The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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is as seriously meant in national and political terms as his first. The poem, also invoking Pitt, depends on laughter but the comic tone is one that both covertly asserts Burns’s satirising superiority to his subject and his ability to give tangible witness to the economic distresses caused by the whisky tax. As well as the machinations of the London Parliament and the betrayals of Scotland therein by her forty-five Commons representatives, he also speculates on the degree to which available Scottish talent could be employed to the Nation’s benefit. Not least, running through the poem, are insinuations of ancestral Scottish violence resurrecting itself again to put right political injustice.
The poem begins with the ironic comment that, whilst Irish Lords were allowed to represent Scotland in Parliament, the elder sons of Scottish Peers were not. He then craftily invokes his coarse, arse-in-the-dust muse. As well as the tactical self-denigration of his muse, this allows the poet to distance himself in the wings, putting the muse centre stage. But, at l. 55, this somewhat transparent mask drops and he speaks, again, ironically, self-denigratorily, as himself.
Ll. 13–54 invoke the muse to have the courage to tell the truth about establishment censure by revealing the social dereliction caused by the related excesses of the Excisemen and the Smugglers. He also looks to specifically Ayrshire heroes (See The Vision) such as the military Montgomery and the writerly Boswell to save Mother Scotland from dereliction. We get the first suggestion of reactive violence (ll. 59–60), with a vengeful image of choking restriction perpetrated by the poet on his nation’s enemies.
The poem is, thus, both an analysis of post-Union Scottish distress and a thesis about Scottish resurrection based on the available Scottish greatness. In a letter he wrote to Bruce Campbell on November 13th, 1788 he included the poem which he hoped would be passed to James Boswell, thus procuring him an introduction to the great writer:
There are few pleasures my late will-o’-wisp character has given me, equal to that of having seen many of the extraordinary men, the heroes of Wit and Literature in my Country; and as I had the honour of drawing my first breath in almost the same Parish with Mr Boswell, my pride Plumes itself on the connection. To crouch in the train of meer, stupid Wealth & Greatness, except where the commercial interests of worldly Prudence find their account in it, I hold to be Prostitution in any one that is not born a Slave; but to have been acquainted with a man such as Mr Boswell, I would hand down to my Posterity, as one of the honours of their Ancestor (Letter 284).
Boswell received and endorsed the letter (13th Nov 1788, ‘Mr Robert Burns the Poet expressing very high sentiments of me’) but made no attempts to meet Burns. Burns’s need for redemptive Scottish Heroes, ancestral and contemporary, certainly chose the wrong man in that sycophantic, anglophile prose genius. Also this poem’s programme puts together a misalliance of talents who Burns then thought were the rhetorical equals of Demosthenes and Tully, whose eloquence would cause the triumph of Scotland at Saint Stephens, the then site of Parliament. Ll. 73–81 list the candidates allegedly worthy of this task.
That this é lite legal, political corps would co-operate to save Scotland was to prove for Burns the wildest of hopes. By 1795, as his brilliant poem The Dean of Faculty reveals, Scotland was tearing itself apart with the brilliant radical Henry Erskine outvoted and ejected from office by Robert Dundas. Henry Dundas, as Pitt’s ferociously repressive Home Secretary, was running a fatwah against his radical countrymen.
From ll. 85–100 we have images of Scottish outrage spilling into weapons bearing anarchy with echoes of recent Jacobite incursion. Pitt, auld Boconnocks, is praised for his new methods of taxation. ‘Commutation’ (l. 121) refers to his 1784 Commutation Act which diverted tax from tea to windows. Fox, at this time is still for Burns merely a licentious nuisance. After another invocation of Scottish capacity for violence, he ends by requesting the 45 MPs to support their Nation. His actual hopes of their doing so is summed up in a brilliantly ironic last stanza where he envisages these pursy placemen subsisting on the diet and in the rags of Scottish peasantry among the temptations of St James’s in London.
This level of irony is sustained in the quite brilliantly subtle seven-stanza Postscript which Burns adds to the poem. Carol McGuirk suggests that this should be read as the Poet’s first address to Parliament. On the face of it, derived from Enlightenment theories that national character is the product of climate and environment, the poem seems to be a celebration of Scottish machismo and militarism over the cowardice inherent to the wine drinking peasantry of warmer climes. This apparent celebration of Scottish militarism is, however, immediately, devastatingly undercut. Ll. 163–74 are an astonishingly compressed denunciation of the savage, self-destructive consequences to the unaware Highlanders of their post-Culloden integration into British Imperial armies. Equally dark for Scotland is the fact that the feminine part of the nation (ll. 181–3) has degenerated to an incontinent crone. Thus, the ultimate toast (ll. 185–6) is the blackest irony.
N.B. Stanza 15 here is not included in Kinsley. There is also a variation in the last stanza.
1 This was written before the Act anent the Scotch Distilleries of session 1786; for which Scotland and the Author return their most grateful thanks. R.B.
1 George Dempster, mentioned in The Vision.
2 Sir Adam Ferguson.
3 James Graham, Son of the Duke of Montrose.
4 Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville.
5 Thomas Erskine, M.P., brother of Henry Erskine.
6 Frederick Campbell and Ilay Campbell.
7 Sir William Cunninghame of Livingston.
8 Classical rhetorical orators – colloquial for Cicero.
9 Hugh Montgomerie, Earl of Eglinton.
10 Leader of the Whig Opposition.
11 An allusion to William Pitt’s grandfather, Robert.
12 A worthy old Hostess of the Author’s in Mauchline, where he sometimes studies Politics over a glass of guid auld Scotch Drink. R.B.
The Holy Fair
First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
A robe of seeming truth and trust
Hid crafty observation;
And secret hung, with poison’d crust,
The dirk of defamation:
A mask that like the gorget show’d,
Dye-varying on the pigeon;
And for a mantle large and broad,
He wrapt him in Religion.
Tom Brown, Hypocrisy A-La-Mode.
Upon a simmer Sunday morn, summer
When Nature’s face