We know of nothing in literature that, in the same space, contains so much of the homely, the horrible, and the grotesque, as will be found in this poem. There is a sharp Rembrandt-like minuteness in the details of this Scotch Walpurgis night that produces terror on the reader mingled with an irrisistible inclination to shriek with laughter. We watch the hard drunken sot
“Weel mounted on his gray mare, Meg,
A better never lifted leg.”
Skelping along through the mud and pouring rain, the lightnings flashing from “pole to pole.”
“Whiles holding fast his guid blue bonnet,
Whiles croomin o’er some auld Scotch sonnet
While peepm round with prudent care
Lest bogles catch him unaware.”
Every turn in the road has its tragic associations. Here a packman was smothered in the snow. Here hunters found a murdered child. Here an old thorn tree near a well where a woman hanged herself, etc. Till the adventurers are crowned on his approaching the old Kirk at Alloway which seems blazing to heaven.
We have stood in it, and really it looks a very innocent ruin, nothing but four stone walls, roofles, with a niche at one end where he old pulpit once stood. But in that neche Burns put “Aul Nick” as a piper to whose music a rabble rout of sheol are dancing “fast and furious.” Tammie urges on his mare until he comes into the sheolish light which gilds the ghastly scene, where the bones of murderers, the garter that strangled a babe, the knife that lacerated the throat of a father.