The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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rustling play;
And, like a passing thought, she fled
In light away.
The poem is structured in two ‘Duans’ which Burns tells us in his footnote is a term derived from Macpherson’s Ossian where it signifies different sections within a digressive poem. This may have been slightly exhibitionistic, given that contemporary Edinburgh’s enthusiasm for the ‘Highland’ poem was so great that it was even subject to balletic theatrical performance. The games he played with the local literati were, however, usually of a deeper kind. A constant adopter, and adapter of a catholic range of earlier poetic forms, what Burns may be doing here is taking a formal structural device from Macpherson in order to deliver an inverted content. In The Vision we have not a poet melancholically wandering in a ghostly landscape littered with the Celtic-warrior dead, a culture irretrievably lost, but a virile poet celebrating an Ayrshire landscape energised by the power and beauty of its rivers and its organic, living connection with its heroic dead. The intrusion of the supernatural in this poem is not elegiac but consoling and celebratory. The Second Duan, indeed, not only reassures the poet about the nature and success of his creative career but integrates this individual success into an efflorescent Ayrshire, a land full of land-owning local heroes whose varied talents are benevolently directed to the nation’s common good. Here the optimistic energies and anticipations of the Scottish Enlightenment seem to be yielding a rich harvest.
This poem has always been deeply controversial. Daiches (pp. 134–7) sees the poem as broken-backed with the anglicised, literati-pleasing second Duan betraying the vernacular brilliance of the first. Crawford in an extended treatment of the poem sees it as one of Burns’s most complete masterpieces with the stanzas xiv-xviii of the second Duan achieving ‘a unity of the personal and elemental of the sort we associate with poets like Shakespeare and Yeats’. Nor does he think Burns was involved in any kind of sycophancy:
To regard these stanzas as flattery of the local nobility and nothing more would be to misunderstand Burns’s intention completely. The Vision is the work, above all others, in which Burns shows himself aware of the contemporary national renaissance: a movement which, in many spheres of life, from agricultural improvement to moral philosophy, was led by the most energetic and forward-looking of the landed gentry. (pp. 182–92)
The Vision, then, is an extraordinarily ambitious poem, which attempts to resolve, in a related fashion, the poet’s personal cri-sis-ridden anxieties with those of the nation and perceives a happy-ending for both. That it has such national as well as personal aspirations is partly deducible from its main source which was a forgery also entitled The Vision which Ramsay alleged as being translated in 1524 from a fourteenth-century Latin text dealing with a warrior spirit appearing before the depressed narrator who is agonised by John Baliol’s appeasement to England’s King Edward. McGuirk writes (p. 209) that ‘Ramsay’s “sact” bears a thistle and a prophecy of Scottish history; “Coila” bears holly and a prophecy of Burns’s poetic destiny.’ Coila, however, also bears a prophecy of a revived Scotland and it is here that lies the poem’s main difficulty and, indeed, final failure.
The largely successful, vernacular first Duan is one of the most beautiful and moving in all Burns’s poetry. The varied movements of men and beasts through a winterscape lead to arguably the best, most compressed of all accounts by Burns of the toll of farm life on him with its exhausting labour and its rat infested restricted living space culminating in the chronic, constant pressure of poverty and his volatile inadequacy in making a prudent living in the face of it. This bitter introspection is tangibly present to us and it is typical of Burns that such detailed realism is always a prelude to the entry, usually partly comical, of the supernatural into his poetry. Hence the appearance of his holly-crowned, gorgeously-legged Muse. Initially, at least the legs, this may have been based on Bess Paton but she was replaced by another evidently leggy beauty, Jean Armour. Dazzlingly beautiful in herself, this divine woman, mystically, projects the beauty of Ayrshire (ll.62–72). This celebration of Ayrshire’s spirit of place metamorphoses to celebration of the historical nation where, happily, Ayrshire’s virtues converge with those of Scotland as a whole in Burns’s archetypal Scottish hero, William Wallace. Not the least of Mrs Dunlop’s attractions for Burns was as descendant of Wallace. This is one of several poems, which confirm his early wish (Letter 55) ‘to be able to make a Song on his equal to his merits’. Hence Burns’s own footnotes outlining the unbroken lineage of Wallace to the present. Kinsley considers that ll. 107–8 refer to Mrs Dunlop’s eldest son Craigie, who became bankrupt in 1783. He died in England in 1786. This, it should be noted, is hardly the stuff of epic but the all too common experience of the economically deeply unstable world of eighteenth-century incipient capitalism.
Quite atypical of Burns, however, this poem is concerned not with the destructive, often disruptive late eighteenth-century forces of social and economic change but it is an optimistic, partly Utopian, vision or, indeed, dream of a resurrected Ayrshire/Scotland by virtue of the top-down activities of a liberal progressive land-owning and professional é lite. Thus we have not epic heroes drawn up for battle but a list of new men of virtue who tangibly seem, in varied ways, to be delivering the reformative Scottish Enlightenment project. Thus ll. 109–14 celebrate the patriotic, military valour of the Montgomeries of Coylfield. This is no distant hero-worship, however, as Burns was on fraternal terms with James Montgomerie in the merged Tarbolton Masonic Lodge in 1781. L. 115 refers to Barskimming, the home of the improving Sir Thomas Miller, Bt. (1717–89). His steam-boat innovating brother Patrick Miller (1731–1815) of Dalswinton let Ellisland to Burns in 1788. Thomas Miller had an extremely successful legal career. As Lord Barskimming he became Lord Justice Clerk in 1766 and, as Lord Glenlee, Lord President of the Court of Session in 1788. He seems the antithesis of the terrible Lord Braxfield who was to run amok in the political trials of the 1790s: ‘Though well aware that offended justice required satisfaction, he knew that the vilest criminal was entitled to a fair and dispassionate trial … he never uttered a harsh or taunting word’ (Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, l. 343–50.) Ll. 121–6 deal with the noted Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh Matthew Stewart and his even more celebrated son Dugald (1753–1828) who was a tangible friend to Burns in Edinburgh. As Burns wrote to Mrs Dunlop (Letter 152A) of this exceptional man: ‘It requires no common exertion of good sense and Philosophy in persons of elevated rank to keep a friendship properly alive with one much their inferior.’ The letter continues as an act of homage to Stewart’s innate democratic virtues. Ll. 127–32 refer to William Fullerton, diplomat, politician, soldier and agricultural improver who accepted Burns’s advice on the care of cattle and to whom in 1791 the poet sent songs and poems (Letters, 472, 474). Unlike the absentee, Europhile, aristocratic degenerates of The Twa Dogs who, in Fergusson’s lines, ‘… never wi’ their feet hae mett/The marches o’ their ain estate’ these men are tangible assets to Ayrshire and Scotland. Further Burns enjoys support and degrees of intimacy with the best of them. There are, indeed, significant grounds for national optimism.
The second Duan is devoted to Coila’s monologue in which she pours a cornucopia of promised gifts not only on the head of her chosen poet but over all Ayrshire by dint of the aid of her accompanying spirits (perhaps derived from The Rape of the Lock). In this very non-Burnsian happily hierarchical society, each is given according to his needs. Regarding the ‘embryonic’ Burns she gives a detailed account of the growth of the poet. Pre-Wordsworth, Burns believed that the child was father of the creative man. As a sort of angelic counsellor, she offers soothing solutions to the anxieties which, with varying intensity, preoccupied him concerning the nature of his poetic career. Ll. 235–40 are particularly memorable in dealing with the central, crucial problem in all Burns’s poetry and thought concerning the rights of the instinctual self as opposed to imposed conformity. He knew libidinal energy was essential to his art; he was never certain whether it was not only a predatory force for others but, finally, also a self-destructive one. Coila also, in a poem concerned with Scotland’s political independence, deals with his properly modest but worthy relationships to English poetry (ll. 247–8). Finally, l. 259 she reassures him that his true role as rustic poet more than compensates for the lack of money and fame. Crowning him with her holly she triumphantly