Robert Burns

by Gabriel Setoun

But, lazy or not, she becomes 'ramfeezled' with constant work, when he vows if 'the thowless jad winna mak it clink,' to prose it,—a terrible threat. For he must write, though it be but to keep despondency at arm's length. Yet it had become more than a pleasure and a recreation to him; and this he was beginning to understand. This, after all, was his real work, not the drudgery of the fields; in it he must live his life, and fulfil his mission. The more he wrote the more he accustomed himself with the idea of being an author. He knew that the critic-folk, deep read in books, might scoff at the very suggestion of a ploughman turning poet, but he recognised also that they might be wrong. It was not by dint of Greek that Parnassus was to be climbed. 'Ae spark o' Nature's fire' was the one thing needful for poetry that was to touch the heart.

'The star that rules my luckless lot,
Has fated me the russet coat,
And damned my fortune to the groat;
But, in requit,
Has blest me with a random shot
O' countra wit.

This while my notion's ta'en a sklent,
To try my fate in guid, black prent;
But still the mair I'm that way bent,
Something cries, "Hoolie!
I red you, honest man, tak tent!
Ye'll shaw your folly.

"There's ither poets, much your betters,
Far seen in Greek, deep men o' letters,
Hae thought they had ensured their debtors,
A' future ages;
Now moths deform in shapeless tatters
Their unknown pages."'

The works of such scholars enjoyed of the moths! There is gentle satire here. They themselves had grubbed on Greek, and now is Time avenged.

It is in his epistles that we see Burns most vividly and clearly, the man in all his moods. They are just such letters as might be written to intimate friends when one is not afraid of being himself, and can speak freely. In sentiment they are candid and sincere, and in language transparently unaffected. Whatever occurs to him as he writes goes down; we have the thoughts of his heart at the time of writing, and see the varying expressions of his face as he passes from grave to gay, from lively to severe. Now he is tender, now indignant; now rattling along in good-natured raillery without broadening into burlesque; now becoming serious and pensively philosophic without a suggestion of mawkish morality. For Burns, when he is himself, is always an artist; says his say, and lets the moral take care of itself; and in his epistles he lets himself go in a very revelry of artistic abandon. He does not think of style—that fetich of barren minds—and style comes to him; for style is a coquette that flies the suppliant wooer to kiss the feet of him who worships a goddess; a submissive handmaiden, a wayward and moody mistress. But along with delicacy of diction, force and felicity of expression, pregnancy of phrase and pliancy of language, what knowledge there is of men—the passions that sway, the impulses that prompt, the motives that move them to action. Clearness of vision and accuracy of observation are evidenced in their vividness of imagery; naturalness and truthfulness—the first essential of all good writing—in their convincing sincerity of sentiment. Wit and humour, play and sparkle of fancy, satire genial or scathing, a boundless love of nature and all created things, are harmoniously unified in the glowing imagination of the poet, and welded into the perfect poem. Behind all is the personality of the writer, captivating the reader as much by his kindliness and sympathy as by his witchery of words. Others have attempted poetic epistles, but none has touched familiar intercourse to such fine issues; none has written with such natural grace or woven the warp and woof of word and sentiment so cunningly into the web of poetry as Robert Burns. Looseness of rhythm may be detected, excruciating rhymes are not awanting, but all are forgiven and forgotten in the enjoyment of the feast as a whole.

Besides the satires and epistles we have during this fertile period poems as different in subject, sentiment, and treatment as The Cotter's Saturday Night and The Jolly Beggars; Hallowe'en and The Mountain Daisy; The Farmer's Address to his Auld Mare Maggie and The Twa Dogs; Address to a Mouse, Man was made to Mourn, The Vision, A Winter's Night, and The Epistle to a Young Friend. Perhaps of all these poems The Vision is the most important. It is an epoch-marking poem in the poet's life. All that he had previously written had been leading to this; the finer the poem the more surely was it bringing him to this composition. The time was bound to come when he had to settle for himself finally and firmly what his work in life was to be. Was poetry to be merely a pastime; a recreation after the labours of the day were done; a solace when harvests failed and ruin stared the family in the face? That question Burns answered when he sat down by the ingle-cheek, and, looking backward, mused on the years of youth that had been spent 'in stringing blethers up in rhyme for fools to sing.' He saw what he might have been; he knew too well what he was—'half-mad, half-fed, half-sarket.' Yet the picture of what he might have been he dismissed lightly, almost disdainfully; for he saw what he might be yet—what he should be. Turning from the toilsome past and the unpromising present, he looked to the future with a manly assurance of better things. He should shine in his humble sphere, a rustic bard; his to

'Preserve the dignity of Man,
With soul erect;
And trust, the Universal Plan
Will all protect.'

The poem is pitched on a high key; the keynote is struck in the opening lines, and the verses move to the end with stateliness and dignity. It is calm, contemplative, with that artistic restraint that comes of conscious power. Burns took himself seriously, and knew that if he were true to his genius he would become the poet and prophet of his fellow-men.

It is worth while dwelling a little on this particular poem, because it marks a crisis in Burns's life. At this point he shook himself free from the tyranny of the soil. He had considered all things, and his resolution for authorship was taken. Some of the other poems will be mentioned afterwards; meantime we have to consider another crisis in his life—some aspects of his nature less pleasing, some episodes in his career dark and unlovely.