On poetic interpretation of nature

by John Campbell Shairp

BURNS.

The rural descriptions and the reflections on the outer world contained in the poetry of Cowper, mark the highest limit which the feeling for Nature had reached in England at the close of last century. But the stream of natural poetry in England, which up to that time had been fed from purely native sources, and which had flowed on through all last century with ever increasing volume, received toward the close of the century affluents from other regions, which tinged the color and modified the direction of its future current. Of these affluents the first and most powerful was the poetry of Burns. It is strange to think that Cowper and he were singing their songs at the same time, each in his own way describing the scenery that surrounded him, and yet that they hardly knew of each other’s existence.

Burns not only lived in a world of nature, of society, and of feeling, wholly alien to that of Cowper, but he took for his models far different poets. These models were the Scottish rhymers, Allan Ramsay, Ferguson, and the unknown singers of the native ballads, and especially of the popular songs, of his country. Proud and self-reliant as Burns was, he everywhere speaks of Ramsay and Ferguson as his models and superiors. From these he took the forms of his poems, though into these forms he poured a new and stronger inspiration. Burns’s “Halloween” is framed on a model of Ferguson’s poem called “Leith Races,” and “The Cottar’s Saturday Night” is evidently suggested by Ferguson’s “Farmer’s Ingle;” but poor Ferguson’s very mundane view of happiness is, at least in the “Cottar’s Saturday Night,” by Burns, transfigured by a purer and nobler sentiment. Besides these Burns knew the English poets, such as Pope and Shenstone, but well for the world that he did not come too early under their influence, else we had probably lost much of what is most native and original in him. Somewhere in his later years he marvels at his own audacity in having ventured to use his native Scotch as the vehicle for poetry, and speaks as if, had he earlier known more English literature, he would not have dared to do so. Yet when he does essay to write pure English his poetry becomes only of third or fourth-rate excellence, just as nothing can be more mawkish and vapid than Ferguson, when he makes Damon and Alexis discourse in his purely English pastorals. Only in one poem, written in pure English, does Burns attain high excellence, and that one is the “Lines to Mary in Heaven.” Perhaps in nothing, except it may be in humorous or pathetic feeling, is the Scottish dialect more in place than in describing the native scenery. For, in truth, the features of every county, if possible of each district, ought to be rendered in the very words by which they are known to the natives. When instead of this they are transferred into the literary language, they have lost I know not how much of their life and individuality. If in Scottish scenery, for instance, you speak of a brook and a grove, instead of a burn or a shaw or wood, you have really robbed the locality described of all that belongs to it. The same thing holds still more of mountain scenery, in which, unless you adopt the words which the country people apply to their own hills, you had better leave them undescribed. This feeling has at last forced both poets, and all who attempt to render Highland scenery, to use the Celtic words by which the mountain lineaments are described. We must, if we would name these features at all, speak of the “corrie,” the “lochan,” the “balloch,” and the “screetan” or “sclidder,” for the book-English has no words for these things. Hence it is that Scottish Lowland scenery is never so truly and vividly described, as when Burns uses his own vernacular. And yet Burns was no merely descriptive poet. It would be difficult to name one of his poems in which description of Nature is the main object. Everywhere with him, man, his feelings and his fate, stand out in the front of his pictures, and Nature comes in as the delightful background—yet Nature loved with a love, beheld with a rapture, all the more genuine, because his pulses throbbed in such intense sympathy with man. Every one can recall many a wonderful line, sometimes whole verse, in his love-songs, in which the surrounding landscape is flashed on the mind’s eye. In that longer poem, so full of sagacious observation on life and character, “The Twa Dogs,” how graphically rendered is the evening with which the poem closes!—

“By this, the sun was out o’ sight,

An’ darker gloamin brought the night:

The bum-clock humm’d wi’ lazy drone,

The kye stood rowtin i’ the loan;

When up they gat, an’ shook their lugs,

Rejoiced they were na men but dogs;

An’ each took aff his several way,

Resolved to meet some ither day.”

“The kye stood rowting in the loan,” what a picture is that of an old-fashioned Lowland farm, with the loane or lane, between two dikes, leading up to the out-field or moor! All who have known the reality will at once recognize the truth of the picture, in which the kye, as they come home at gloamin’, stop and low, ere they enter the byre: to others it is uncommunicable.

Or take that description in “Halloween” of the burn and the adventure there:—

“Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays,

As thro’ the glen it wimpl’t;

Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays

Whyles in a wiel it dimpl’t;

Whyles glitter’d to the nightly rays,

Wi’ bickering, dancing dazzle;

Whyles cookit underneath the braes

Below the spreading hazel,

Unseen that night.

“Amang the brachens on the brae,

Between her an’ the moon,

The Deil, or else an outler Quey,

Gat up an’ gae a croon:

Poor Leezie’s heart maist lap the hool;

Near lav’rock-height she jumpit,

But mist a fit, an’ in the pool

Out-owre the lugs she plumpit,

Wi’ a plunge that night.”

Would any one who can feel the force of that description allow that it could be expressed in literary English without losing much of its charm?

I have said that Burns’s glances at Nature are almost all incidental, and, by the way, and this enhances their value. There is, however, a passage in an Epistle to William Simpson, in which he addresses Nature directly, and speaks out more consciously the feeling with which she inspired him:—

“O, sweet are Coila’s haughs an’ woods,

When lintwhites chant amang the buds,

And jinkin hares, in amorous whids,

Their loves enjoy,

While thro’ the braes the cushat croods

Wi’ wailfu’ cry!

“Ev’n winter bleak has charms to me

When winds rave thro’ the naked tree;

Or frosts on hills of Ochiltree

Are hoary gray;

Or blinding drifts wild-furious flee,

Dark’ning the day!

“O Nature a’ thy shews and forms

To feeling, pensive hearts hae charms!

Whether the summer kindly warms

Wi’ life an’ light,

Or winter howls, in gusty storms,

The lang, dark night!

“The Muse, nae Poet ever fand her,

Till by himsel he learn’d to wander,

Adown some trottin burn’s meander,

An’ no think lang;

O sweet, to stray an’ pensive ponder

A heart-felt sang!”

Three things may be noted as to the influence of Burns on men’s feeling for Nature.

First, he was a more entirely open-air poet than any first-rate singer who had yet lived, and as such he dealt with Nature in a more free, close, intimate way than any English poet since the old ballad-singers. He did more to bring the hearts of men close to the outer world, and the outer world to the heart, than any former poet. His keen eye looked directly, with no intervening medium, on the face alike of Nature and of man, and embraced all creation in one large sympathy. With familiar tenderness he dwelt on the lower creatures, felt for their sufferings, as if they had been his own, and opened men’s hearts to feel how much the groans of creation are needlessly increased by the indifference or cruelty of man. In Burns, as in Cowper, and in him perhaps more than in Cowper, there was a large going forth of tenderness to the lower creatures, and in their poetry this first found utterance, and in no poet since their time, so fully as in these two.

Secondly, his feeling in Nature’s presence was not, as in the English poets of his time, a quiet contemplative pleasure. It was nothing short of rapture. Other more modern poets may have been thrilled with the same delight, he alone of all in last century expressed the thrill. In this, as in other things, he is the truest herald of that strain of rejoicing in Nature, even to ecstasy, which has formed one of the finest tones in the poetry of this century.

Thirdly, he does not philosophize on Nature or her relation to man; he feels it, alike in his joyful moods and in his sorrowful. It is to him part of what he calls “the universal plan,” but he nowhere reasons about the life of Nature as he often does so trenchantly about that of man.