the other side. Mary went home to prepare for her marriage, but a relative in Greenock fell ill with malignant fever, and Mary went to nurse him, and caught the fever herself and died.
The poems he wrote to her and about her made her a renowned character. When in 1919 a shipbuilding company at Greenock, after a four years’ struggle, finally purchased the church and churchyard in which Mary was buried, with the intention of removing the bodies to another place, the British Parliament passed an Act providing that her monument must stand forever over her grave, where it had always stood.[4] Though she held a humble position, the beautiful poems of her lover gave her an honoured place in the hearts of millions of people all over the world.
Burns did not go to Jamaica, although he had secured a berth on a ship to take him to that beautiful island. Calls came to him just in time to publish an edition of his poems in Edinburgh. He answered the calls, startled and delighted Edinburgh society, published his poems, and met Clarinda.
Mrs M’Lehose was a cultured and charming grass-widow. She had been courted and married by a wealthy young man in Glasgow when she was only seventeen years of age. Though a lady of the highest character, on the advice of relatives and friends she left her husband. He then went to Jamaica.
Burns and Mrs M’Lehose mutually admired each other when they met, and their friendship quickly developed into affection. Under the names of Sylvander and Clarinda they conducted a love correspondence which will probably always remain the finest love correspondence of the ages. Clarinda was a religious and cultured woman; Burns was a religious and cultured man, so their letters of love are on a high plane. Clarinda wrote very good poems as well as good prose, and Burns wrote some of his best poems to Clarinda. His parting song to Clarinda is, in the opinion of many literary men, the greatest love-song of its kind ever written. Those who study the Clarinda correspondence will find not only love, but many interesting philosophical discussions regarding religion and human life.
Thus ends the record of his real loves, notwithstanding the outrageous misstatements that his loves extended, according to one writer, to nearly four hundred. He had just four deep and serious loves, not counting the two deep and transforming affections of his adolescent period for Nellie Kirkpatrick and Peggy Thomson. He loved four women: Alison Begbie, Jean Armour, Mary Campbell, and Mrs M’Lehose. At the age of twenty-one he loved Alison Begbie, and, when twenty-two, he asked her to marry him. She declined his proposal. He was too shy to propose to her when he was with her. Get this undoubted fact into your consciousness, and think about it fairly and reasonably, and it will help you to get a truer vision of the real Burns. Read the proposal and his subsequent letter on pages 51-55, and your mind should form juster conceptions of Burns as a lover and as a man. You will find it harder to be misled by the foolish or the malicious misrepresentations that have too long passed as facts concerning him as a lover.
From twenty-two to twenty-five he had no lover; then he loved and married Jean Armour. No act of his prevented that marriage-contract remaining in force. When her father forced the destruction of the contract, and much against his will, and in defiance of the love of his heart, he found that he had lost his wife beyond any reasonable hope of reconciliation and reunion, and was therefore free to love another, he loved Mary Campbell, and honourably proposed marriage to her. She accepted his offer, but died soon after. He was untrue to no one when he took Clarinda into his heart. Of course he could not ask her to marry him, as she was already married.
The first three women he loved after he reached the age of twenty-one years were Alison Begbie, Jean Armour, and Mary Campbell. The first refused his offer; he married the second, and was forced into freedom by her father; the third accepted his offer of marriage, but died before they could be married. The fourth woman whom he loved loved him, but could not marry him, a fact recognised by both of them. There is not a shadow of evidence of inconstancy or unfaithfulness on his part in the eight years during which he loved the four women—the only four he did love after he became a man.
It may be answered that Burns was not loyal to Jean Armour because he loved Mary Campbell and Clarinda after he was married to Jean. Burns absolutely believed that his marriage to Jean was annulled by the burning of the marriage certificate. He would not have pledged matrimony with Mary Campbell if he had known that Jean was still his wife. When Mary died, and he found Jean’s father was willing that he might again marry Jean, he did marry her in Gavin Hamilton’s home. In writing to Clarinda he forgot himself for a moment and spoke disrespectfully of Jean, but his prompt and honourable action in marrying her soon after showed him to be a true man.
It should ever be remembered that Burns was in no sense a fickle lover. To each of the three women whom he loved, his love was reverent and true. He had a reverent affection for Alison Begbie after she refused him; he loved Jean Armour after she allowed their marriage-certificate to be destroyed; and he loved Mary Campbell, not only till she died, but to the end of his life. The fact that he sat out in the stackyard on Ellisland farm through the long moonlit night, with tears flowing down his cheeks, on the third anniversary of her death, and wrote ‘To Mary in Heaven,’ proves the depth and permanency of his love.
In ‘My Eppie Adair’ he says:
By love and by beauty, by law and by duty,
I swear to be true to my Eppie Adair.
In these lines Burns truly defines his own type of love.
It is true that Miss Margaret Chalmers told the poet Campbell, after Burns died, that he had asked her to marry him. His letters to her are letters of deep friendship—reverent friendship—not love. It is true that the last poem he ever wrote was written to Margaret Chalmers, and that in it he said:
Full well thou knowest I love thee, dear.
But it must be remembered that Burns had been married to Jean and living happily with her for eight years, so the love of this line was not the love that is expected to lead to marriage, but an expression of reverent affection. The whole tenor of this last poem of his life indicates that he thought her feeling for him was cooling, and his deep affectionate friendship urged him to plead with her for a continuance of their long-existing and quite unusual relationship.
Many people will doubtless say, ‘What about Chloris?’ Chloris was his name for Jean Lorimer, the daughter of a friend of his who dwelt near him when he lived on Ellisland farm after his second marriage to Jean Armour. Chloris was a sweet singer and player, who frequently visited Mrs Burns, and who sang for Burns, sometimes, with Mrs Burns the grand old Scottish airs that had long been sung to words that were not pure, and to which he was writing new and pure words nearly every day. A number of these songs were addressed to Chloris, but in a book of his poems presented to Miss Lorimer he states clearly that the love he appeared to be expressing for her was an assumed, or, as he called it, a ‘fictitious,’ and not a real love.
When Burns had earned five hundred pounds by the sale of the Edinburgh edition of his poems, he decided ‘that he had the responsibility for the temporal and possibly the eternal welfare of a dearly loved fellow-creature;’ so again giving proof of his honest manhood and recognising his plain duty, he married Jean Armour a second time, in the home of his dear friend Gavin Hamilton. Of the first three women whom he loved one refused him, one died after their sacred engagement, and the third he married twice. The fourth and last woman that he loved could not marry.
Any one of the first three would have made him a good wife, but no one could have been more considerate or more faithful than the one he married.
Could any reasonable man believe that if Burns had really loved other women, as he loved Alison Begbie, Jean Armour, Mary Campbell, and Mrs M’Lehose, the names of the other women would not have been known by the world? He never tried to hide his love. He wrote songs of love with other names attached to them, used for variety. In a letter to a friend he regretted the use of ‘Chloris’ in several of his Ellisland and Dumfries poems, and to her directly he said they were ‘fictitious’ or assumed expressions of love. Notwithstanding the foolish or malicious statements that Burns had many lovers, he had but four real loves. One would have been his limit if the first had accepted him and lived as long as he did.
It has been said that ‘the love of Burns was the love of the flesh.’ It is worth while to examine the love-songs of Burns to learn what elements of thought and feeling dominated his mind and heart. He wrote two hundred and fifty love-songs, and only three or four contain indelicate references; even these were not considered improper in his time.
What were the themes of his love-songs? What were the symbols that he used to typify love? There is no beauty or delight in Nature on earth or sky that he did not use as a symbol of true love. He saw God through Nature as few men ever saw Him, and he therefore naturally used the beauty and sweetness and glory of Nature to help to reveal the beauty and sweetness and glory of love, the element of the Divine that thrilled him with the deepest joy and the highest reverence.
In his first poem, written when he was fifteen, describing his fourteen-year-old sweetheart, he says:
A bonnie lass, I will confess,
Is pleasant to the e’e;
But without some better qualities,
She’s no a lass for me.
······
But it’s innocence and modesty
That polishes the dart.
’Tis this in Nelly pleases me,
’Tis this enchants my soul;
For absolutely in my breast
She reigns without control.
Of Peggy Thomson, his second love, he wrote:
Not vernal showers to budding flowers,
Not autumn to the farmer,
So dear can be as thou to me,
My fair, my lovely charmer.
Of Alison Begbie he wrote in ‘The Lass o’ Cessnock Banks’:
But it’s not her air, her form, her face,
Tho’ matching beauty’s fabled queen;
’Tis the mind that shines in ev’ry grace,
And chiefly in her rogueish een.
In ‘Young Peggy Blooms’ he describes her:
Young Peggy blooms our bonniest lass,
Her blush is like the morning,
The rosy dawn, the springing grass
With early gems adorning.
Her eyes outshine the radiant beams
That gild the passing shower,
And glitter o’er the crystal streams,
And cheer each fresh’ning flower.
In ‘Will Ye Go to the Indies, My Mary?’ he says:
O sweet grows the lime and the orange,
And the apple o’ the pine;
But a’ the charms o’ the Indies
Can never equal thine.
The following are emblems of beauty in the ‘Lass o’ Ballochmyle’:
On every blade the pearls hang.
Her look was like the morning’s eye,
Her air like Nature’s vernal smile.
Fair is the morn in flowery May,
And sweet is night in autumn mild.
Describing ‘My Nannie O’ he says:
Her face is fair, her heart is true;
As spotless as she’s bonnie, O;
The opening gowan, wat wi’ dew, daisy
Nae purer is than Nannie O.
In ‘The Birks [birches] of Aberfeldy’ he speaks to his lover of ‘Summer blinking on flowery braes’ and ‘Playing o’er the crystal streamlets;’ and the ‘Blythe singing o’ the little birdies’ and ‘The braes o’erhung wi’ fragrant woods’ and ‘The hoary cliffs crowned wi’ flowers;’ and ‘The streamlet pouring over a waterfall.’ Love and Nature were united in his heart.
In ‘Blythe was She’ he describes the lady by saying she was like beautiful things:
Her looks were like a flower in May.
Her smile was like a simmer morn;
Her bonnie face it was as meek
As any lamb upon a lea;
and the ‘ev’ning sun.’
Her step was
As light’s a bird upon a thorn.
He wrote ‘O’ a’ the Airts the Wind can Blaw’ about Jean Armour after they were married, while he was building their home on Ellisland. He says in this exquisite song:
By day and night my fancy’s flight
Is ever wi’ my Jean.
I see her in the dewy flowers,
I see her sweet and fair;
I hear her in the tunefu’ birds,
I hear her charm the air:
There’s not a bonnie flower that springs
By fountain, shaw, or green; woodland
There’s not a bonnie bird that sings,
But minds me o’ my Jean.
To Jean he wrote again:
It is na, Jean, thy bonnie face,
Nor shape that I admire;
Although thy beauty and thy grace
Might weel awake desire.
Something in ilka part o’ thee
To praise, to love, I find;
But dear as is thy form to me,
Still dearer is thy mind.
In ‘Delia—an Ode,’ he uses the ‘fair face of orient day,’ and ‘the tints of the opening rose’ to suggest her beauty, and ‘the lark’s wild warbled lay’ and the ‘sweet sound of the tinkling rill’ to suggest the sweetness of her voice.
In ‘I Gaed a Waefu’ Gate Yestreen’ he says:
She talked, she smiled, my heart she wiled;
She charmed my soul, I wist na how.
It was the soul of Burns that responded to love. Neither Alison Begbie nor Mary Campbell excelled in beauty, and no one acquainted with their high character could have had the temerity to suggest that love for them was ‘the love of the flesh.’ His beautiful poems to Jean Armour place his love for her on a high plane. He was a man of strong passion, but passion was not the source of his love.
In ‘Aye sae Bonnie, Blythe and Gay’ he says:
She’s aye sae neat, sae trim, sae light, the graces round her hover,
Ae look deprived me o’ my heart, and I became her lover
‘Ilka bird sang o’ its love’ he makes Miss Kennedy say in ‘The Banks o’ Doon.’ As the birds ever sang love to Burns, he naturally makes them sing love to all hearts.
In ‘The Bonnie Wee Thing’ he gives high qualifications for love kindling:
Wit, and grace, and love, and beauty
In ae constellation shine;
To adore thee is my duty,
Goddess o’ this soul o’ mine.
In ‘The Charms of Lovely Davies’ he says:
Each eye it cheers when she appears,
Like Phœbus in the morning,
When past the shower, and ev’ry flower
The garden is adorning.
The last three poems from which quotations have been made were written about two ladies whose lovers had been untrue to them: the first about Miss Kennedy, a member of one of the leading Ayrshire families; the other two about Miss Davies, a relative of the Glenriddell family.
In a letter to Miss Davies he said:
‘Woman is the blood-royal of life; let there be slight degrees of precedency among them, but let them all be sacred. Whether this last sentiment be right or wrong, I am not accountable; it is an original component feature of my mind.’
Burns was not in love with either Miss Kennedy or Miss Davies, but he explains the writing of the songs to Miss Davies, in a letter enclosing ‘Bonnie Wee Thing,’ by saying, ‘When I meet a person of my own heart I positively can no more desist from rhyming on impulse than an Æolian harp can refuse its tones to the streaming air.’
One of his most beautiful poems is ‘The Posie,’ which he planned to pull for his ‘Ain dear May.’
The primrose I will pu’, the firstling o’ the year,
And I will pu’ the pink, the emblem o’ my dear,
For she’s the pink o’ womankind, and blooms without a peer.
I’ll pu’ the budding rose, when Phœbus peeps in view,
For it’s like a baumy kiss o’ her sweet, bonnie mou’;
The hyacinth’s for constancy, wi’ its unchanging blue.
The lily it is pure, and the lily it is fair,
And in her lovely bosom I’ll place the lily there;
The daisy’s for simplicity and unaffected air.
The woodbine I will pu’, when the e’ening star is near,
And the diamond draps o’ dew shall be her een sae clear;
The violet’s for modesty, which weel she fa’s to wear.
I’ll tie the posie round wi’ the silken band o’ luve,
And I’ll place it in her breast, and I’ll swear by a’ above
That to my latest draught o’ life the band shall ne’er remove,
And this will be a posie to my ain dear May.
In ‘Lovely Polly Stewart’ he says:
O lovely Polly Stewart,
O charming Polly Stewart,
There’s ne’er a flower that blooms in May
That’s half so fair as thou art.
The flower it blaws, it fades, it fa’s,
And art can ne’er renew it;
But worth and truth, eternal youth
Will gie to Polly Stewart.
In ‘Thou Fair Eliza’ he says:
Not the bee upon the blossom,
In the pride o’ sinny noon;
Not the little sporting fairy,
All beneath the simmer moon;
Not the minstrel, in the moment
Fancy lightens in his e’e,
Kens the pleasure, feels the rapture,
That thy presence gies to me.
In ‘My Bonie Bell’ he writes:
The smiling spring comes in rejoicing,
The surly winter grimly flies;
Now crystal clear are the falling waters,
And bonie blue are the sunny skies.
Fresh o’er the mountains breaks forth the morning,
The evening gilds the ocean’s swell;
All creatures joy in the sun’s returning,
And I rejoice in my Bonie Bell.
‘Sweet Afton’ was suggested by the following: ‘I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not, nor awaken my love—my dove, my undefiled! The flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land.’
In descriptive power and in fond and reverent love no poem of Burns, or any other writer, surpasses Sweet Afton. Authorities have been divided in regard to the person who was the Mary of Sweet Afton. Currie and Lockhart declined to accept the statement of Gilbert Burns that it was Highland Mary. Chambers and Douglas, the most illuminating and reliable of the early biographers of Burns, agree with Gilbert. One of Mrs Dunlop’s daughters stated that she heard Burns himself say that Mary Campbell was the woman whose name he used to represent the lover for whom he asked such reverent consideration. He had no lover at any period of his life on the Afton. He had but one lover named Mary, and she stirred him to a degree of reverence that toned the music of his love to the end of his life. Mary Campbell was alive to Burns in a truly realistic sense when he wrote the sacred poem ‘Sweet Afton.’
In ‘O were my Love yon Lilac Fair’ he assumes that his love might be
A lilac fair,
Wi’ purpling blossoms in the spring,
And I a bird to shelter there,
When wearied on my little wing.
In the second verse he says:
O gin my love were yon red rose if
That grows upon the castle wa’;
And I mysel’ a drop o’ dew,
Into her bonie breast to fa’!
Could imagination kindle more pure ideals to reveal love than these? In ‘Bonie Jean—A Ballad’ he gives two delightful pictures of love:
As in the bosom of the stream
The moonbeam dwells at dewy e’en;
So trembling, pure, was tender love
Within the breast of Bonie Jean.
······
The sun was sinking in the west,
The birds sang sweet in ilka grove; every
His cheek to hers he fondly laid,
And whispered thus his tale of love.
In ‘Phillis the Fair’ he writes:
While larks, with little wing, fann’d the pure air,
Tasting the breathing spring, forth did I fare;
Gay the sun’s golden eye
Peep’d o’er the mountains high;
Such thy morn! did I cry, Phillis the fair.
In each bird’s careless song glad did I share;
While yon wild-flow’rs among, chance led me there!
Sweet to the op’ning day,
Rosebuds bent the dewy spray;
Such thy bloom! did I say, Phillis the fair.
In ‘By Allan Stream’ he describes the glories of Nature, but gives them second place to the joys of love:
The haunt o’ spring’s the primrose-brae,
The summer joys the flocks to follow;
How cheery thro’ her short’ning day
Is autumn in her weeds o’ yellow;
But can they melt the glowing heart,
Or chain the soul in speechless pleasure?
Or thro’ each nerve the rapture dart,
Like meeting her, our bosom’s treasure?
In ‘Phillis, the Queen o’ the Fair’ he uses many beautiful things to illustrate her charms:
The daisy amused my fond fancy,
So artless, so simple, so wild:
Thou emblem, said I, o’ my Phillis—
For she is Simplicity’s child.
The rosebud’s the blush o’ my charmer,
Her sweet, balmy lip when ’tis prest:
How fair and how pure is the lily!
But fairer and purer her breast.
Yon knot of gay flowers in the arbour,
They ne’er wi’ my Phillis can vie:
Her breath is the breath of the woodbine,
Its dew-drop o’ diamond her eye.
Her voice is the song o’ the morning,
That wakes thro’ the green-spreading grove,
When Phœbus peeps over the mountains
On music, and pleasure, and love.
But beauty, how frail and how fleeting!
The bloom of a fine summer’s day;
While worth, in the mind o’ my Phillis,
Will flourish without a decay.
In ‘My Love is like a Red, Red Rose’ he uses exquisite symbolism:
My luve is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
My luve is like a melodie
That’s sweetly play’d in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.
In the pastoral song, ‘Behold, my Love, how Green the Groves,’ he says in the last verse:
These wild-wood flowers I’ve pu’d to deck
That spotless breast o’ thine;
The courtier’s gems may witness love,
But never love like mine.
In the dialogue song ‘Philly and Willy,’
He says,
As songsters of the early spring
Are ilka day more sweet to hear, each
So ilka day to me mair dear
And charming is my Philly.
She replies,
As on the brier the budding rose
Still richer breathes and fairer blows,
So in my tender bosom grows
The love I bear my Willy.
In ‘O Bonnie was yon Rosy Brier’ he says:
O bonnie was yon rosy brier
That blooms so far frae haunt o’ man;
And bonnie she, and ah, how dear!
It shaded frae the e’ening sun.
Yon rosebuds in the morning dew,
How pure amang the leaves sae green;
But purer was the lover’s vow
They witnessed in their shade yestreen.
All in its rude and prickly bower,
That crimson rose, how sweet and fair.
But love is far a sweeter flower,
Amid life’s thorny path o’ care.
In ‘A Health to Ane I Loe Dear’—one of his most perfect love-songs—he says:
Thou art sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet,
And soft as their parting tear.
······
’Tis sweeter for thee despairing
Than aught in the world beside.
In ‘My Peggy’s Charms,’ describing Miss Margaret Chalmers, Burns confines himself mainly to her mental and spiritual charms. This was clearly a distinctive characteristic of nearly the whole of his love-songs. No other man ever wrote so many pure songs without suggestion of the flesh as did Robert Burns.
My Peggy’s face, my Peggy’s form,
The frost of hermit age might warm;
My Peggy’s worth, my Peggy’s mind,
Might charm the first of human kind.
I love my Peggy’s angel air,
Her face so truly, heavenly fair.
Her native grace, so void of art;
But I adore my Peggy’s heart.
The tender thrill, the pitying tear,
The generous purpose, nobly dear;
The gentle look that rage disarms—
These are all immortal charms.
In his ‘Epistle to Davie—A Brother Poet’ Burns, after detailing the many hardships and sorrows of the poor, forgets the hardships, and recalls his blessings:
There’s a’ the pleasures o’ the heart,
The lover and the frien’;
Ye hae your Meg, your dearest part,
And I my darling Jean.
It warms me, it charms me,
To mention but her name;
It heats me, it beets me, kindles
And sets me a’ on flame.
O all ye powers who rule above!
O Thou whose very self art love!
Thou know’st my words sincere!
The life-blood streaming through my heart,
Or my more dear immortal part
Is not more fondly dear!
When heart-corroding care and grief
Deprive my soul of rest,
Her dear idea brings relief
And solace to my breast.
Thou Being, All-Seeing,
O hear my fervent prayer;
Still take her, and make her
Thy most peculiar care.
Three years after the death of Highland Mary, Burns remained out in the stackyard on Ellisland farm and composed ‘To Mary in Heaven.’ Nothing could more strikingly prove the sincerity, the permanence, the purity, and the sacredness of the white-souled love of Burns than this poem:
Thou ling’ring star, with less’ning ray,
That lov’st to greet the early morn,
Again thou usher’st in the day
My Mary from my soul was torn.
O Mary! dear departed shade!
Where is thy place of blissful rest?
See’st thou thy lover lowly laid?
Hear’st thou the groans that rend his breast?
That sacred hour can I forget?
Can I forget that hallow’d grove
Where, by the winding Ayr, we met
To live one day of parting love?
Eternity can not efface
Those records dear of transports past;
Thy image at our last embrace;
Ah! little thought we ’twas our last!
Ayr, gurgling, kiss’d his pebbled shore,
O’erhung with wild-woods, thickening green;
The fragrant birch and hawthorn hoar
Twined amorous round the raptured scene:
The flowers sprang wanton to be prest,
The birds sang love on every spray;
Till too, too soon, the glowing west,
Proclaimed the speed of wingèd day.
Still o’er these scenes my mem’ry wakes,
And fondly broods with miser-care;
Time but th’ impression stronger makes,
As streams their channels deeper wear.
My Mary, dear departed shade!
Where is thy place of blissful rest?
See’st thou thy lover lowly laid?
Hear’st thou the groans that rend his breast?
The general themes of this sacred poem, written three years after Mary Campbell’s death, are the preponderating themes of his love-songs. No love-songs ever written have so little of even embracing and kissing as the love-songs of Burns, except the sonnets of Mrs Browning.
It is worthy of note that Mary Campbell was not a beauty—her attractions were kindness, honesty, and unselfishness; yet, though happily married himself, he loved her, three years after her death, as profoundly as when they parted on the Fail, more than three years before he wrote the poem.