The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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decks the lily fair in flow’ry pride,
160 ‘Would, in the way His Wisdom sees the best,
‘For them and for their little ones provide;
‘But, chiefly, in their hearts with Grace Divine preside’.
From Scenes like these, old SCOTIA’S grandeur springs,
That makes her lov’d at home, rever’d abroad:
165 Princes and lords are but the breath of kings,
‘An honest man’s the noble work of GOD’;2
And certes, in fair Virtue’s heavenly road, verily
The Cottage leaves the Palace far behind;
What is a lordling’s pomp? – a cumbrous load,
170 Disguising oft the wretch of human kind,
Studied in arts of Hell, in wickedness refin’d!
O SCOTIA! my dear, my native soil!
For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent!
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil
175 Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content!
And O! may Heaven their simple lives prevent
From Luxury’s contagion, weak and vile!
Then, howe’er crowns and coronets be rent,
A virtuous Populace may rise the while,
180 And stand a wall of fire around their much-lov’d ISLE.
O THOU! who pour’d the patriotic tide,
That stream’d thro’ WALLACE’S undaunted heart,
Who dar’d to, nobly, stem tyrannic pride,
Or nobly die, the second glorious part:
185 (The Patriot’s GOD, peculiarly Thou art,
His friend, inspirer, guardian, and reward!)
O never, never SCOTIA’S realm desert;
But still the Patriot, and the Patriot-bard
In bright succession raise, her Ornament and Guard!
As Kinsley noted (Vol. III, p. 112): ‘What appealed to Burns contemporaries … was the naturalism and the moral tone of TC’s SN. The English Review (Feb. 1787) thought it the best poem in the Kilmarnock book, offering ‘a domestic picture of rustic simplicity, natural tenderness, and innocent passion that must please every reader whose feelings are not perverted’. As Henry Mackenzie’s and Robert Heron’s reviews show (See Low, The Critical Heritage), conformist Scots were only too eager to build up such English pieties.
Unfazed that a ‘heaven-taught’ ploughman should be so canonically allusive, we find, embryonically in these Tory sentimentalists, the enormous Victorian enthusiasm for a poem which seemed, under the growing threat of the anarchic urban, industrial crowd, to offer the security and succour of a pietistically all-accepting rural folk. (See Andrew Noble, ‘Some Versions of Scottish Pastoral: The Literati and the Tradition’ in Order in Space and Society, ed. Markus (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 263–310.
Twentieth-century critics have mainly been less easy with the poem. In his masterly reading Daiches compares it unfavourably to Fergusson’s formally Spenserian precursor, The Farmer’s Ingle. Compared to Fergusson’s consistent vernacular, Daiches finds the language and voice uneven in the Burns poem. The problem Daiches believes is that, beginning with its initial homage to Robert Aitken: ‘What Aitken in a Cottage would have been;/Ah! tho’ his worth unknown, far happier there I ween’, a most unlikely tale, the poem is muddled, in parts, especially the ruined maid sequence, by Burns too consciously looking over his shoulder to please genteel Edinburgh.’ As he further notes:
There is probably no poem of Burns in which the introduction of an artificial personality has spoiled a potentially fine work to the extent that it has in The Cotter’s Saturday Night. The main trouble is that the poet has kept shifting his attitude, and with it his diction, between several incompatible positions. He is at one and the same time the sympathetic, realistic observer; at still another he is the sophisticated moralist acting as a guide showing off his rustic character for the benefit of a sentimental, genteel audience (p. 149).
Daiches is also rightly concerned with the semi, if not wholly, detached nature of the last two stanzas: ‘But he overdoes the patriotic note, and in his final stanza seems to forget altogether the real theme of his poem.’ Perhaps subconsciously, Burns did realise that some of the poem was complicit with values he detested and this invocation of a national, contractually governed common people was his attempt to deny some of the sentiments which preceded his inevitably inorganic conclusion. Certainly he is echoing the national spirit of Fergusson’s The Farmer’s Ingle:
On sicken food has mony doughty deed
By Caledonia’s ancestors been done;
By this did mony wright fu’ weirlike bleed
In brulzies frae the dawn to set o’ sun:
’Twas this that brac’d their gardies stiff and strang
That bent the deidly yew in antient days,
Laid Denmark’s daring sons on yird alang,
Gar’d Scottish thristles bang the Roman bays;
For near our crest their heads they doughtna raise.
It would be hard to overestimate Fergusson’s influence in both national style and substance on Burns. From Fergusson, albeit often more elegiacally expressed, come the sense of the food, drink, music and personages that make up the Scottish spirit. Burns also understood that Fergusson was, if covertly, a profoundly political poet. Like himself, Fergusson was socially displaced because he also existed in a hierarchical world between masters and men. Their political poetry, then, had to be ironic, oblique, comically masked. In defining Fergusson as ‘bauld and slee’ (bold and sly) Burns, knowingly, defined himself. As we have already seen, Fergusson’s brilliant Hame Content: A Satire with its denunciation of those Europhiliac, decadent aristocrats who will not remain responsibly at home was put, in The Twa Dogs, to equally brilliant use. These lines from the same Fergusson poem should remind us simultaneously of the relatively uneven failure of The Cotter’s Saturday Night and the greatness in representing the harshness, beauty and injustice in the life of the common people found in so much of Burns’s other poetry, significantly due to Fergusson’s influence on him:
Now whan the Dog-day heats begin
To birsel and to peel the skin,
May I lie streetkit at my ease,
Beneath the caller shady trees,
(Far frae the din o’ Borrowstown,)
Whar water plays the haughs bedown,
To jouk the simmer’s rigor there,
And breath a while the caller air
’Mang herds, an’ honest cotter fock
That till the farm and feed the flock;
Careless o’ mair, wha never fash
To lade their kist wi’ useless cash
But thank the gods for what they’ve sent
O’ health eneugh, and blyth content,
An’ pith, that helps them to stravaig
Owr ilka cleugh and ilka craig,
Unkend to a’ the weary granes
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