And neist my heart I'll wear her, next
For fear my jewel tine. be lost
The warld's wrack, we share o't,
The warstle and the care o't; struggle
Wi' her I'll blythely bear it,
And think my lot divine.
Similarly, most of the lyrics addressed to Clarinda in Edinburgh are marked by the sentimentalism and affectation of an affair that engaged only one side, and that among the least pleasing, of the many-sided temperament of the poet.
But, in general, with Burns as with other poets, it was not the catching of a first-hand emotion at white heat that resulted in the best poetry, but the stimulating of his imagination by the vision of a person or a situation that may have had but the hint of a prototype in the actual. We have already noted that the best of the Clarinda poems were written in absence, and that they drop the Arcadian names which typified the make-believe element in that complex affair. So a number of his most charming songs are addressed to girls of whom he had had but a glimpse. But that glimpse sufficed to kindle him, and for the poetry it was all advantage that it was no more.
His relations with women were extremely varied in nature. At one extreme there were friendships like that with Mrs. Dunlop, the letters to whom show that their common interests were mainly moral and intellectual, and were mingled with no emotion more fiery than gratitude. At the other extreme stand relations like that with Anne Park, the heroine of [Yestreen I had a Pint o' Wine], which were purely passionate and transitory. Between these come a long procession affording excellent material for the ingenuity of those skilled in the casuistry of the sexes: the boyish flame for Handsome Nell; the slightly more mature feeling for Ellison Begbie; the various phases of his passion for Jean Armour; the perhaps partly factitious reverence for Highland Mary; the respectful adoration for Margaret Chalmers to whom he is supposed to have proposed marriage in Edinburgh; the deliberate posing in his compliments to Chloris (Jean Lorimer); the grateful gallantry to Jessie Lewars, who ministered to him on his deathbed.
In the later days in Dumfries, when his vitality was running low and he was laboring to supply Thomson with verses even when the spontaneous impulse to compose was rare, we find him theorizing on the necessity of enthroning a goddess for the nonce. Speaking of Craigieburn-wood and Jean Lorimer, he writes to his prosaic editor: