The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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learning Scots to read your book, but they don’t like your address to the King, and say it will hurt the sale of the rest. Of this I am no judge. I can only say there is no piece … I would vote to leave out, tho’ several where I would draw my pen over the lines, or spill the ink glass over a verse. (Robert Burns and Mrs Dunlop, ed. William Wallace (London: 1898), p. 11)
Burns’s response was peremptory and unyielding:
Your criticisms, Madam I understand very well, and could have wished to have pleased you better. You are right in your guesses that I am not very amenable. Poets, much my superiors, have so flattered those who possessed the adventitious qualities of wealth and power that I am determined to flatter no created being, either in prose or verse, so help me God. I set as little by kings, lords, clergy, critics, &c as all these respectable Gentry do by my Bardship. I know what I may expect from the world, by and by, illiberal abuse and contemptuous neglect: but I am resolved to study the sentiments of a very respectable Personage, Milton’s Satan – Hail horrors! Hail infernal world!
I am happy, Madam, that some of my favourite pieces are distinguished by you’re particular approbation. For my DREAM which has unfortunately incurred your loyal dis-pleasure, I hope in four weeks time or less to have the honour of appearing, at Dunlop, in it’s defence in person (Letter 98).
It is hard to see what sort of convincing defence Burns could have mounted concerning the danger to his incipient poetic career with regard to the flagrantly disloyal, anti-Hanoverian elements of this poem. Beginning with the general weakened fiscal state of the nation resulting from the disastrously lost American war and Pitt’s subsequent punitive taxation policies and naval cuts (ll. 60–2) with an inverted political order where the lowest types are at the top of the government, Burns launches into a highly specific assault on the varied cupidities and promiscuities of what he consistently perceived as an irretrievably dysfunctional family of German upstarts. L. 26 contrasts the virtues of Charles Edward Stuart.
The treatment of the King and Queen is mild compared to that doled out to their children. Driven by infantile, Oedipal rage, the Prince of Wales, had flung himself into the grossly licentious world of whoring and gambling of ‘Charlie’ Fox’s opposing Whigs. Brilliantly, ironically, Burns (ll. 91–9) compresses an allusion to post-Falstaffian redemption to this Prince of Wales. The ploughman poet, tellingly, feels he needs to explain this reference to Henry IV to his cultivated audience. The ‘right rev’rend Osnaburg’ is Frederick Augustus (1763–1827) who was ‘elected’ to the bishopric of Asna-burg in Westphalia by his father, George III, in 1764. He added to this clerical distinction by taking up with Letita Derby, the ex-mistress of Rann the highwayman. The ‘Royal TARRY-BREEKS’ (l. 109) is another prodigally gifted son, Prince William (1765–1837), who became William IV in 1830. He had become naughtily, nautically involved with Sarah Martin, daughter of the commissioner of the Portsmouth dockyard. This encounter may have been derived from what Kinsley describes as the ‘ingenious model’ in Robert Sempill’s Ballat Maid Upoun Margaret Fleming, callit the Fleming Bark in Edinburgh, which was modernised in Ramsay’s The Ever Green (1724). Similar metaphors of dropped tackle and predatory boarding parties can also be found in Donne, followed by Pope.
Burns claims that his knowledge of this particular incident came from a newspaper. It is probable that most of this kind of information so came to him. Unlike Wordsworth, who was wholly averse to what he saw as such vulgar contemporary contaminants, Burns belongs to an earlier satirical tradition. He not only throve on journalistic gossip, but could transmute it, like Byron, into great poetry. He also refers warmly to Hogarth and the whole world of eighteenth-century political caricature had undoubtedly a strong influence on him, perhaps not yet fully appreciated. The King also had five daughters (ll. 118–126) who were, needless to say, not noted for their beauty, unlike their chronic constipation.
1 Sir John Falstaff, Vide Shakespeare. R.B.
2 Alluding to the Newspaper account of a certain royal Sailor’s Amour. R.B.
The Vision
Duan First1
First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
The Sun had clos’d the winter-day,
The Curlers quat their roaring play, quit
And hunger’d Maukin taen her way, hare, taken
To kail-yards green, kitchen-gardens
5 While faithless snaws ilk step betray snows each
Whare she has been. where
The Thresher’s weary flingin-tree, flailing
The lee-lang day had tired me; live-long
And when the Day had clos’d his e’e eye
10 Far i’ the West,
Ben i’ the Spence, right pensivelie, back, parlour
I gaed to rest. went
There, lanely by the ingle-cheek, lonely, fire side
I sat and ey’d the spewing reek, smoke
15 That fill’d, wi’ hoast-provoking smeek, cough, smoke
The auld clay biggin; old, building
An’ heard the restless rattons squeak rats
About the riggin. roof
All in this mottie, misty clime, dusty specks
20 I backward mus’d on wasted time:
How I had spent my youthfu’ prime,
An’ done naething, nothing
But stringing blethers up in rhyme, nonesense stories
For fools to sing.
25 Had I to guid advice but harket, good, listened
I might, by this, hae led a market, have
Or strutted in a bank and clarket clarked
My Cash-Account:
While here, half-mad, half-fed, half-sarket, half-clothed
30 Is a’ th’ amount.
I started, mutt’ring blockhead! coof! fool
An’ heav’d on high my wauket loof, horny palm/hand
To swear by a’ yon starry roof,
Or some rash aith, oath
35 That I, henceforth, would be rhyme-proof
Till my last breath —
When click! the string the snick did draw; door latch
And jee! the door gaed to the wa’; went, wall
And by my ingle-lowe I saw, fire-flame
40 Now bleezan bright,
A tight, outlandish Hizzie, braw, girl
Come full in sight.
Ye need na doubt, I held my whisht; not doubt, said nothing
The infant aith, half-form’d, was crusht; oath/pledge
45 I glowr’d as eerie’s I’d been dusht, stared, touched
In some wild glen;
When sweet, like modest Worth, she blusht,
And stepped ben. inside
Green, slender, leaf-clad Holly-boughs leaf-clothed/covered
50