On poetic interpretation of nature

by John Campbell Shairp

Of meditation slipping in between

The beauty coming and the beauty gone.”

And this it is that gives them their peculiar charm.

BURNS.

The rural descriptions and the reflections on the outer world contained in the poetry of Cowper, mark the highest limit which the feeling for Nature had reached in England at the close of last century. But the stream of natural poetry in England, which up to that time had been fed from purely native sources, and which had flowed on through all last century with ever increasing volume, received toward the close of the century affluents from other regions, which tinged the color and modified the direction of its future current. Of these affluents the first and most powerful was the poetry of Burns. It is strange to think that Cowper and he were singing their songs at the same time, each in his own way describing the scenery that surrounded him, and yet that they hardly knew of each other’s existence.

Burns not only lived in a world of nature, of society, and of feeling, wholly alien to that of Cowper, but he took for his models far different poets. These models were the Scottish rhymers, Allan Ramsay, Ferguson, and the unknown singers of the native ballads, and especially of the popular songs, of his country. Proud and self-reliant as Burns was, he everywhere speaks of Ramsay and Ferguson as his models and superiors. From these he took the forms of his poems, though into these forms he poured a new and stronger inspiration. Burns’s “Halloween” is framed on a model of Ferguson’s poem called “Leith Races,” and “The Cottar’s Saturday Night” is evidently suggested by Ferguson’s “Farmer’s Ingle;” but poor Ferguson’s very mundane view of happiness is, at least in the “Cottar’s Saturday Night,” by Burns, transfigured by a purer and nobler sentiment. Besides these Burns knew the English poets, such as Pope and Shenstone, but well for the world that he did not come too early under their influence, else we had probably lost much of what is most native and original in him. Somewhere in his later years he marvels at his own audacity in having ventured to use his native Scotch as the vehicle for poetry, and speaks as if, had he earlier known more English literature, he would not have dared to do so. Yet when he does essay to write pure English his poetry becomes only of third or fourth-rate excellence, just as nothing can be more mawkish and vapid than Ferguson, when he makes Damon and Alexis discourse in his purely English pastorals. Only in one poem, written in pure English, does Burns attain high excellence, and that one is the “Lines to Mary in Heaven.” Perhaps in nothing, except it may be in humorous or pathetic feeling, is the Scottish dialect more in place than in describing the native scenery. For, in truth, the features of every county, if possible of each district, ought to be rendered in the very words by which they are known to the natives. When instead of this they are transferred into the literary language, they have lost I know not how much of their life and individuality. If in Scottish scenery, for instance, you speak of a brook and a grove, instead of a burn or a shaw or wood, you have really robbed the locality described of all that belongs to it. The same thing holds still more of mountain scenery, in which, unless you adopt the words which the country people apply to their own hills, you had better leave them undescribed. This feeling has at last forced both poets, and all who attempt to render Highland scenery, to use the Celtic words by which the mountain lineaments are described. We must, if we would name these features at all, speak of the “corrie,” the “lochan,” the “balloch,” and the “screetan” or “sclidder,” for the book-English has no words for these things. Hence it is that Scottish Lowland scenery is never so truly and vividly described, as when Burns uses his own vernacular. And yet Burns was no merely descriptive poet. It would be difficult to name one of his poems in which description of Nature is the main object. Everywhere with him, man, his feelings and his fate, stand out in the front of his pictures, and Nature comes in as the delightful background—yet Nature loved with a love, beheld with a rapture, all the more genuine, because his pulses throbbed in such intense sympathy with man. Every one can recall many a wonderful line, sometimes whole verse, in his love-songs, in which the surrounding landscape is flashed on the mind’s eye. In that longer poem, so full of sagacious observation on life and character, “The Twa Dogs,” how graphically rendered is the evening with which the poem closes!—

“By this, the sun was out o’ sight,

An’ darker gloamin brought the night:

The bum-clock humm’d wi’ lazy drone,