The Canongate Burns (16 page)
Read The Canongate Burns Online
Authors: Robert Burns
185
But will ye tell me, master Caesar,
Sure
great folk's
life's a life o' pleasure?
Nae cauld nor hunger e'er can steer them,
no cold, touch
The vera thought o't need na fear them.
very, not
Â
CAESAR
Lord, man, were ye but whyles whare I am,
whiles where
190
The
Gentles
, ye wad ne'er envy them!
would
It's true, they need na starve or sweat,
not
Thro' Winter's cauld, or Simmer's heat;
cold, summer's
They've nae sair-wark to craze their banes,
no sore work, bones
An' fill
auld-age
wi' grips an' granes:
old-age, gripes & groans
195
But
human bodies
are sic fools,
such
For a' their Colledges an' Schools,
That when nae
real
ills perplex them,
no
They
mak
enow themsels to vex them;
An' ay the less they hae to sturt them,
always, have, fret
200
In like proportion, less will hurt them.Â
A countra fellow at the pleugh,
country, plough
His
acre's
till'd, he's right eneugh;
well enough
A countra girl at her wheel,
country
Her
dizzen's
done, she's unco weel;
dozens (yarn), very well
205
But Gentlemen, an' Ladies warst,
Wi' ev'n down
want o' wark
they're curst:
work
They loiter, lounging, lank an' lazy;
Tho' deil-haet ails them, yet uneasy:
nothing
Their days insipid, dull an' tasteless;
210
Their nights unquiet, lang an' restless.
long
An' ev'n their sports, their balls an' races,
Their galloping thro' public places,
There's sic parade, sic pomp an' art,
such
The joy can scarcely reach the heart.
215
The
Men
cast out in
party-matches
,
compete
Then sowther a' in deep debauches;
patch up
Ae night they're mad wi' drink an' whoring,
one
Niest day their life is past enduring.
next
The
Ladies
arm-in-arm in clusters,
220
As great an' gracious a' as sisters;
all
But hear their
absent thoughts
o' ither,
They're a' run deils an' jads thegither.
downright, together
Whyles, owre the wee bit cup an' platie,
whiles, over, plate
They sip the
scandal-potion
pretty;
225
Or lee-lang nights, wi' crabbet leuks
live-long, bad tempered looks
Pore owre the devil's
pictur'd beuks
;
over, books (playing cards)
Stake on a chance a farmer's stackyard,
An' cheat like onie
unhang'd blackguard
.
any, villain
There's some exceptions, man an' woman;
230
But this is Gentry's life in common.
By this, the sun was out o' sight,
An' darker gloamin brought the night;
fading twilight
The
bum-clock
humm'd wi' lazy drone;
beetle
The kye stood rowtin i' the loan;
cattle, lowing, field
235
When up they gat, an' shook their lugs,
got, ears
Rejoic'd they were na
men
, but
dogs
;
not
An' each took aff his several way,
went his different
Resolv'd to meet some ither day.
other
Burns lived with animals, wild and domestic, in conditions of intimacy which few of us in this twenty-first century can easily appreciate. This poem, as much of his poetry, is filled with an empathetic, hence, detailed knowledge of them. The collie and the Newfoundland are sportively present to us. Throughout his writing there are also frequent, often obliquely political analogies, made between the lots of animals and men.
The genesis of this poem was his own collie, Luath, who, his brother tells us, was âkilled by some wanton cruelty of some person the night before my father's death'. This extraordinary witty, seminal poem is the result of his original intention to write, for the sinisterly murdered Luath,
Stanzas to the Memory of a Quad-
ruped Friend
(Currie, Vol. 3, p. 386).
His wholly deliberate choice of opening The Kilmarnock edition with this particular poem is mockingly ironic. In that volume, he had no sooner come on stage with his highly successful self- promoting prose remarks about his poetic ploughman's pastoral naïvety, than he immediately delivers a poetic performance of not only formidable linguistic and double-voiced dramatic subtlety but one which is eruditely allusive to earlier Scottish and English poetry. Indeed, it would be, as in ll. 26â28, an extremely odd ploughman who would not only name his dog from a character in Macpherson's
Ossian
but also allude to that simmering controversy. Also both the octosyllabic verse and the dialogue form are derived from his beloved predecessor, Robert Fergusson's
The Mutual Complaint of
Plainstanes and Causey, in their Mother Tongue
.
While the poem formally and linguistically is not indebted to English poetry, the content certainly is. As William Empson (
Some Versions of
Pastoral
, 1935) and Raymond Williams (The City and Country, 1975) have revealed, English poetry from the sixteenth century had been preoccupied with the nature and representation of country life as a reflection of the quarrel between largely conservative poets and their aristocratic patrons due to the disruptive evolution in the life of the common people caused by the accelerating participation by the
aristocratic master class in agrarian capitalism. The greatest statement of this theme, as we shall see Burns demonstrably knew in his own
A Winter's Night
, is Shakespeare's
King Lear
. The consistently cogent McGuirk in discussing this poem locates its tap-roots in Augustan convention, especially Pope's
Moral Epistles
. Burns also had, of course, the endorsement of his views from contemporary sources such as Goldsmith, particularly
The Deserted Village
. Although they diverged totally about the role of the monarchy, Burns and Goldsmith were also part of that rising late eighteenth-century tide of patriotic feeling about the âFrenchified' degeneration of the British aristocracy as increasingly they squandered their ill-gotten agrarian rents in European fleshpots. (See Gerald Newman,
The Rise
of English Nationalism
, London, 1987.) Hence that quite wonderfully sophisticated section, comparable to anything in Augustan satire, from ll. 149â170 where Caesar describes into what The Grand Tour has degenerated. This brilliantly echoes Fergusson's pronouncedly anti-aristocratic lines from
Hame Content:
   Some daft chiel reads, and takes advice
The chaise is yokit in a trice;
Awa drives he like huntit deil,
And scarce tholes time to cool his wheel,
Till he's Lord ken how far awa,
At Italy, or Well o' Spaw,
Or to Montpelier's safer air;
For far off fowls hae feathers fair.
   There rest him weel; for eith can we
Spare mony glakit gouks like he;
They'll tell whare Tibur's water's rise;
What sea receives the drumly prize,
That never wi' their feet hae mett
The marches o' their ain estate.
Stimulated by Fergusson, then, this dramatic dialogue, domesti- cates in the Scottish vernacular this great English poetic quarrel with a rapacious land-owning class. What further intensified this in Burns is that from childhood he had been exposed to both brutal- ising toil and chronic economic anxiety. Ll. 95â100 do, in fact, seem to refer to actual events on the family farm at Lochlea of which he wrote: âmy indignation yet boils at the recollection of the scoundrel tyrant's insolent threatening epistles which he used to set us all in tears' (Letter 137). As Burns's subsequent poetry reveals, this early trauma about debt, bankruptcy and possible homelessness was to be
a subject of inflammatory repetition. Also, as much of his later poetry, the poem is filled with telling detail about the harsh, exposed, exhausting nature of farm work in the late eighteenth century as opposed to the pampered sloth of the aristocracy. Indeed, as in ll. 89â90, such brutal work leads to a Swiftian vision of the bestialisation of the common people: âLord man, our gentry care as little/For
delvers, ditchers
and sic cattle'.
Burns's strategy in the poem of course is to create through the dogs a kind of comic brio, which, at a primary level, disguises the poem's incisive documentation and its anti-establishment values. Further, he does not do the ideologically obvious thing by creating an oppositional dialogue between the people's collie and the master's newly fashionable Newfoundland. Caesar is not so much a traitor to his class as a natural democrat who will put his nose anywhere as a possible prelude to even more intimate entangle- ments. It is he who really spills the beans about the condition of the working people and the lifestyle of their masters. In Luath's speeches, especially ll. 103â38, we find the roots of Burns's vision of the nobility of the common people which is to recur throughout his poetry though, at times, especially in âThe Cotter's Saturday Night', somewhat questionably.
First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
Gie him strong drink until he wink,
That's sinking in despair;
An' liquor guid to fire his bluid,
That's prest wi' grief an' care:
There let him bowse, and deep carouse,
Wi' bumpers flowing o'er,
Till he forgets his loves or debts,
An' minds his griefs no more.
Solomon's Proverbs
, xxxi. 6, 7. I.
A paraphrase from Hugh Blair's
The Grave
, p. 8.
Let other Poets raise a frácas
âBout vines, an' wines, an' drucken Bacchus,
drunken
An' crabbed names an' stories wrack us,
torment
                An' grate our lug:
vex, ears
5
I sing the juice
Scotch bear
can mak us,
drink, barley
                In glass or jug.
O thou, my MUSE! guid auld SCOTCH DRINK!
good old
Whether thro' wimplin worms thou jink,
winding, frisk
Or, richly brown, ream owre the brink,
froth over
10
                In glorious faem,
foam
Inspire me, till I
lisp
an'
wink
,
                To sing thy name!
Let husky Wheat the haughs adorn,
hollows
An' Aits set up their awnie horn,
oats, bearded
15
An' Pease an' Beans, at een or morn,
                Perfume the plain:
Leeze me on thee,
John Barleycorn
,
blessing on thee
                Thou king o' grain!
On thee aft Scotland chows her cood,
often, chews, cud
20
In souple scones, the wale o' food!
soft, pick
Or tumbling in the boiling flood
                Wi' kail an' beef;
greens
But when thou pours thy strong
heart's blood
,
                There thou shines chief.
25
Food fills the wame, an' keeps us livin;
belly
Tho' life's a gift no worth receivin,
When heavy-dragg'd wi' pine an' grievin;
                But oil'd by thee,
The wheels o' life gae down-hill, scrievin,
go, careering
30
                Wi' rattlin glee.
noisy joy
Thou clears the head o' doited Lear,
muddled knowledge
Thou cheers the heart o' drooping Care;
Thou strings the nerves o' Labor-sair,
sore
                At's weary toil;
35
Thou ev'n brightens dark Despair
                Wi' gloomy smile.
Aft, clad in massy, siller weed,
often clothed
Wi' Gentles thou erects thy head;
Yet, humbly kind, in time o' need,
40
                The
poorman's
wine:
His wee drap parritch, or his bread,
drop, porridge
                Thou kitchens fine.
Thou art the life o' public haunts;
But thee, what were our fairs and rants?
without, merry-makings
45
Ev'n goodly meetings o' the saunts,
saints
                By thee inspir'd,
When, gaping, they besiege the
tents
,
                Are doubly fir'd.
That merry night
we get the corn in,
50
O sweetly, then, thou reams the horn in!
Or reekin on a
New-Year-mornin
steaming
                In cog or bicker,
bowl, jug
An' just a wee drap
sp'ritual burn
in,
small drop
                An'
gusty sucker
!
tasty sugar
55
When Vulcan gies his bellys breath,
gives, bellows
An' Ploughmen gather wi' their graith,
gear
O rare! to see thee fizz an' fraeth
bubble and froth
                I' the lugget caup!
two-handled jug
Then
Burnewin
comes on like Death
blacksmith
60
                At ev'ry chap.
stroke
Nae mercy, then, for airn
or
steel:
no, iron
The brawnie, bainie, Ploughman-chiel,
sturdy, boney, fellow
Brings hard owrehip, wi' sturdy wheel,
over hip
                The strong forehammer,
65
Till block an' studdie ring an' reel,
anvil
                Wi' dinsome clamour.
When skirlin weanies see the light,
squalling infants
Thou maks the gossips clatter bright.
makes, chatter, cheerfully
How fumbling coofs their dearies slight;
fools
                Wae worth the name!
woe betide
Nae Howdie gets a social night,
no midwife
                Or plack frae them.
coin
When neebors anger at a plea,
neighbours
An' just as wud as wud can be,
mad/wild
75
How easy can the
barley-bree
-brew
                Cement the quarrel!
It's ay the cheapest Lawyer's fee,
                To taste the barrel.
Alake! that e'er my
Muse
has reason,
80
To wyte her countrymen wi' treason!
blame/charge
But mony daily weet their weason
many, wet their throat
                Wi' liquors nice,
An' hardly, in a winter season,
                E'er spier her price.
ask
85
Wae worth that
Brandy
, burnin trash!
woe to
Fell source o' monie a pain an' brash!
sickness
Twins mony a poor, doylt, drucken hash,
(deprives many,
                O' half his days;
weary drunken fellow)
An' sends, beside, auld
Scotland's
cash
old
                To her warst faes.
worst foes
Ye Scots, wha wish auld Scotland well,
who, old
Ye chief, to you my tale I tell,
Poor, plackless devils like
mysel
,
penniless
                It sets you ill,
95
Wi' bitter, dearthfu' wines to mell,
meddle
                Or
foreign gill
.
May
Gravels
round his blather wrench,
stones, bladder
An'
Gouts
torment him, inch by inch,
Wha twists his gruntle wi' a glunch
who, mouth, grumble
100
                O' sour disdain,
Out owre a glass o'
Whisky-punch
over
                Wi' honest men!
O
Whisky
! soul o' plays an' pranks!
Accept a
Bardie's
gratefu' thanks!
105
When wanting thee, what tuneless cranks
                Are my poor Verses!
Thou comes â they rattle i' their ranks
                At ither's arses!
Thee,
Ferintosh
! O sadly lost!
110
Scotland lament frae coast to coast!
from
Now colic-grips, an' barkin hoast
coughing hoarse
                May kill us a';
For loyal
Forbes' Chartered boast
                Is taen awa!
taken away
115
Thae curst horse-leeches o' th' Excise,
those
Wha mak the
Whisky stills
their prize!
who make
Haud up thy han',
Deil
! ance, twice, thrice!
hold, hand, once
                There, seize the blinkers!
rascals/spies
An' bake them up in brunstane pies
brimstone
120
                For poor damn'd
Drinkers
.
Fortune! if thou'll but gie me still
give
Hale breeks, a scone, an'
Whisky gill
,
whole breeches
An' rowth o'
rhyme
to rave at will,
abundance/store
                Tak a' the rest,
125
An' deal't about as thy blind skill
                Directs thee best.
Though not quite in the manner of his contemporary, William Blake, Burns found
The Bible
a constant source of inspiration and allusion. This vernacularisation of
Proverbs
with which he introduces the poem is characteristic of his delight in the often excessively erotic, violent and, in this case, alcoholic tales he found in
The Old Testament
. Such use of
The Bible
was not the least of his anti-clerical weapons. Nor was it the least of his offences against Hugh Blair and the pietistic critical sensibilities of genteel Edinburgh.
A copy of
Scotch Drink
was sent to Robert Muir in March, 1786, having been apparently written sometime in the preceding winter. This celebratory âhymn' to the virtues of the national drink again owes its genesis and tone to the bibulous gaiety which pulses through Robert Fergusson's poetry. In particular it is related to Fergusson's
Caller Water
and
A Drink Eclogue
with its disputation between Brandy and Whisky. As in Fergusson's poems, whisky is ever the vital, democratising, somewhat chauvinistic heart's blood of the nation, energising and socialising everybody with whom it comes into contact. The sad exception is the impotent, cuckolded husband of ll. 67â72.
In ll. 102â8 Burns also associates whisky with the power to energise his own poetic creativity so that the quality of his verses catches up with those of his poetic competitors. We cannot know to what degree alcohol was a creative stimulant for Burns, though certainly some of his most extraordinary letters are self-confessedly written with well-plied glass in hand. See, for example, Letter 506 to Alexander Cunningham.
The reference in l. 109 to Ferintosh as Kinsley tells us, is that this Cromarty Firth whisky had been exempted from duty after 1695 in reparation for damage to the estates of Forbes of Culloden, the
owner of the distillery, by the Jacobites in 1689. Forbes' loss of this privilege in 1785 drove the price of whisky up.
The penultimate stanza's consignment of the Excise to the fires of hell for their still-breaking activities must have caused Burns subsequent guilty grief. The Excise was the most hated and efficient arm of a state that had nothing to do with welfare and everything to do with intrusive, punitive taxation. Had he known it, Burns would have wholeheartedly agreed with Blake that âLawful Bread, Bought with Lawful Money, & a Lawful Heaven, seen thro' a Lawful Telescope, by means of a Lawful Window Light! The Holy Ghost, & whatever cannot be Taxed, is Unlawful & Witchcraft'.
