Portrait of Robert Burns (1759-1796) Scottish Poet

Photograph: Getty Images/Time Life Pictures

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/25/robert-burns-don-paterson

 

The Guardian, 25 Monday January 2010

Robert Burns was born in Alloway in Ayrshire, and died in Dumfries. He had watched his father worn down by authority, and worn out by labour. This radicalised him, and turned Burns into an enemy of all enemies of freedom and humanity. Such egalitarian ideals got him into trouble: he was excited by outbreak of revolution in France, and his indiscreet support nearly lost him his job as an exciseman. Burns' songs enjoy an international popularity, but what's often admired in his poetry is his liberal sloganeering; however, the best of his poems shed a far more sophisticated light on the species. (I can think of no wiser dissection of the slippery nature of human morality and temptation than Address to the Unco Guid, for example.)

 

Burns was such a complex individual that everyone is free to make their own reading of him, according to their own agenda. Whatever you want to see, you'll find: a crude boor and brilliant raconteur; a male chauvinist pig and a champion of the rights of women; an Ayrshire farmer and an Edinburgh sophisticate; an abolitionist and a supporter of the slave trade (he almost left Scotland to work on a plantation in the West Indies); a bad English late-Augustan poet, and a brilliant Scots early Romantic. Attempts to make a simplified reading of Burns' verse are similarly doomed. One myth, though, we can swiftly dispatch. He may have been complicit, when it suited him, in the proclamation of his noble savagery; but Burns was no "heaven-taught ploughman". He was a quick-witted and thoroughly well-read man, who (Paxo take note) would have torn any of us to shreds in intellectual argument.

 

The same thing lies behind his multiple personalities as behind his universal appeal: the neurotic desire to be all things to all men, and especially all women. But none of this would have meant a thing without his huge natural talent. His gift for broad address was achieved by his having organised his language, through a remarkable feat of the literary intellect, into a smooth continuum that ran from low Ayrshire Scots to high Johnsonian English, effectively constructing one of the largest linguistic resources any poet has ever had at their disposal. (Burns' Scots, contrary to popular belief, is anything but pure.)

 

More important, though, is what Burns actually said with it. Burns' central insight is that the spiritual, the social, the sexual, the natural, the political and the humorous are overlapping human realms, not separate or competing ones. To pretend otherwise is a lie. If you sang one, you should sing them all. Through his humane, funny, impassioned, acutely-observed and often brilliantly argued verse, Burns shows us that if we keep those realms continually in dialogue, each tempers, civilises and refines the laws of the others. Out of all this, a crucial moral distinction emerges: hypocritical behaviour becomes far less forgivable, merely inconsistent behaviour far more so. Holy Willie is destroyed by Burns for his hypocrisy, not his inconsistency. Man is complicated, is Burns' truest song—and heaven knows, no man was ever more qualified to sing it.

 

Burns was a notorious womaniser—or a great lover, if you prefer, which is no doubt how he saw it. This career was brought to a sharp halt in Edinburgh by the brilliant, beautiful, bourgeois (and chaste) Nancy McLehose. His failure with Nancy taught him that his low pedigree would forever count against him, and he retreated to Ayr to live with his family, and resume work as an exciseman. His career as a poet was essentially over; whatever the subject of his poems, it was always love that had fired the engine. Thereafter, he redirected his amorous energies into song-making. However the songs are astonishing: Burns assuaged his fragmented personality by projecting it into a vast and partly anonymous work, and his revitalisation of Scottish song was so pervasive its extent can never be fully known. The work was so skillfully executed that, 200 years later, the songs are still going strong. Though the songs aren't poems, as I suspect he'd have been the first to tell you. They need singing (nor do his poems work when set to music: there's far too much music in them already). No one, though, could listen to Ae Fond Kiss and doubt that a great poet had a hand in it.

 

Many of us dread Burns Night. Address to a bloody Haggis; recitations of Tam O'Shanter that should, by rights, have their speakers automatically sectioned or arrested; much talk of "our Rabbie"—but as Hugh McDiarmid said: "No wan in 50 kens a wurd Burns wrote / But misapplied is aabody's property". It also affords us the yearly opportunity to hear him belittled and traduced in the media, and listen to the very folk who should be championing him—Hattersley and Paxman, to name two—laugh him away, based on their own poor understanding of the poems and their impatience with its alien diction. Dr Starkey's criticisms seem to be more broadly anti-Scottish, and therefore impossible to take seriously. Robert Burns died of being Robert Burns, as Stevenson remarked, and in many ways has died of him ever since. But he was good enough for Keats, and for Wordsworth, and for Hazlitt—"Burns was not like Shakespeare in the range of his genius; but there is something of the same magnanimity, directness, and unaffected character about him"—and he should be good enough for us.

Ae Fond Kiss

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;

Ae farewell, alas, for ever!

Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,

Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee!

 

Who shall say that Fortune grieves him

While the star of hope she leaves him?

Me, nae cheerfu' twinkle lights me,

Dark despair around benights me.

 

I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy;

Naething could resist my Nancy;

But to see her was to love her,

Love but her, and love for ever.

 

Had we never loved sae kindly,

Had we never loved sae blindly,

Never met--or never parted,

We had ne'er been broken-hearted.

 

Fare thee weel, thou first and fairest!

Fare thee weel, thou best and dearest!

Thine be ilka joy and treasure,

Peace, enjoyment, love, and pleasure!

 

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever!

Ae farewell, alas, for ever!

Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,

Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee!

Address to the Unco Guid

My Son, these maxims make a rule,

An' lump them aye thegither;

The Rigid Righteous is a fool,

The Rigid Wise anither:

The cleanest corn that ere was dight

May hae some pyles o' caff in;

So ne'er a fellow-creature slight

For random fits o' daffin.

(Solomon.-Eccles. ch. vii. verse 16)

O ye wha are sae guid yoursel',

Sae pious and sae holy,

Ye've nought to do but mark and tell

Your neibours' fauts and folly!

Whase life is like a weel-gaun mill,

Supplied wi' store o' water;

The heaped happer's ebbing still,

An' still the clap plays clatter.

Hear me, ye venerable core,

As counsel for poor mortals

That frequent pass douce Wisdom's door

For glaikit Folly's portals:

I, for their thoughtless, careless sakes,

Would here propone defences—

Their donsie tricks, their black mistakes,

Their failings and mischances.

Ye see your state wi' theirs compared,

And shudder at the niffer;

But cast a moment's fair regard,

What maks the mighty differ;

Discount what scant occasion gave,

That purity ye pride in;

And (what's aft mair than a' the lave),

Your better art o' hidin.

Think, when your castigated pulse

Gies now and then a wallop!

What ragings must his veins convulse,

That still eternal gallop!

Wi' wind and tide fair i' your tail,

Right on ye scud your sea-way;

But in the teeth o' baith to sail,

It maks a unco lee-way.

See Social Life and Glee sit down,

All joyous and unthinking,

Till, quite transmugrified, they're grown

Debauchery and Drinking:

O would they stay to calculate

Th' eternal consequences;

Or your more dreaded hell to state,

Damnation of expenses!

Ye high, exalted, virtuous dames,

Tied up in godly laces,

Before ye gie poor Frailty names,

Suppose a change o' cases;

A dear-lov'd lad, convenience snug,

A treach'rous inclination—

But let me whisper i' your lug,

Ye're aiblins nae temptation.

Then gently scan your brother man,

Still gentler sister woman;

Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang,

To step aside is human:

One point must still be greatly dark,—

The moving Why they do it;

And just as lamely can ye mark,

How far perhaps they rue it.

Who made the heart, 'tis He alone

Decidedly can try us;

He knows each chord, its various tone,

Each spring, its various bias:

Then at the balance let's be mute,

We never can adjust it;

What's done we partly may compute,

But know not what's resisted.

 

(Themes for this poem religion hypocrisy)