The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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give my counsels all in one,
They tuneful-flame still careful fan;
Preserve the dignity of Man,
With Soul erect
And trust the Universal Plan
Will all protect.
Partly energised by his experience, social and intellectual, with Free Masonry this is a pre-Whitmanian dream of progressive, enlightened social and political virtue and not the thing itself. Ayrshire, of which Burns himself is the best witness, was a deeply frictive culture marked by severe economic instability even for the prosperous and much poverty for the rest. It was also subject to extreme clerical bigotry. The aesthetic stresses we feel in the second Duan derive from the forced, if not false, historical vision Burns here uncharacteristically adopts. There is, of course, the problem, significantly discussed in Issac Kramnick’s Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Cornell U.P.: 1990), as to whether such reformists could deliver their partly practical, partly Utopian project. They were not to be given the opportunity. By the mid 1790s these progressives were, with their poet laureate, in the deepest of trouble as Burkean derived hierarchy and economics brutally reinherited the world. Dugald Stewart like his fellow Whig academics was suspiciously confined. At least, unlike the octogenarian Thomas Reid, he was not roughed up. The admired James Beattie (1735–1803), whose The Minstrel influenced Wordsworth, and, as ll. 123–6 state, allegedly defeated David Hume’s atheism, relapsed, like James Boswell, into a semi-hysterical Toryism to the degree of involving himself in drinking bouts with the frequently besotted Henry Dundas.
1 Duan, a term of Ossian’s for the different divisions of a digressive Poem. See his Cath-Loda, Vol. 2. of M’Pherson’s Translation. R.B.
2 The Wallaces. R.B.
3 William Wallace.
4 Adam Wallace of Richardton, cousin to the immortal Preserver of Scottish Independence.
5 Wallace Laird of Craigie, who was second in Command, under Douglas Earl of Ormond, at the famous battle on the banks of Sark, fought anno 1448. That glorious victory was principally owing to the judicious conduct and intrepid valour of the gallant Laird of Craigie, who died of his wounds after the action. R.B.
6 Coilus King of the Picts, from whom the district of Kyle is said to take its name, lies buried, as tradition says, near the family-seat of the Montgomeries of Coilsfield, where his burial place is still shown. R.B.
7 Barskimming, the seat of the Lord Justice Clerk. R.B.
8 Catrine, the seat of the late Doctor, and present Professor [Dugald] Stewart. R.B. His father was Matthew Stewart, also Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh.
9 Colonel Fullerton. R.B.
10 William Fullerton.
11 George Dempster, M.P. (1732–1818)
12 Dr James Beattie (1735–1803).
13 Commenting on ‘Potosi’s mine’ (in Bolivia, South America) to Peter Hill, Burns wrote: ‘these glittering cliffs of Potosi where the all-sufficient, all powerful Deity, WEALTH, holds his immediate court of joys and pleasures’ (Letter 325).
Halloween
First published in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786
Yes! let the Rich deride, the Proud disdain,
The simple pleasures of the lowly train:
To me more dear, congenial to my heart,
One native charm, than all the gloss of art.
GOLDSMITH.
‘The following poem will, by many readers, be well enough understood; but for the sake of those unaquainted with the manners and traditions of the country [region] where the scene is cast, notes are added, to give some account of the principal charms and spells of that night, so big with prophecy to the peasantry of the west of Scotland. The passion of prying into futurity makes a striking part of the history of human nature in its rude state, in all ages and nations; and it may be some entertainment to a philosophic mind, if any such honour the author with a perusal, to see the remains of it, among the more unenlightened in our own.’
To this headnote, Burns defines Halloween thus: ‘Is thought to be a night when Witches, Devils, and other mischief-making beings, are all abroad on their baneful, midnight errands: particularly, those aerial people, the fairies, are said, on that night, to hold a grand anniversary.’
R.B.
Upon that night, when Fairies light
On Cassilis Downans1 dance,
Or owre the lays, in splendid blaze, over, fields
On sprightly coursers prance;
5 Or for Colean the rout is taen, Culzean, taken
Beneath the moon’s pale beams;
There, up the Cove2, to stray and rove,
Amang the rocks and streams
To sport that night:
10 Amang the bonie winding banks,
Where Doon rins, wimplin, clear; runs, winding
Where BRUCE3 ance ruled the martial ranks, once
An’ shook his Carrick spear;
Some merry, friendly, country-folks
15 Together did convene,
To burn their nits, an’ pou their stocks, nuts, pull
An’ haud their Halloween hold
Fu’ blythe that night.
The lassies feat, an’ cleanly neat, trim
20 Mair braw than when they’re fine; more fair
Their faces blythe fu’ sweetly kythe show
Hearts leal, an’ warm, an’ kin’: loyal, kind
The lads sae trig, wi’ wooer-babs so spruce, love-knots
Weel-knotted on their garten; well, garters
25 Some unco blate, an’ some wi’ gabs very shy, chatting up
Gar lasses’ hearts gang startin make, go beating
Whyles fast at night. sometimes
Then,