TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Bold text is denoted by =equal signs=.
There is only one Footnote in this book. It has been moved to the
end of the Introduction.
Contractions with ’s (is or was) and those with ’t (it) sometimes
had a half-space, sometimes no space, in the original text. For
consistency these contractions all have no space in this etext, for
example, she’s (not she ’s); till’t (not till ’t).
A small number of other spaced contractions have been closed up and
made consistent, such as she ’ll, thou ’rt and thou ’lt.
All other dialect spelling has been left unchanged to match the
original printed text. No spelling corrections have been made.
The ‘List of Poem Titles’ was created by the transcriber and is
granted to the public domain. It has been placed at the end of the
book, after the ‘Index of First Lines’.
SONGS AND LYRICS
OF ROBERT BURNS
[Illustration:
Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon,
How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?]
SONGS AND LYRICS
OF ROBERT BURNS
SELECTED AND EDITED BY
WILLIAM MACDONALD, WITH
ILLUSTRATIONS BY W. RUSSELL
FLINT AND R. PURVES FLINT
[Illustration: (colophon)]
LONDON: PHILIP LEE WARNER
7 GRAFTON STREET, W. MDCCCCXI
Contents
[_Individual Poems may be referred to readily by means of
the Index of First Lines, printed at the end of the volume._]
PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
SONGS AND LYRICS 1
LONGER POEMS 172
GLOSSARY 209
INDEX OF FIRST LINES 217
Illustrations
YE BANKS AND BRAES _Frontispiece_
BLYTHE AND MERRY _Facing page_ 6
TO MARY IN HEAVEN ” ” 14
A WINTER NIGHT ” ” 24
TO A MOUNTAIN DAISY ” ” 44
ADDRESS TO EDINBURGH ” ” 70
OF A’ THE AIRTS ” ” 90
CA’ THE YOWES TO THE KNOWES ” ” 108
MY HEART’S IN THE HIGHLANDS ” ” 138
THE BRAES O’ BALLOCHMYLE ” ” 162
THE COTTER’S SATURDAY NIGHT ” ” 180
THE BRIGS OF AYR ” ” 190
Introduction
“Of Burns, the man and poet, what is there left to be said?” Thus,
some forty years ago, the author of _Dreamthorp_. It was a question
unworthy of so acute a mind. Of Burns, the man and poet, there is
everything still to be said, for a double reason. First, because a
great poet, as he stands for ever in the view of mankind, becomes in
effect a part of nature as it exists for each succeeding generation:
unremoved as the sun from the heavens, and, like the sun, an eternal
subject for remark. What was said of the world or the weather
yesterday was good; but to-day must speak for itself out of its own
fullness, its own sense of being and receiving. Energy, beneficence,
and beauty, in the natural and moral world alike, are a challenge
essentially unprecedented wherever their presence is immediately
felt; and there can be no lack of novelty—or, better still, no need
for it—in the answer of the heart, if sincerely phrased, to whatever
touches it with life.
But, beyond the fact that explicit appraisement is the indefeasible
ritual of response to certain kinds of experience, there is another
reason why there can be no finality in our estimate of the works or
life of a great genius. In the subject of discourse itself there is
no finality; and no fixity save a permanence of changing power. Here
is a difference, advising us that we are in the presence of another
order of reality than that to which the term “natural” can be
usefully applied. For there is a sense in which we may say that the
sun and moon are very old. The first day and night sufficed to reveal
them, and they showed the same face to Adam that has been looked
on by all his posterity. But great poets, those heavenly lights of
the mental world, endure without this sameness, and emit to later
generations rays and influences that were unsuspected by the earlier.
A genius may be discovered—may be descried and acclaimed—in a day;
but is hardly to be found out or estimated in a thousand years.
The bequeathment of great poets is a text only to be elucidated
by the whole experience of the race. Therefore the history of
criticism in regard to them is the record not so much of a continuous
approximation as of many diverse approaches to what is never quite
reached and never can be. As the race goes on evolving through new
conditions of consciousness or states of mind—approaching experience
in each epoch with a new kind of make-up or adjustment of its
faculties, a new system of prepossessions, sensations, tendencies,
and therefore aptitudes for perception—the former outlines of things
dissolve, and new values, gradually or suddenly, become apparent in
the classics long since ranged and estimated.
We say it is the result of a new way of looking at them, as though
there were a particular virtue in our mental act, or we were better
men than our fathers. But in this we partly deceive ourselves. We
have little choice as to how we shall look at them; and might look
at a billiard-ball a million different ways, or in as many moods,
without adding to our knowledge. The truth is rather that the work
of a great poet has from the first reserves of meaning and value to
which almost no limit can be set. We may say ’tis because infinity,
timelessness, and transcendence are of its very essence, making it
inexhaustibly implicit; or because the incalculable intuition of
the poet waives the accidents and amendments of common thinking and
overleaps the slow process of experience to arrive at knowledge by
the fiat of intelligence. Certain it is that the poet is always there
in advance, waiting for the generations to come along and find him
out a little further than has yet been done. But these reserves of
meaning and value are not to be yielded up until the conditions for
their effective appearance, for their proper play and functioning,
have been instated. What history does, in relation to literature,
is to instate these conditions. Then ensues, gradually or suddenly,
our “new way of looking at the poet”—be it Homer or Dante, be it
Shelley or Burns—which is but our recognition of the emergence of
aspects, lineaments, virtues hitherto kept latent by the crowding
of thoughts and prepossessions in us that could not co-exist with
that particular way of perceiving the truth about these names, that
particular compass of comprehension regarding them. The change may be
more or less conscious and episodic, and may have a wider or narrower
range. It may involve only an æsthetic difference, a difference in
the sensations which the cultured of an age have in approaching a
given poet; in the anticipative connotation or keying of the mind for
that encounter. But also it may involve an entire re-reading of text
and man; an intellectual reconstitution or re-orientation in which
the Poet seems to be found afresh, or seen as it were for the first
time—all prejudgments regarding him magically put away—in his proper
being and loneliness _sub specie æternitatis_.
If this be so: if the total value and significance of the great
poet is thus a changing function and goes on evolving through the
generations out of the matrix of an unchanging text, then there
is no poet to whom the observation can be more relevant than it
must be to Burns. Manifestly, there are poets in whom the sheerly
intellectual content to be exploited is greater and more various, and
who, therefore, should have a longer course to run before they are
overtaken by the uninspired mind in its pursuit of wisdom. Yet though
their course be long, the track may, in a sense, be narrow. Their
lives and works may present a simple issue, and lie within the placid
marches of letters with a certain aloofness, a certain abstractness
and destitution. Here, as so often, Shakespeare is the supreme
example. His riches are infinite even in a numerical sense, and
their appraisement may well be endless. Yet in their totality they
are an uncomplicated fact of literature. There is nothing implicated
in them of the scene and circumstances of their production; of the
humanity of an historical man; of the tragedy of a life. Of the life
of Shakespeare, indeed, nobody knows anything save his biographers,
who have elaborated or created it for themselves by discussing in
great detail and with exhaustive knowledge the prevailing absence of
information on the subject. Therefore an estimate or interpretation
of this Poet, which took cognizance of nothing outside of his
works—which treated them as though they had been found in a dream,
and barely assumed the historic fact of Christendom—would not at once
appear to be leaving untouched any topic of pressing relevance, and
might easily set the limits of our knowledge, our understanding of
them and him, a little farther on.
But how different is the case of Burns! So far from being an
uncomplicated fact of literature, the works of this Poet were
early immeshed in a very plexus of real life interest, commentary,
adoption, misjudgment and enhancement, which is now an instant
element of their connotation and almost a part of their substance.
Across the singing voice of the Poet as we listen, and almost
overbearing it, come the reverberated choruses of a million Burns
Suppers and Commemorations, adding volume, but also confusion, to
the song. Across the survey, in which we try to see his works with
disinterested gaze, comes pointing the broad insistent finger of
traditional emphasis upon what was of supreme interest to one body of
readers long ago because the subject-matter was close to their own
lives and _they_ knew all about it, and to another body of readers
because it was curious information about a distant social world, and
even more worthy of remark than a fly in amber. Nor is this all. For
not only is the national estimation in which he is held become a
part of his works, entering into the mental context and determining
the bias of attention, but works and estimation alike are invaded,
darkened, and perplexed by the cloud of moral prepossessions and
agitations which have wreaked themselves upon the subject of his
life. To view Burns with detachment, and yet with understanding, is
impossible; to be certain that we are viewing him at all is by no
means easy. For the effect of all the nationalising fervour which has
made him its own, and of all the moralising impertinence which has
failed to apprehend him and yet refused to let him go, is to keep
before our eyes an approved subject for a certain kind of discourse
(also, alas! approved), but not the poetry in its essential power,
and not the Poet in the human integrity of his nature, in the true
thought-and-feeling quality of his mortal days. In a case like this,
therefore, history has another task to perform besides developing the
values and relevancies implicit in a body of poetry. It has, as a
condition precedent, to secure for that body of poetry the relative
degree of detachment, of disencumbrance from real-life impositions
and prejudgments, which belongs to every other supreme poetical
bequest. It has to secure for the Poet and his poetry alike—since
in this case the man and the singer, the singer and the song, are
beyond all example one—such a deliverance from many things, beginning
with the too engrossing spirit of locality, as would enable them
to be seen in their true place and aspect among the universals of
literature, unobscured at last by the falsifications of reflection
and the crudities of accident.
That the poetry of Burns, thus liberated, must have its career
of evolving value—that it is even now entering upon its clearer
stages—hardly admits of intelligent doubt. It would be strange
indeed if a genius so autochthonous, if a personality so powerful
and so perilously charged, so real and yet symbolic, were to abide
always where the first bewildered essays of opinion placed them.
In truth, they have abided there too long. The most interesting
life in Scotland has hitherto found no sufficient biographer.
Lockhart’s early sketch is still virtually unsuperseded, though it
was historically impossible that Lockhart in 1828 could be more
than provisionally excellent and honourably imperfect. In the way
of interpretation nothing of any moment was done—nothing, that
is, which did not leave the subject where it was before—till the
appearance in 1896 of Henley’s highly disturbing _Essay on Burns_;
a masterpiece loudly execrated by fools, but a homage none the
less noble, and a service hardly the less great, for being a little
warped in the rendering. And if it seem strange that the Peasant
Poet (somewhat misleadingly so called) and the social rebel should
be indebted to an Edinburgh lawyer and son of the manse for the
most sympathetic and dignified telling of his life-story, it might
seem stranger still that the patriotic and revolutionary spirit who
wrote _Scots Wha Hae_ and _A Man’s a Man for a’ That_ should be
indebted to an intransigeant Englishman (and no lover of democrats
and levellers, perdy!) not only for the first illuminating study of
his literary origins and personal achievement, but for the first full
sympathetic perception of the tragedy presented by his over-worked,
under-nourished, playless, joyless, prospectless adolescence, with
all its inspiration mute and waiting. But in Henley the man was
even more abounding than the Englishman, and the man-of-letters
was equal to both; and he found in Burns such true matter, of
humanity and literature, as all his head and heart delighted to take
hold of. So his work has done more to de-provincialise Burns—to
dissipate, I mean, the subtly limiting and obscuring presupposition
of provincialism with which many even of the worthy were wont to
approach him—than all the annual panegyrics of the Poet’s own
countrymen, most of which, to be sure, have wrought to quite contrary
effect. It off-sets with abundance the sad dereliction of Matthew
Arnold, whose poor, pained, academic, and sniffy sensations in the
presence of Burns and his world “of Scotch morals, Scotch religion
and Scotch drink” is equalled, among the illustrious stupidities of
great critics, only by Sainte-Beuve’s inability to see in Balzac
anything more than a vulgar and voluminous writer of romances for
the ruck of contemporary readers.
Only, the liberating process so powerfully initiated by Henley has
farther to go. It is much to have Burns organically related to a
vernacular literature centuries old, and shown as the destined, and
in himself richly-endowed, heir of a great inheritance of song which
was his to appropriate, re-express, glorify, and complete. It is
much to have it established that while there was nothing accidental
about his genius, save as all genius is an accident, so there was,
in the final result and value, nothing local about his quality and
work save as Pindar and Aristophanes were also local. But it still
remains that for the aspirational, resistant, and prophetic spirit
of Burns—for the positive forces of his thought and character,
and for the moral, social, and political declarations laid up in
his work—there should be effected a similar liberation from the
prejudgments which localise, belittle, and obscure. It has yet to
become a matter of common recognition that the appearance of Burns
was more than an event in the history of Scottish national sentiment,
or in the history of English literature; that it was an event of
moment in the history of human ideals. The lad who was born in Kyle
had a message for all Europe, and a message that must reach Cathay
in time. So far from being local, he stands among the figures of
literature, boldly and in a kind of isolation, as more than any other
that ever lived and sang, the sheer Man. By his contact with the
primeval occupation, by the splendour of his spirit and the courage
of his heart, not least by the final ruin of his life, he is indeed
the symbol of Man inhabitant of the earth, as we contrast him with
the gods, as we oppose him to Destiny. Standing thus in the midst
of Nature, yet with a clear inlook upon Society—as it were with one
hand upon the plough and another on the pen—he saw that the supreme
injustice of the world was not in its acts but its estimates; not
in the inequalities of worldly fortune, but in the accumulations
of arrogance and the distribution of contempt. He had himself been
delivered only by the blossoming of his genius from the doom which
would have consigned him to obscurity as one of “the common herd”
whose qualities are of no consequence; and he resented the wrong for
the sake of all those who have no genius to deliver them. He grudged
no man his honours or his possessions. But he grudged that the
exaltation of some should be made the debasement of many, and that
worth in a poor man should be worth so little in the world’s view
of him. Against the oceanic vulgar vice in which society welters,
against the habitual easy refusal of respect, his heart was hot with
generous protest, as against the spirit that denies and would make
abject. And so his message is a claim, unique in its quality and
power, that the man of independent mind is kingly in his degree, and
that the man of good heart—“the heart compassionate and kind”—is the
nearest image of God.
Those two affirmations are unique in their quality and power because
they are unadulterated and underived; and because his whole life, in
other respects so casually conducted, maintained an unwavering simple
loyalty to their spirit from beginning to end. His assertion of the
sovereignty of free manhood, though made in vindication of the poor,
was inspired by no ignoble envy of the rich; nor was it conveyed
from anybody’s scheme of political thinking. It was the natural
forthright consequence of his own vivid intuition of what it was to
be a man, and of what were the inalienable moral properties that must
go with that estate. Thus it had a broader groundwork of reason than
philosophy can compass, and was a deliverance of truth not from an
accumulation of examples, but from the very centre of mind. So, too,
with his exaltation of the Kind Heart above all the crowd of formal
virtues. It was no mere reaction from the religious teaching of his
place and day, which scowled so darkly upon human nature and made
merit in the sight of God—goodness it could hardly be called—consist
in a preservative acidulation of the soul and a sacred lack of
sympathy with sinners. It was a protest also against the moral system
and judgments of society at large; which set a high value on the
qualities by which a man gets and keeps, but leave out of estimate
and precept alike the qualities in which humanity fulfils itself.
From this it continually follows, and is everywhere to be seen, that
the “respected citizen” may be a man in whom there is very little to
respect and still less to like; nor is it for any other reason than
this that the word respectability has come to mean a destitution
of passions, sympathies and ideals, the salted dead-sea level of
social safety and acceptance. But Burns, with his lot cast among
simple people, stood where he could see the _primordia rerum_ of the
moral and social qualities at work in their essential character and
aspect, and could judge more securely than the world judges of their
worth and drift. Therefore it is with the observation of a peasant
and the authority of a poet—of one, that is, whose sonship to Nature
is an immediate reality, importing a command of secret sources and
an added intellectual power—that he confronts the religious and the
worldly wise alike to tell them that neither in what the one chiefly
inculcates nor in what the other chiefly rewards, but just in the
primal kindness of heart that may be found among the simple and even
among sinners, lies the superlative attribute and exercise of human
nature: that in which it continues Nature’s own beneficence: that in
which it approaches the Divine: that without which it falls short of
being human, for all its virtues.
By the valiance of those two thoughts animating, even when only
implicitly presented, the whole body of his work—and by the
convincing tragic token of a life which, whatever its confusions and
faults, was always starkly independent and compassionately kind—Burns
has made a contribution distinctly his own to the world’s wealth of
ideals, and of the memories that keep them alive. What makes the
power of this ideal, and its distinctness as an historical event, is
that it was so utterly personal and of the Poet himself: therefore,
so inspired and authoritative. The message which he conveys comes
to him with the sweep of his genius and the certainty of his
imperishable song, and in its delivery he speaks as a chosen son of
Nature for and to all mankind. In this sense he speaks as no other
poet in the world has spoken. Standing in the new-ploughed earth, or
following the occupations of seedtime or harvest, he seems to be at
the beginning and at the centre; and has a consciousness of universal
man, of the labours and seedtimes and harvests of the ages and the
climes, denied to the poets, however great, for whom the world is
primarily a scene of cities, and not of earth and sky and man, alone
in the fields with the primal curse and solace. In this regard
he stands nearer to Millet than any other name in Art or Poetry.
Therefore it was fitting that one who was so much and potently and
generously a man should have written, near the close of his life
and in a time of repression and alarm, that vindication—_A Man’s
a Man for a’ That_—which (_pace_ Mr. Henley) has been not inaptly
called “the Marseillaise of Humanity.” Fitting also that he should
have written, again near the close of his life, that song of human
friendship and recollected childhood—_Auld Lang Syne_—which seems
destined to become the common possession of the nations, as it is
already the one thing in our literature which draws the hearts of all
English-speaking people throughout the world, and not seldom their
tears.
And of course the ideal has its other aspect: “I bring not peace, but
a sword.” With the judgment which saw those two truths clear, he was
empowered to put upon its trial the existing system, in as far as it
denied them. Being very sure of the essentials, he could look upon
the good and evil in current practice with the nihilistic audacity
of the great saints or the great sinners, of those who have nothing
further to gain or nothing further to lose. Hence the unsurpassed
energy of his satire, an energy only possible to a mind working
with consummate detachment, a mind that sat very loose to all the
dead-horse ideas on which the creatures of convention get carried
safely through life. But of this particular splendour and peril of
his powers the less need here be said because few of the poems in the
present selection have been taken from among those which illustrate
it. Enough to know that the spirit of Burns remains in the world,
as both a glory and a defence; and that many usurping polities will
crumble, and many moral incrustations dissolve, when required to meet
the challenge of those two conceptions of the sovereignty of the man
whose soul is free and the supremacy of kindness. Nor can we doubt
that as time goes on, and the idea of his life emerges more clearly
out of the chaos in which we see it now, he will be recognised as not
only an apparitional personality and a great lyric poet, but as a
largely symbolic being also, expressing and embodying the powers in
the world which for ever save and for ever beneficently destroy: one
of whom it will seem but sense to say—
A Poet, he was brought to birth
By Nature’s self or Mother Earth,
And had for his prophetic sire
The Force that sets the Sun on fire.
Meanwhile, something may be said of the present selection, if
only to explain it. The title _Songs and Lyrics_ has been chosen
in preference to _Songs and Poems_, that the reader, having been
warned, might have no cause for feeling aggrieved at the absence of
a number of pieces which are constants in other collections, however
variously made up. The term “lyric” has, by one notable example of
its use and by subsequent custom, become the accepted general name
for poems of many kinds having for their common characters only the
quality of expressing feeling or reflection (or the quality, in the
case of an anecdote or incident, of producing feeling or reflection)
and comparative brevity. It includes readily _O Were I on Parnassus
Hill_ and the _Lament for Glencairn_; that astonishing rapture of
words and humour and gusto the _Address to a Haggis_, and that wise
and tender yet withal scathing _Address to the Unco Guid_. But it
cannot be made to cover such an exact description of local custom
as _Halloween_; such a satirical and controversial description of
local events as _The Holy Fair_ and others of its kind; nor even
_Death and Doctor Hornbook_, effective though it is and instinct with
the poet’s humorous malice. These things are splendid as literature,
are indeed unequalled of their kind; but their quality is mainly
intellectual rather than poetical in the more absolute sense, and the
interest which they appeal to (and appeal powerfully) is not mainly
our interest in poetry. In any case they are in all the collections,
and I have considered that by their omission on this occasion it
would be possible to render a service to Burns, and to lovers of
poetry, which has not yet been rendered. A selection, I have thought,
might be made in which the Poet himself, and not the social scenery
of which he was a curious observer, nor the alien matters with which
he took up, should be the pervading presence in the book, making it
continuously lyrical, personal, and human. This, it was obvious,
would mean some uncustomary omissions. But experiment has proved
that it means also a sudden enlargement of the range of choice among
things truly and beautifully poetical. The poetic wealth of Burns
seems, indeed, not diminished but enriched by the surrender of that
part which issues rather from the general energy of his genius than
from those faculties of the soul in which he is distinctively a poet.
Certainly there is no dearth, either of value or variety, the range
of Burns over the different forms and occasions of poetry being, upon
the whole, unique. Shakespeare implicitly contains everything, yet he
has contributed to but a few of the forms; while the moderns (like
Wordsworth) who have attempted to exemplify the different varieties
of poetical composition are lyrically or morally monotonous. _Cælum
non animum mutant._
But Burns is as vivid and variable as Nature, and at full power in a
wide variety of domains and achievements. Within the domain of Song
alone (his peculiar and unquestioned kingdom) his variety is almost
as astonishing as his wealth. All the moods of love especially are
his: the wistful subjection of soul in _Mary Morison_, the lover’s
complaint against fortune and the world in _Poortith Cauld_, or
against the harder fate of a mistress’s disdain in _Maun I still on
Menie doat_ (these two with exquisite touches of humour on the way!);
the grief of parting in _Ae Fond Kiss_, with its unutterable regret,
and in _Go, Bring to Me_ with the tumult of the future sounding in
it; or again, love’s sense of its own nobility and security rising
even above that grief in _My Love is Like a Red Red Rose_ (the
greatest love song, which is really a _song_, in literature), or
the glossing preoccupation of the enamoured heart, to which every
natural beauty is but an illustration and reminder, in _Of a’ the
Airts_ (than which there is nothing in the world of song more single,
perfect and sincere), or the unanswerable argument of maidens’
reasons when they love in _Tam Glen_ and _The Gallant Weaver_, or the
comedy of courtship in _Duncan Gray_ and _Last May a Braw Wooer_,
and whatever of joyous and equivocal there might be in the idyll of
_Duncan Davison_, so realistic and so reticent. These are but samples
of a stock to which only a long catalogue would do representative
justice. The reader will at once think of _The Rigs of Barley_ so
triumphant and _The Lea Rig_ so trusting, and of _Bonnie Doon_, with
the sadness which has ensued from such trust—how often!—and of the
echoing _Fareweel to Ballochmyle_ with its atmosphere so large and
lonely. But beyond these there is another order of love-song; of the
love that has stood the test of life and has increased in kindness
as it has emerged from passion. Here we think of _John Anderson, my
Jo_, a song for which every good man must bow his head to the memory
of Burns. And near to it will be found in these pages a lyric with
the same consecration—_The Cardin’ o’t_—not less perfect though less
known. It summarises the human epic as lowly and kind folk know
it, and is like “the still sad music of humanity,” telling of its
affections, its toils, and the little wrongs that mean so much. And
beyond these, again, there is another order of love song, in which
the destinies enacted or the sorrows endured seem outside the limits
of the world. Of this disembodied and metaphysical quality—rare in
all literature outside of Shakespeare—are _Open the Door to Me, Oh_,
in which we feel the presence of Nature and Time only as spectators
of a human woe; and _Ay Waukin’_, with its haunting repetition,
its immeasurable sense of want and waiting, and of the endless
desolation that there may be for the soul within one summer day. But
of the songs of Burns it is impossible to speak adequately, and I
have spoken only of the love songs. There are others. Those devoted
to convivial joy touch a point of glory in letters quite equalling
that ever reached by the true devotee in life. _Willie Brewed a Peck
o’ Maut_ tells of the escape of three mortal men, for the space of
one night, from the dominion of Fate and from the common ignoble
respect for the solar system; while in _Rattlin’ Roarin’ Willie_
there are heroic reverberations, and the last verse shows us Willie
seated on high—“at yon board en’”—in a mist of glory as though the
guid companie were the gods themselves, and he in Asgard! As for
the graver national theme, Burns’s love of Scotland was so implicit
and pervading, that he rarely wrote upon it—apart from incidental
allusions—even as a man, among all the things that he does for his
wife and thinks for her, may rarely think of saying that he loves
her. But _when_ he wrote it was _Scots Wha Hae_; and that Jacobite
lyric, _It was a’ for our Rightfu’ King_, in which the romantic and
adventurous spirit of old Scotland, and its proscribed loyalties
and lost causes early and late, quintessentialise into the immortal
formula of heroic defeat:
Now a’ is done that men can do
And a’ is done in vain.
Of the Lyrics (other than songs) there is no room to speak at length,
but the preceding argument renders this less necessary. They all
converge to illustrate Burns’s kindness and his love of all who were
kind, his manly independence and his respect for that character
in others. His kindness, indeed, passes beyond his own species to
embrace all life, from the Daisy to the Devil, and even as a farmer
he has no animosity against the Field Mouse. The Devil, indeed, he
would not publicly encourage, though he would like him to escape
the extreme penalty; but the Daisy and the Mouse he brings for good
within the sympathies and almost within the circuit of human nature.
They are fellow-travellers with him on the strange road of life and
stand equally within the menace of calamity. We see the same humane,
dissolving, imaginative aptitude in _The Farmer’s Salutation_ and the
_Death of Poor Mailie_, pieces in which there is, however, a richness
of humanity, involving many qualities besides sympathy, hardly to
be described. The knowledge, the moral and social inwardness of
the former, and in the latter the finely balanced play of humour,
never for an instant excessive where excess would have been easy and
spoilt all, have hardly been equalled even by himself. The impulse
which made him compassionate towards his fellow-creatures ranged him
against those who habitually, and on peculiarly insufficient warrant,
judged them harshly. Hence the _Address to the Unco Guid_, which
would not have remained unwritten even had he never come personally
within the range and shot of their malice. Hence also, in part,
_Scotch Drink_, that plenary libation of soul in honour of those
cordials, especially the supreme national one, which are as a divine
fuel nourishing the glow of happiness when friend meets friend.
The epistles to David Sillar and Lapraik and Simpson (to which I
have affixed titles for this occasion)[1] admit us directly into
the presence of Burns in his familiar intercourse as the “social,
friendly, honest man” beyond measure abundant. These were written
while he was still an unprinted local poet, a man of mark among his
neighbours, but marked also for misfortune and disgrace, and the
future prospectless enough. But though he is cheering others on,
and dauntless himself, we can divine that it is fast becoming the
dauntlessness of desperation, the indifference of pride. What Nature
has given him renders him more keenly conscious of what his lot in
life denies, and the gifts and the lack between them are working
together to sink this splendid misplaced being, half Apollo and
half Pan, among the waste of humanity in whom the light of purpose
has gone out. Then came the Edinburgh triumph, and it saved him at
least from that. It opened new vistas, and promised a large future.
The vistas closed and the promise was not kept; but in the course
of being disappointed—in the course of encountering the successive
misfortunes of the ten years remaining to him, who was then only
twenty-seven—he added to his achievement nearly one-half of the
whole. He wrote not only _Tam o’ Shanter_ and the thrice-noble
_Lament for Glencairn_, but also the great bulk of his song work. And
the result? Surely it is this: that all who read these pages to the
end, to where the Muse of Scottish Song leaves him dreaming in the
spence, must feel that the light in which she “fled away” has not
itself fled, but remains for ever in his book, and he in the midst of
it with the lyric crown still fresh from her hands.
WILLIAM MACDONALD.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Namely, _The Riches of the Poor_, _An Offer of Friendship_, _An
Exhortation to Davie_, _Poets for ever!_ and _The Bards of Ayr_. A
book of selections being in its nature an anthology, in which all the
contents are there upon their individual merits as poetry, it seems
right that each should have a title that carries some reference to
its subject-matter. I have ventured upon this innovation in one or
two other cases, with results which, I hope, will commend themselves
to the judicious.
And here a word may be said about the arrangement of the contents,
which is not chronological, yet anything but haphazard. The intention
has rather been to make it lyrical and vital. I conceive that a
collection like this, which is virtually an anthology gathered from
the domain of a single poet, should as nearly as possible be itself
a poem. That is, it should be so composed, so put together, that the
reader may pass from number to number in the sequence as easily and
naturally as he would pass from verse to verse of a single poem:
even more easily and naturally, perhaps, from a continually renewed
sense of refreshment, of slightly changed animation. But this effect
is not to be achieved without taking pains. An editor who aims at
it must be keenly and even anxiously observant of many values—of
values constituted by metrical quality, subject matter, moral mood
and so forth—in all the varieties of each and in their interactions.
He must try to maintain continuity (the continuity of unflagging
animation, interest and enjoyment in the act of reading) through
variety and relief, and even through the occasional sudden contrast
which may express either a natural reaction and subsidence of mood,
or an impetus of the poetic soul in fresh directions. Finally, while
disregarding the mere time-order of composition (since the poem which
best speaks the truth for a man’s forty-sixth year may well have
been written at twenty-one) he must yet try to suggest something of
the tone of the poet’s different life-periods, and these in their
right order. If the attempt is at all successful, the resulting
arrangement should not only do justice to each individual poem by a
sympathetic setting, but should compass a general effect of unity
and of personality. How far the series from _There was a Lad to Auld
Lang Syne_ realises this ideal it is not for me to say. Other things
besides the ideal had claims to be considered, such as the proposed
scope of the book and the need to distribute the illustrations
reasonably through the volume. But I may say that from point to point
it has only been after many re-readings and searching comparisons
that I have finally decided whether _this_ or _this_ or _this_ poem
would most happily and economically follow _that_ one; regard being
also had to others that were yet to come. Felicity in the metrical
transition was, it will be seen, the value predominantly considered
in the earlier pages, while towards the close (I speak of the _Songs
and Lyrics_ section) there has been more conscious grouping of poems
reinforcing one another in the expression or suggestion of a mood or
colour-tone of the mind. I say predominantly; for both principles of
arrangement, as well as those of relief and contrast, have been used
throughout. Thus _Lassie wi’ the Lint-White Locks_, _The Posie_, _My
Lady’s Gown_, and _The Daisy_ (pp. 41-4) have an element in common—a
certain refinement and gentleness of feeling—which brings them within
the same moral key, diverse as they are. They breathe of flowers,
independently of speaking of them. But naturally the principle of
grouping has been more particularly used to suggest what I have
called the colour-tone of the poet’s mind at certain stages of his
life, especially the later ones. And I permit myself to hope that
the more the reader knows (understandingly) of Burns, the more will
he find of what is essential and quintessential to any true account
of the poet’s later days suggested or recalled by the successive
groupings with which our first and main section draws to a close.
[_Note._—The following pages have been set up from the text of
the Oxford Edition, for kind permission to use which thanks are
due, and are heartily tendered, to Mr. Henry Frowde of the Oxford
University Press].
Songs and Lyrics
THERE WAS A LAD
There was a lad was born in Kyle,
But what’n a day o’ what’n a style
I doubt it’s hardly worth the while
To be sae nice wi’ Robin.
Robin was a rovin’ boy,
Rantin’ rovin’, rantin’ rovin’;
Robin was a rovin’ boy,
Rantin’ rovin’ Robin.
Our monarch’s hindmost year but ane
Was five-and-twenty days begun,
’Twas then a blast o’ Janwar win’
Blew hansel in on Robin.
The gossip keekit in his loof,
Quo’ scho, Wha lives will see the proof,
This waly boy will be nae coof,
I think we’ll ca’ him Robin.
He’ll hae misfortunes great and sma’,
But aye a heart aboon them a’;
He’ll be a credit till us a’,
We’ll a’ be proud o’ Robin.
But sure as three times three mak nine,
I see by ilka score and line,
This chap will dearly like our kin’,
So leeze me on thee, Robin.
Robin was a rovin’ boy,
Rantin’ rovin’, rantin’ rovin’;
Robin was a rovin’ boy,
Rantin’ rovin’ Robin.
MARY MORISON
O Mary, at thy window be,
It is the wish’d, the trysted hour!
Those smiles and glances let me see,
That make the miser’s treasure poor:
How blythely wad I bide the stoure,
A weary slave frae sun to sun,
Could I the rich reward secure,
The lovely Mary Morison.
Yestreen, when to the trembling string
The dance gaed thro’ the lighted ha’,
To thee my fancy took its wing,
I sat, but neither heard nor saw:
Tho’ this was fair, and that was braw,
And yon the toast of a’ the town,
I sigh’d, and said amang them a’,
‘Ye are na Mary Morison.’
O Mary, canst thou wreck his peace,
Wha for thy sake wad gladly die?
Or canst thou break that heart of his,
Whase only faut is loving thee?
If love for love thou wilt na gie,
At least be pity to me shown!
A thought ungentle canna be
The thought o’ Mary Morison.
THE BIRKS OF ABERFELDY
Now simmer blinks on flowery braes,
And o’er the crystal streamlet plays,
Come let us spend the lightsome days
In the Birks of Aberfeldy.
Bonnie lassie, will ye go,
Will ye go, will ye go,
Bonnie lassie, will ye go
To the Birks of Aberfeldy?
While o’er their heads the hazels hing,
The little birdies blythely sing,
Or lightly flit on wanton wing
In the Birks of Aberfeldy.
The braes ascend like lofty wa’s
The foaming stream deep-roaring fa’s,
O’erhung wi’ fragrant spreading shaws—
The Birks of Aberfeldy.
The hoary cliffs are crown’d wi’ flowers,
White o’er the linns the burnie pours,
And rising, weets wi’ misty showers
The Birks of Aberfeldy.
Let fortune’s gifts at random flee,
They ne’er shall draw a wish frae me,
Supremely blest wi’ love and thee,
In the Birks of Aberfeldy.
Bonnie lassie, will ye go,
Will ye go, will ye go,
Bonnie lassie, will ye go
To the Birks of Aberfeldy?
TO A MOUSE, ON TURNING HER UP IN HER NEST WITH THE PLOUGH, NOVEMBER,
1785
Wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie,
O what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!
I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave
’S a sma’ request:
I’ll get a blessin’ wi’ the lave,
And never miss’t!
Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin’!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin’,
Baith snell an’ keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare and waste,
An’ weary winter comin’ fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out-thro’ thy cell.
That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld!
But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft a-gley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain
For promis’d joy.
Still thou art blest compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But oh! I backward cast my e’e
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
GO FETCH TO ME A PINT O’ WINE
Go fetch to me a pint o’ wine,
An’ fill it in a silver tassie;
That I may drink, before I go,
A service to my bonnie lassie.
The boat rocks at the pier o’ Leith,
Fu’ loud the wind blaws frae the ferry,
The ship rides by the Berwick-law,
And I maun leave my bonnie Mary.
The trumpets sound, the banners fly,
The glittering spears are rankèd ready;
The shouts o’ war are heard afar,
The battle closes thick and bloody;
But it’s no the roar o’ sea or shore
Wad mak me langer wish to tarry;
Nor shout o’ war that’s heard afar,
It’s leaving thee, my bonnie Mary.
MY LOVE IS LIKE A RED RED ROSE
My love is like a red red rose
That’s newly sprung in June:
My love is like the melodie
That’s sweetly play’d in tune.
So fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in love am I:
And I will love thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:
And I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.
And fare thee weel, my only love,
And fare thee weel awhile!
And I will come again, my love,
Tho’ it were ten thousand mile.
BLYTHE AND MERRY
By Ochtertyre there grows the aik,
On Yarrow banks the birken shaw;
But Phemie was a bonnier lass
Than braes o’ Yarrow ever saw.
Blythe, blythe and merry was she,
Blythe was she but and ben:
Blythe by the banks of Earn,
And blythe in Glenturit glen.
Her looks were like a flower in May,
Her smile was like a simmer morn;
She trippèd by the banks of Earn
As light’s a bird upon a thorn.
Her bonnie face it was as meek
As ony lamb’s upon a lea;
The evening sun was ne’er sae sweet
As was the blink o’ Phemie’s e’e.
The Highland hills I’ve wander’d wide,
And o’er the Lowlands I hae been;
But Phemie was the blythest lass
That ever trod the dewy green.
[Illustration:
She trippèd by the banks of Earn
As light’s a bird upon a thorn.]
HIGHLAND MARY
Ye banks, and braes, and streams around
The castle o’ Montgomery,
Green be your woods, and fair your flowers,
Your waters never drumlie!
There simmer first unfauld her robes,
And there the langest tarry;
For there I took the last fareweel
O’ my sweet Highland Mary.
How sweetly bloom’d the gay green birk,
How rich the hawthorn’s blossom,
As underneath their fragrant shade
I clasp’d her to my bosom!
The golden hours on angel wings
Flew o’er me and my dearie;
For dear to me as light and life
Was my sweet Highland Mary.
Wi’ mony a vow, and lock’d embrace,
Our parting was fu’ tender;
And, pledging aft to meet again,
We tore oursels asunder;
But oh! fell death’s untimely frost,
That nipt my flower sae early!
Now green’s the sod, and cauld’s the clay,
That wraps my Highland Mary!
O pale, pale now, those rosy lips,
I aft have kiss’d sae fondly!
And closed for aye the sparkling glance,
That dwelt on me sae kindly!
And mould’ring now in silent dust,
That heart that lo’ed me dearly!
But still within my bosom’s core
Shall live my Highland Mary.
AFTON WATER
Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,
Flow gently, I’ll sing thee a song in thy praise;
My Mary’s asleep by thy murmuring stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.
Thou stock-dove whose echo resounds thro’ the glen,
Ye wild whistling blackbirds in yon thorny den,
Thou green-crested lapwing, thy screaming forbear,
I charge you disturb not my slumbering fair.
How lofty, sweet Afton, thy neighbouring hills,
Far mark’d with the courses of clear winding rills;
There daily I wander as noon rises high,
My flocks and my Mary’s sweet cot in my eye.
How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below,
Where wild in the woodlands the primroses blow;
There oft as mild ev’ning weeps over the lea,
The sweet-scented birk shades my Mary and me.
Thy crystal stream, Afton, how lovely it glides,
And winds by the cot where my Mary resides;
How wanton thy waters her snowy feet lave,
As gathering sweet flow’rets she stems thy clear wave.
Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,
Flow gently, sweet river, the theme of my lays;
My Mary’s asleep by thy murmuring stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.
DAINTY DAVIE
Now rosy May comes in wi’ flowers,
To deck her gay, green spreading bowers;
And now comes in my happy hours,
To wander wi’ my Davie.
Meet me on the warlock knowe,
Dainty Davie, dainty Davie,
There I’ll spend the day wi’ you,
My ain dear dainty Davie.
The crystal waters round us fa’,
The merry birds are lovers a’,
The scented breezes round us blaw,
A wandering wi’ my Davie.
When purple morning starts the hare,
To steal upon her early fare,
Then through the dews I will repair,
To meet my faithfu’ Davie.
When day, expiring in the west,
The curtain draws o’ Nature’s rest,
I flee to his arms I lo’e best,
And that’s my ain dear Davie.
IT WAS A’ FOR OUR RIGHTFU’ KING
It was a’ for our rightfu’ King,
We left fair Scotland’s strand;
It was a’ for our rightfu’ King,
We e’er saw Irish land,
My dear,
We e’er saw Irish land.
Now a’ is done that men can do,
And a’ is done in vain;
My love and native land farewell,
For I maun cross the main,
My dear,
For I maun cross the main.
He turn’d him right and round about
Upon the Irish shore;
And gae his bridle-reins a shake,
With adieu for evermore,
My dear,
Adieu for evermore.
The sodger from the wars returns,
The sailor frae the main;
But I hae parted frae my love,
Never to meet again,
My dear,
Never to meet again.
When day is gane, and night is come,
And a’ folk boune to sleep,
I think on him that’s far awa’,
The lee-lang night, and weep,
My dear,
The lee-lang night, and weep.
WHEN I THINK ON THE HAPPY DAYS
When I think on the happy days
I spent wi’ you, my dearie;
And now what lands between us lie,
How can I be but eerie!
How slow ye move, ye heavy hours,
As ye were wae and weary!
It was na sae ye glinted by
When I was wi’ my dearie.
THERE’LL NEVER BE PEACE TILL JAMIE COMES HAME
By yon castle wa’, at the close of the day,
I heard a man sing, tho’ his head it was grey:
And as he was singing, the tears down came—
‘There’ll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.