The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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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.
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 ‘killed 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. 26–28, 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 ‘Frenchified’ 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. 149–170 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. 95–100 do, in fact, seem to refer to actual events on the family farm at Lochlea of which he wrote: ‘my 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