The Canongate Burns (86 page)

The song dates from April 1782, according to notes taken by Dr Currie from a farming memorandum notebook, which was last seen in the library of William Roscoe about 1815. There is no
manuscript copy. Admittance to the canon has been on the word of Dr Currie. Perhaps ironically, out of economic necessity, certainly with a degree of self-dramatisation, Burns considered a military career: ‘Hannibal gave my young ideas such a turn that I used to strut in raptures up and down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe, and wish myself tall enough to be a soldier' (Letter 125).

Other than commentary on Burns's notes on the tune, that a North of Ireland song,
The Weaver and his Shuttle, O,
was exactly the same as the Scottish one, Kinsley says nothing about this song. Perhaps he was prejudiced by Burns's own disparagement of it in his
First
Commonplace Book,
April, 1874: ‘a wild rhapsody, miserably deficient in versification; but as the sentiments are the genuine feelings of my heart, for that reason, I have a particular pleasure in conning it over'. This early, probably 1782 song, is indeed seminal in its rehearsal of so many future themes: the constant frustration of his worthy hopes; the harshness of farm toil and the compensatory sense of independence despite all such difficulties. The first stanza is of particular note. In Liam McIlvanney's forthcoming study,
Burns
the Radical: Poetry and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland,
we will have a revaluation of the influence on the child of his father's passionate, liberal educational values. As McIlvanney writes: ‘… it is crucial to appreciate that Burns's education was far more extensive than his formal schooling. It could hardly be otherwise, given the fiercely intellectual presence of William Burnes, a man who bought and borrowed books for his sons and remorselessly engaged them in “improving” conversations.' McIlvanney also notes the degree to which his father and his hired schoolmaster, John Murdoch, combined forces to educate Robert and Gilbert with a humane, often English Whig-inspired eighteenth-century liberalism, against the prevalent Auld Licht Culture.

Composition is dated for around 1782. In the
First Commonplace Book
Burns writes this song is an ‘imitation of the manner of a noble old Scottish Piece called
MacMillan's
Peggy,
and sings to the tune of Galla Water. – My Montgomerie's Peggy was my Deity for six or eight months'. After laying courtship ‘siege' to her, he was mortified to discover that she had already been pledged to another. Peggy is believed to have been a house maid at Coylfield House, owned by the Montgomerie family, according to the poet's sister, later Mrs Begg.

This was composed after reading Adam Smith's
Theory of Moral
Sentiments,
a book of philosophical inquiry (1759). In the
First
Commonplace Book,
the lines are dated for September 1783. The poet paraphrases his own verse: ‘I entirely agree with that judicious Philosopher Mr Smith in his excellent Theory of Moral Sentiments, that Remorse is the most painful sentiment that can embitter the human bosom … when our own follies or crimes, have made us miserable and wretched, to bear it up with manly firmness, and at the same time have a proper penitential sense of our misconduct, – is a glorious effort of Self-command'. It is clearly an experiment in Shakespearean blank verse, a poetic form the poet did not often employ and highly comparable, linguistically and formally, with the early, guilt-tormented Coleridge's use of that form.

This was written on a Laird who lived near the Burns family at Lochlie. It is generally dated for 1783–4. In a 1787 edition of the poet's work a holograph copy of the epigram has the subtitle as above, ‘A Sanctimonious Rascal of the First Water'.

In Chambers–Wallace this is titled
On Thomas Kirkpatrick, Late
Blacksmith in Stoop,
with ‘A. Manson' changed to ‘Auld Thomas' in the last line. Kinsley has no remarks. Mackay records that a plaque marks the spot in Tarbolton where Andrew Manson had an Inn.

Unpublished during the poet's life, this song is written in the voice of a ruined farmer. There is a strong resonance of family biography relating to the poet's father during 1783–4 when he fell into rent arrears and was taken to court. Burns wrote about this episode in 1787: ‘My indignation yet boils at the recollection of the scoundrel tyrant's insolent, threatening epistles, which used to set us in tears' (Letter 125). The song is included among the Stair manuscripts.

This was written in the Autumn of 1782. Dr James Currie says of the Tarbolton Bachelor's Club – essentially a debating society – that in the Autumn of 1782, a book was purchased into which the rules and regulations were copied by the poet, as President. Introducing the annotations, Currie prints four lines of poetry, stating that the entire text inscribed is from Burns (See Currie, 1800, p. xliv). If so, it is almost certain the lines of poetry are by Burns, although they have never previously been included in the canon. The lines may have merely been quoted from another author, but Burns is generally open about attribution. Currie records in a footnote that actual topics debated at Tarbolton included the following, ‘Whether do we derive more happiness from Love or Friendship? – Whether between friends who have no reason to doubt each other's friendship,
there should be any reserve? – Whether is the savage man, or the peasant of a civilised country, in the most happy situation? – Whether is a young man of the lower ranks of life likeliest to be happy, who has got a good education, and his mind well informed, or he who has just the education and information of those around him?' (Currie, p. xlvii). Found in the hand of Burns, these lines are almost certainly his.