The forms our pencil, or our pen design’d.

Such was our youthful air, and shape, and face!

Such the soft image of our youthful mind.”

Ibidem.’

Burns was already conscious of something more in himself than there was in the average young peasant; as an escape from worries over his own health and the family’s future he was undertaking to leave a record of himself to edify some hypothetical future reader. Whatever tinge of humility there might be on his title-page was, like the pretence at third-person reporting, assumed. He meant to prove that a peasant youth shared the feelings of his betters and could rime and moralize to as good effect as they. But the title-page, the quotations from Shenstone, and the opening paragraph about Love all announce a programme he soon abandoned. When he began the book he was still thinking in the terms of his first letters about Pride and Courage; before he ended it he was thinking in poetry.

Though he might continue to assert that he rimed for fun, the fact was that from the day in April, 1783, when he commenced the Commonplace Book he was composing for publication, though not necessarily for print. His earliest verses were either the expression of a personal emotion, social jeux d’esprit, or conventional exercises in versification, with no purpose beyond the momentary and personal one; the ‘Observations, Scraps of Song, &c.’, were to be his legacy to the world. Not by chance did the Commonplace Book and its successor survive the general destruction of his private papers when he supposed himself on the eve of flight to Jamaica. Even though by that time the best of his verse had escaped the hazard of manuscript and was safely enshrined in the good black print of the Kilmarnock volume, he could not bring himself to destroy these records. It was well that he saved them. The Commonplace Book remains the sole record of what Burns was doing, intellectually and poetically, between April, 1783, and October, 1785. Commencing with self-conscious commentaries on life and on his own first efforts at writing, it reveals before its close his steady growth in artistic competence.

Not that it resembles the notebooks of Keats and Shelley, with their evidence of how poems grow in the poet’s mind. Burns’s poems stayed in his mind until they were mature. His poverty and his method of composing to music combined to prevent his committing half-formed ideas to paper. Paper was scarce and expensive; often in his early days he failed to write down his poems even when they were complete. Sometimes he forgot them entirely; sometimes he managed to reconstruct them long afterwards, as he did when he recalled ‘The Mauchline Wedding’ for Mrs. Dunlop’s amusement. One of the few poems composed on paper is the disastrous ‘Elegy on the Death of Sir James Hunter Blair’, which Burns drafted in his Border journal. Here he was working with an English verse-form for which no melody existed. It took him three different sittings painfully to wring out the first seven stanzas. Again in 1791 he reported that he had ‘these several months been hammering at an Elegy’ on Miss Burnet of Monboddo, but found elegy ‘so exhausted a subject that any new idea on the business is not to be expected’; the original manuscript of the ‘Lament for James Earl of Glencairn’ reveals similar struggles. When no tune sang itself in his head, composition was labour and the results were wooden. The ‘Lament’, with a more lyric stanza and with stronger personal feeling at its root, came nearer than the others to success, but even it cannot be ranked among the great elegies. Declining Cunningham’s suggestion of a theme, he once said, ‘I have two or three times in my life composed from the wish, rather than from the impulse, but I never succeeded to any purpose.’ In commemorating Lord Glencairn, wish and impulse combined, yet even here he did not wholly succeed because the tune was lacking.

Poetic expression with Burns was not, as with Wordsworth, the fruit of emotion recollected in tranquillity; it was the fruit of emotion expressing itself to music. Though as he grew older the emotion no longer needed to be so strongly personal as when he wrote his earliest songs, the dependence on music became correspondingly greater. How he composed in his later years he told George Thomson in the autumn of 1793:

‘Until I am compleat master of a tune, in my own singing (such as it is) I never can compose for it.—My way is: I consider the poetic Sentiment, correspondent to my idea of the musical expression; then chuse my theme; begin one stanza; when that is composed, which is generally the most difficult part of the business, I walk out, sit down now & then, look out for objects in Nature around me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy & workings of my bosom; humming every now & then the air with the verses I have framed: when I feel my Muse beginning to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, & there commit my effusions to paper; swinging, at intervals, on the hind-legs of my elbow-chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as my pen goes on.—

Seriously, this, at home, is almost invariably my way.—What damn’d Egotism!’