Burns never wrote a ‘Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind’, and left only a few fragments of his projected satire on ‘The Poet’s Progress’. Yet his letters and journals, as well as the poems themselves, so definitely describe his moods and methods of composition that his poetic psychology can be studied almost as fully as Wordsworth’s own.
Conscious pleasure in poetry read or heard first came to him in boyhood through one of Addison’s hymns; mingled with martial and patriotic sentiment he found it also in ‘The History of Sir William Wallace’ and the Life of Hannibal. This latter, he said, ‘gave my young ideas such a turn that I used to strut in raptures up & down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe, and wish myself tall enough to be a soldier, while the story of Wallace poured a Scotish prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest.’ But this, like the similar thrills from all the odds and ends of English poetry and Scottish song which came his way, was commonplace boyish emotion. The need and desire to write poetry of his own did not awaken until his adolescent blood was warmed, in his ‘fifteenth autumn’, by the first consciousness of sexual attraction in the company of Nelly Kilpatrick.
‘I never expressly told her that I loved her.—Indeed I did not well know myself, why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening from our labors; why the tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrill like an Eolian harp; and particularly, why my pulse beat such a furious ratann when I looked and fingered over her hand, to pick out the nettle-stings and thistles.—Among her other love-inspiring qualifications, she sung sweetly, and ’twas her favorite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme.—I was not so presumtive as to imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin; but my girl sung a song which was said to be composed by a small country laird’s son, on one of his father’s maids, with whom he was in love; and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he, for ... he had no more Scholarcraft than I had.’
‘Thus’, Burns summed up, with a juxtaposition of ideas never far separated in his mind, ‘with me began Love and Poesy.’ In all respects save one the episode was the commonest experience of calf-love. But that one difference was decisive. When a girl roused him to lyric fervour, Burns did not sit down and merely string his emotions together in rime. Another element went to make the song; an element that ultimately would mean more, poetically, to Burns than any girl—namely, a tune. His mind did not work from emotion directly to words; it worked from emotion to music, and the music brought the words which expressed its mood. Herein Burns was almost unique among modern poets. Fully to appreciate his lyrics one must hear them sung to the airs which evoked them. To read many of them in bare print is like reading the libretto of an opera. Even in his satires and epistles the process of composition was usually the same, though another man’s poem, instead of music, fired the train. Acquaintance with his models is almost as illuminating as acquaintance with his tunes.
His first effort at song-writing led to a conscious study of the poet’s craft. The elaborate criticism appended to ‘Handsome Nell’ when Burns copied the poem into his Commonplace Book is too obviously a bravura piece to merit consideration; more noteworthy is his account of how he studied his collection of English songs: ‘I pored over them, verse by verse; carefully noting the true tender or sublime from affectation and fustian.—I am convinced I owe much to this for my critic-craft such as it is.’ But these were English songs, and their effect on his early work shows mainly in such things as ‘My father was a farmer’ and ‘Man was made to mourn’, which latter in the Commonplace Book is entitled, ‘A Song: Tune, Peggy Bawn’. Even his most doleful lines came to him in music.
But lugubrious notes were not the only ones. It was as inevitable that a young Scot should try his hand at metrical paraphrases of the Psalms as that a young Etonian of the same century should paraphrase Horace. The results in both cases are equally negligible. Youth has to repeat the stale patterns of its predecessors before it can find its own. It was much more important that ‘I murder hate by field or flood’ was written in the same way. This is an epigrammatic song in the Restoration manner, and as English in language as in style. But it was written to a Scottish air, ‘Gillicrankie’. The innate Scottish culture of the poet was beginning, as early as 1781, to assimilate and adapt the alien materials of Restoration England.
Though Burns failed to act on Richard Brown’s suggestion that he send some of his early verses to a magazine, the idea stuck. The yeasty stirrings of a still immature mind which had led him in 1780 to plague his friends with pompous discourses on Pride and Courage were slowly giving place to more personal thinking on topics which he better understood. His customary chronological vagueness in referring to his early manhood makes it uncertain whether he began his Commonplace Book before he discovered the poems of Robert Fergusson, or after. The internal evidence indicates the former. So does the elaborate title-page:
‘Observations, Hints, Songs, Scraps of Poetry, &c., by Robt. Burness; a man who had little art in making money, and still less in keeping it; but was, however, a man of some sense, a great deal of honesty, and unbounded good-will to every creature—rational or irrational. As he was but little indebted to scholastic education, and bred at a plough-tail, his performances must be strongly tinctured with his unpolished, rustic way of life; but, as I believe they are really his own, it may be some entertainment to a curious observer of human-nature to see how a ploughman thinks and feels under the pressure of Love, Ambition, Anxiety, Grief, with the like cares and passions, which, however diversified by the modes and manners of life, operate pretty much alike, I believe, in all the Species.
“There are numbers in the world who do not want sense to make a figure, so much as an opinion of their own abilities, to put them upon recording their observations, and allowing them the same importance which they do to those which appear in print.”—Shenstone.
“Pleasing when youth is long expir’d to trace,