Though it would probably be impossible to overstress Robert Fergusson’s influence on Burns’s development, the elder poet’s primary service was to clarify and confirm ideas already present but as yet inarticulate in Burns’s mind. He knew what he liked, and what his own poetic impulses were; the discovery of Fergusson enabled him to define both his method and his objective. To realize how much he matured intellectually between the beginning of the Commonplace Book in 1783 and its conclusion in 1785, one need merely read the strutting, self-conscious, and essentially empty criticism of ‘expletive phrases’ of ‘too serious sentiment’, and ‘flimsy strain’ which he appended to ‘Handsome Nell’, or the pseudo-devotional passage about the grand end of human life being ‘to cultivate an intercourse with that Being to whom we owe life’. These things of 1783 are juvenilia. The following, written in September, 1785, is adult:
‘There is a certain irregularity in the Old Scotch Songs, a redundancy of syllables with respect to that exactness of accent and measure that the English Poetry requires, but which glides in, most melodiously with the respective tunes to which they are set. For instance, the fine old song of “The Mill Mill O,” to give it a plain prosaic reading, it halts prodigiously out of measure; on the other hand, the song set to the same tune in Bremner’s collection of Scotch Songs which begins “To Fanny fair could I impart,” &c., it is most exact measure, and yet, let them both be sung before a real critic, one above the biasses of prejudice, but a thorough Judge of Nature, how flat and spiritless will the last appear, how trite, and lamely methodical, compared with the wild-warbling cadence, the heart-moving melody of the first. This particularly is the case with all those airs which end with a hypermetrical syllable. There is a degree of wild irregularity in many of the compositions and fragments which are daily sung to them by my compeers, the common people—a certain happy arrangement of Old Scotch syllables, and yet, very frequently, nothing, not even like rhyme, or sameness of jingle at the ends of the lines. This has made me sometimes imagine that perhaps, it might be possible for a Scotch Poet, with a nice, judicious ear, to set compositions to many of our most favorite airs ... independent of rhyme altogether....’
With nothing except mother-wit and a sure ear to guide him, Burns had reached conclusions regarding poetic rhythm at complete variance with the critical theories of his century and beyond the practice of even nineteenth-century orthodoxy. He had recognized that the real charm of folk-poetry lies in the fact that it is musical rather than regular. In an age when the essence of poetry was thought to abide in the accurately counted syllables of the heroic couplet such an opinion would have seemed not merely heresy but sheer insanity. Compared with it, Coleridge’s supposed innovation of hypermetrical syllables in Christabel is timid conventionality. Blake alone among Burns’s contemporaries had bolder theories of rhythm, and his work, which the Scotsman never saw, had to wait more than half a century for recognition. Burns later expended much time and ink in trying to persuade George Thomson that a song could be poetry even if all its lines did not count up the same number of syllables, but he was never optimistic enough to offer that silly body a lyric which dispensed with rime.
So, too, in regard to the physiology and psychology of composition, Burns, before he ever published a line, had reached closer to fundamentals than an academician like Hugh Blair could ever go. Like Milton he had recognized from his own experience that there is in many poets a seasonal rhythm of creativeness. In himself it usually began in August, and continued for several months. That month, he said in his autobiography, was always a carnival in his bosom; in 1793 he told Thomson, ‘Autumn is my propitious season. I make more verses in it, than all the year else,’ and at the beginning of the next summer he repeated the assertion: ‘Now, & for six or seven months I shall be quite in song.’ In other words, it took all the scanty sunshine of the Scottish summer to bring him physically to that level of well-being at which creation was possible.
The psychology of composition, moreover, which he explained in prose in 1793 he had defined in poetry in the epistle to William Simpson of Ochiltree, composed in May, 1785, and published in the Kilmarnock volume. It is surprisingly like A. E. Housman’s, who recorded that some of his best poems came to him spontaneously while walking on Hampstead Heath and thinking of nothing in particular, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon. Burns’s formula is precisely similar:
The Muse, nae Poet ever fand her,
Till by himself he learn’d to wander
Adown some trottin burn’s meander,
An’ no think lang.
In these circumstances, when his emotional pressure was high enough, lines and stanzas would come unsought to his mind, and it was to this experience he referred when he repeatedly called himself ‘a Bard of Nature’s making’. Burns knew as well as Housman did that this spontaneous birth was only the beginning and not the end of composition. Gilbert reported the process without realizing its significance: