[21] ] Woven in a reed of 1,700 divisions.
[22] ] Lit., a present from a fair; deserts and something more.
Description in Burns is not confined to man and society: he has much to say of nature, animate and inanimate.
Though within a few miles of the ocean, the scenery among which the poet grew up was inland scenery. He lived more than once by the sea for short periods, yet it appears but little in his verse, and then usually as the great severing element.
And seas between us braid hae roar'd
Sin auld lang syne
is the characteristic line. Scottish poetry had no tradition of the sea. To England the sea had been the great boundary and defense against the continental powers, and her naval achievements had long produced a patriotic sentiment with regard to it which is reflected in her literature. But Scotland's frontier had been the line of the Cheviots and the Tweed, and save for a brief space under James IV she had never been a sea-power. Thus the cruelty and danger of the sea are almost the only phases prominent in her poetry, and Burns here once more follows tradition.
Again, the scenery of Ayrshire was Lowland scenery, with pastoral hills and valleys. On his Highland tours Burns saw and admired mountains, but they too appear little in his verse. Though not an unimportant figure in the development of natural description in literature, he had not reached the modern deliberateness in the seeking out of nature's beauties for worship or imitation, so that the phases of natural beauty which we find in his poetry are merely those which had unconsciously become fixed in a memory naturally retentive of visual images.
Not only do his natural descriptions deal with the aspects familiar to him in his ordinary surroundings, but they are for the most part treated in relation to life. The thunderstorm in [Tam o' Shanter] is a characteristic example. It is detailed and vivid and is for the moment the center of interest; but it is introduced solely on Tam's account. Oftener the wilder moods of the weather are used as settings for lyric emotion. In Winter, a Dirge, the harmony of the poet's spirit with the tempest is the whole theme, and in [My Nannie's Awa] the same idea is treated with more mature art: