Something I put together as an attempt at the Glorious Memory for Burns night a couple of months ago.
Robert Burns was an 18th Century Scottish poet, writer of traditional folk songs and ballads and a fierce critic of the political and social order prevalent in Scotland at the time. Burns was born into a politically, economically and socially turbulent Scotland and his life’s work reflects almost every aspect. He wrote in both Scots dialects and in Standard English, and is universally regarded as Scotland’s foremost literary figure. His finest poems are characterized by satire directed at the Church and the Establishment and he was forthright in his support for liberty and social justice. As a direct result of his mastery of language and unaccountably broad education, (when he was supposed to be only a peasant), his achievement as a radical and dissenting voice was denied and suppressed by urbane editors and commentators alike during his life, and continued with his death well into the twentieth century.
Let me quote from a recent biography, from a chapter describing his first visit to Edinburgh:
“Unlike Heathcliff, Burns was not the brute, sub-literate threat, that dark, erotic stranger, which haunted the bourgeois imagination of the period. They were faced with someone hyper-literate, fecundly allusive to a degree far beyond their powers in canonical literary and biblical tradition, who could not only talk their pants off but, it was feared, those of their wives and daughters too. Command of language was directly related to a fixed social hierarchical social order; Burns threatened social anarchy by the very nature of his poetic, rhetorical potency. It offered them some security to classify him as a class-bound ‘heaven-taught ploughman’ rather than great poet’”.
His poetry has suffered neglect due to careful censorship of his political views, and he is still remembered sentimentally for his pastoral descriptions of farming life. Few realise he would probably have been the most influential dissenting voice at the time had he been able to gain a public platform.
He was the eldest of seven children, was the father of twelve, had one wife (whom he possibly married twice), several well-publicised affaires, was a Freemason, suffered from chronic ill-health and lived and died in financial uncertainty.
He has been criticised by many for being confused in his political views but it is evident that he followed Dr. Johnson’s comment on the “unwisdom of giving one’s loyalty of mind to a single party”. This is not confusion but freedom of thought. As a result, almost every political party has taken Burns to bed with them at some time or other. However, his nationalism, internationalism and radicalism never wavered. He believed constantly and passionately in Scotland, in the ‘brotherhood of man’, and in the rights of the ordinary man.
To Burns, the Anglo-British Empire to which Scotland was becoming a part did not look like such a good deal. He saw Scots drawn into bloody wars of empire. He saw that the Scottish leadership would bow to their masters the English Parliament and Hanoverian King with the bullies winning every time. He saw a Scotland which had fought heroically through history for freedom lost forever. He saw himself as the representative of a new Scottish poetry, creating a mythological and Romantic image of a nation lost to greed.
He married Jean Armour, a long-time love of his who was pregnant with twins, in 1786. On 3 March, the day of Jean’s confinement prior to labour, Burns wrote to his friend Robert Ainslie: ‘Jean I found banished like a martyr – forlorn, destitute and friendless; all for the good old cause: I have reconciled her to her fate; I have taken her a room: I have taken her to my arms: I have given her a mahogany bed: I have given her a guinea; and I have f****d her till she rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory….She did this all like a good girl, and I took the opportunity of some dry horse litter and gave her such a thundering scalade that electrified the very marrow of her bones’. Needless to say, the twins both died within a few weeks.
Let me finish with a few bitter lines Burns scratched on a window pane in Stirling, the ancient seat of Scottish kings, in 1789:
HERE Stewarts once in triumph reign’d,
And laws for Scotland’s weal ordain’d;
But now unroof’d their Palace stands,
Their sceptre’s fall’n to other hands;
Fallen indeed, and to the earth,
Whence grovelling reptiles take their birth.—
The injur’d STEWART-line are gone,
A Race outlandish fill their throne;
An idiot race, to honor lost;
Who knows them best despise them most.
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