The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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was written sometime during the summer of 1785. It is entered in the FCB under August 1785. In his commentary on l. 5 of this poem Kinsley remarks that a ‘meeting with a didactic sage is common in eighteenth-century poetry down to the time of Wordsworth. Burns’s immediate model was apparently the white-haired “grateful form” encountered “on distant heaths beneath autumn skies” by Shenstone (Elegies, vii)’. It is characteristic of Kinsley that as a commentator on Burns’s poems his eye is always fixed on the rear-view mirror hardly ever the road ahead. His commentary is eruditely, densely allusive to Burns’s sources; he rarely has anything to say about Burns’s seminal capacity to influence others, especially if the influence is of a political nature. Burns profoundly influenced Wordsworth. This poem, with its mixture of the elemental and political pains of existence, is probably the single best example of that influence. The depth of Burns’s political passion in the poem can be gauged from Gilbert’s account of its genesis when he noted that several of his brother’s poems were written to ‘bring forward some favourite sentiment of the author. He used to remark to me, that he could not well conceive a more mortifying picture of human life, than a man seeking work. In casting about in his mind how the sentiment might be brought forward, the elegy Man was Made to Mourn was composed’ (Currie, iii. 384). Ll. 57–64 are this sentiment turned into poetry.
Mary Jacobus is particularly astute in her awareness of the degree to which Wordsworth creativity derived from the Scottish poet’s sense of the terrible injustices of the rampant agrarian revolution. As she remarks:
The Last of the Flock confronts, not death, but destitution – the plight of the labouring poor. Burns’s Man was Made to Mourn: A Dirge was clearly in Wordsworth’s mind during the spring of 1798, and its lament for the human condition shapes his poem (Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads 1798 (Oxford: 1976), p. 202).
Wordsworth’s Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman is, if anything, even closer to Burns’s dirge. Simon Lee, a tragic version of Tam Sampson, is faced with not only the increasingly severe symptoms of geriatric decline but the brutal redundancy of, no longer useful, being cast into helpless destitution. This combination of age and political injustice exactly follows Burns and his poem is deliberately echoed in the last lines of Wordsworth’s:
I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! The gratitude of men
Hath oftener left me mourning.
The Dirge is also echoed in Wordsworth’s Lines Written in Early Spring: ‘Have I not reason to lament/ What man has made of man?’, (ll. 23–4). The Leech Gatherer in Resolution and Independence, a poem in which Burns (ll. 45–9) makes an unnamed appearance, is also partly derived from the Dirge. Wordsworth’s poem perhaps postulates a more spiritual consolation than Burns’s Dirge with its vision of that ultimate and absolute democratic equaliser, Death itself.
Winter, a Dirge
Tune: MacPherson’s Farewell
First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
The Wintry West extends his blast,
And hail and rain does blaw;
Or, the stormy North sends driving forth
The blinding sleet and snaw: snow
5 While, tumbling brown, the Burn comes down,
And roars frae bank to brae: from
While bird and beast in covert, rest,
And pass the heartless day.
‘The sweeping blast, the sky o’ercast,’1
10 The joyless winter-day,
Let others fear, to me more dear
Than all the pride of May:
The Tempest’s howl, it soothes my soul,
My griefs it seems to join;
15 The leafless trees my fancy please,
Their fate resembles mine!
Thou POW’R SUPREME, whose mighty Scheme
These woes of mine fulfill,
Here, firm I rest, they must be best,
20 Because they are Thy Will!
Then all I want (Oh, do Thou grant
This one request of mine!):
Since to enjoy Thou dost deny,
Assist me to resign.
This song is ‘The eldest of my printed pieces’ Burns told Dr Moore (Letter 125). In the FCB the poet records the influence upon him of Nature during the most inclement of winter weather: ‘There is scarcely any earthly object gives me more – I don’t know if I should call it pleasure, but something which exalts me, something which enraptures me – than to walk in the sheltered side of a wood or high plantation, in a cloudy winter day, and to hear a stormy wind howling among the trees & raving o’er the plain. – It is my best season for devotion …’ The imagery of winter desolation cast in a melancholy vein runs through the poetry of Burns as a motif for individual loss, or resignation to a person’s fate.
1 Dr Young, R.B.
A Prayer, in the Prospect of Death
First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
O THOU unknown, Almighty Cause
Of all my hope and fear!
In whose dread Presence, ere an hour,
Perhaps I must appear!
5 If I have wander’d in those paths
Of life I ought to shun;
As Something, loudly, in my breast,
Remonstrates I have done.
Thou know’st that Thou hast formed me,
10 With Passions wild and strong;
And list’ning to their witching voice
Has often led me wrong.
Where human weakness has come short,
Or frailty stept aside,
15 Do Thou, ALL-GOOD, for such Thou art,
In shades of darkness hide.
Where with intention I have err’d,
No other plea I have,
But, Thou art good; and Goodness still
20 Delighteth to forgive.
This was almost certainly composed while the poet was at Irvine during the winter of 1781. The original title is, according to the copy in the FCB, ‘A Prayer when fainting fits and other alarming symptoms of a pleurisy or some other dangerous disorder, which indeed still threatens me, first put Nature on the alarm’. Writing to his father, 27th December, 1781, Burns revealed his gloomy illness: ‘The weakness of my nerves has so debilitated my mind that I dare not, either review past events, or look forward into futurity; for the least anxiety, or perturbation in my breast, produces most unhappy effects on my whole frame … I am quite transported at the thought that ere long, perhaps very soon, I shall bid an eternal adieu to all the pains, & uneasiness & disquietudes of this weary life; for I assure you I am heartily tired of it’ (Letter 4). The poem is partly derived from the content of Pope’s Universal Prayer, although the form is that of the Scottish metrical psalms.