The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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in the world. The biographical letter of August 1787 to Dr Moore is another example of Burns turning prose, this time his marvellous own, into poetry:
– The great misfortune of my life was never to have an aim –. I had felt early some stirrings of Ambition, but they were the blind gropins [sic] of Homer’s Cyclops round the walls of his cave: I saw my father’s situation entailed on me perpetual labor. – The only two doors by which I could enter the fields of fortune were, the most niggardly economy, or the little chicaning art of bargain-making: the first is so contracted an aperture, I never could squeeze myself into it; the last, I always hated the contamination of the threshold. – Thus, abandoned of [every (deleted)] aim or view in life; with a strong appetite for sociability, as well from native hilarity as from a pride of observation and remark; a constitutional hypochondriac taint which made me fly solitude; add to all these incentives to social life, my reputation for bookish knowledge, a certain wild, logical talent, and a strength of thought something like the rudiments of good sense, made me generally a welcome guest; so ’tis no great wonder that always “where two or three were met together, there was I in the midst of them” (Letter 125).
The semi-vacuous self of this poem is further pervaded by chronic guilt and, in the last stanza, a sense of childhood uncomprehending of the losses and crosses that await the adult. If this sounds more the agonised Coleridge than Burns, this is not accidental. An admirer of Burns’s innovative prosody: ‘Bowles, the most tender and, with the exception of Burns, the only always-natural poet in our Language’ (Low, Critical Heritage, p. 108), Coleridge also identified profoundly with this dark side of the Scottish poet.
As George Dekker makes clear in Coleridge and the Literature of Sensibility (London, 1978), Burns’s Despondency: An Ode was a seminal tonal and thematic influence on Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode. It is perhaps a case of it taking one to know one. Equally the manically protean self-mocking, self-making tone is a common factor in both poets’ letters. Presumably it was not this quality which caused that inspired Scottish talent spotter, James Perry (Pirie) (1756 – 1821) to attempt to lure both men to come to London to work for his radically-inclined Morning Chronicle. If anything Coleridge’s often also disguised contributions to the paper in the early 1790s are at least as dissidently radical as Burns’s.
Man Was Made to Mourn: A Dirge
First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
Tune: Peggy Bawn
When chill November’s surly blast
Made fields and forests bare,
One ev’ning, as I wand’red forth
Along the banks of AIRE, Ayr
5 I spy’d a man, whose aged step
Seem’d weary, worn with care,
His face was furrow’d o’er with years,
And hoary was his hair.
Young stranger, whither wand’rest thou?
10 Began the rev’rend Sage;
Does thirst of wealth thy step constrain,
Or youthful Pleasure’s rage?
Or haply, prest with cares and woes,
Too soon thou hast began
15 To wander forth, with me to mourn
The miseries of Man.
The Sun that overhangs yon moors,
Out-spreading far and wide,
Where hundreds labour to support
20 A haughty lordling’s pride:
I’ve seen yon weary winter-sun
Twice forty times return;
And ev’ry time has added proofs,
That Man was made to mourn.
25 O Man! while in thy early years,
How prodigal of time!
Mis-spending all thy precious hours,
Thy glorious, youthful prime!
Alternate Follies take the sway,
30 Licentious Passions burn;
Which tenfold force gives Nature’s law,
That Man was made to mourn.
Look not alone on youthful Prime,
Or Manhood’s active might;
35 Man then is useful to his kind,
Supported is his right:
But see him on the edge of life,
With Cares and Sorrows worn;
Then Age and Want, Oh! ill-match’d pair!
40 Shew Man was made to mourn!
A few seem favourites of Fate,
In Pleasure’s lap carest;
Yet think not all the Rich and Great
Are likewise truly blest:
45 But Oh! what crouds in ev’ry land,
All wretched and forlorn,
Thro’ weary life this lesson learn,
That Man was made to mourn.
Many and sharp the num’rous Ills
50 Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves
Regret, Remorse, and Shame!
And Man, whose heav’n-erected face,
The smiles of love adorn,
55 Man’s inhumanity to Man
Makes countless thousands mourn!
See yonder poor, o’erlabour’d wight,
So abject, mean, and vile,
Who begs a brother of the earth
60 To give him leave to toil;
And see his lordly fellow-worm
The poor petition spurn,
Unmindful, tho’ a weeping wife
And helpless offspring mourn.
65 If I’m design’d yon lordling’s slave,
By Nature’s law design’d,
Why was an independent wish
E’er planted in my mind?
If not, why am I subject to
70 His cruelty, or scorn?
Or why has Man the will and pow’r
To make his fellow mourn?
Yet let not this too much, my Son,
Disturb thy youthful breast:
75 This partial view of human-kind
Is surely not the last!
The poor, oppressed, honest man
Had never, sure, been born,
Had there not been some recompence
80 To comfort those that mourn!
O Death! the poor man’s dearest friend,
The kindest and the best!
Welcome the hour my aged limbs
Are laid with thee at rest!
85 The great, the wealthy fear thy blow,
From pomp and pleasure torn;
But,