Robert burns (1759-1796)

Robert Burns is the greatest poet of Scotland. Moreover, he is the great national hero of the Scottish people. There are monuments and memorials erected in his hour all over Scotland. In all parts of the world where the Scotsmen have migrated they have organized local Burns’ societies, where they gather to sing his songs and to pledge his name. It is a striking tribute of the affection they bear him.

In the late 18th century became fashionable the idea of natural poets to be found among peasants and proletarians, whose caste or rural habitation protected them against the artificialities of civilized life and culture. When Robert Burns published his first volume of Poems in 1786 he was hailed as a natural genius, a “heaven-taught ploughman”, whose poems were a spontaneous overflow of his native feelings. But in fact he was a well-read man who broke clear from the conventions of decayed neoclassicism as a deliberate craftsman who turned to two earlier traditions for his models – Scottish oral folklore and folk song and the highly developed Scottish literary tradition, which goes back to the Middle ages.

Robert Burns’s father was a hard-working farmer in Ayrshire. Robert, with his brother Gilbert, was forced to do the toil of a man while still a boy, and began to develop the heart trouble of which he was to die when only 37. Although his father had a Scottish esteem for education, Burns’s knowledge in literature, theology, politics, and philosophy came mainly from his own reading. His sympathies were democratic, he was an outspoken admirer of republican revolutions in America and France. In religion, too, he was a radical, professing “the Religion of Sentiment and Reason” in opposition to the strict Calvinism in which ha had been raised. He hailed the French Revolution and sent a cannon as a gift to the Convent.

His first volume of poems became an immediate success. In 1788 Burns was given a commission as excise officer, or tax inspector, and he settled with Jean Armour, his wife, near Dumfries, combining the official duties with farming. When the farm failed he moved his family to the town of Dumfries. In 1787 James Johnson, an engraver, had enlisted Burns’s aid in collecting Scottish folk songs for an anthology called The Scots Musical Museum. Burns soon became the real editor for several volumes of this work, devoting all his free time to collecting, restoring, and imitating traditional songs or to writing his own verses to traditional dance tunes. Almost all of his creative work, during the last twelve years of his life, went into the writing of songs for the Musical Museum and for George Thomson’s Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs. This was for him a labour of love and patriotism, done anonymously, for which he refused to accept any pay, although badly in need of money.

The major part of Burns’ poems are concerned with men and manners and are written in literary forms popular in the 18th century: satires in a variety of modes, verse epistles to friends and fellow poets, a mock-heroic narrative, Tam O’Shanter. Burns’s best poetry, however, was written in Scots, Ayrshire dialect of English spoken by Scottish peasants and (on informal occasions) by most 18th-century Scottish gentlefolk as well. It deals almost exclusively with his own day and his immediate surroundings. Burns is often considered a pre-Romantic who, anticipating Wordsworth, revived the English lyric, exploited the literary forms and legends of folk culture, and wrote in the language really spoken by the common people. These lyrics took up the oral tradition and represented a real departure from the decaying conventions of English neoclassicism. Burns’ reputation is based primary on his songs. He wrote about 300 of them. In his songs Burns gives himself over wholeheartedly to the emotion of the moment, evoked by all the great lyric subjects: love, drink, work, friendship, patriotism, and bawdry. His theme was “the sentiments and manners he felt and saw in himself and his rustic compeers around him.” These he portrays with clear insight and vivid realism, even to the most sordid details Thus in his The Jolly Beggars, written in 1785 but not published till after the poet’s death, Burns takes humanity at its lowest pitch of wretched squalor, and chooses for his setting a disreputable and dirty tavern. His beggars are drunken, lustful vagabonds. The poet does not conceal anything and makes no apologies, but he finds in his characters gaiety and courage which are not mere bravado. The poem is a triumphant justification of the assertion that “a man’s a man for a’ that”. However, the major theme of Burns’s lyric is the theme of joy of life. His poetic character is hearty, generous, and tender, with a sympathy which encompasses humans of all types, from national heroes to tavern roarers.

Burns raised the forms and characters of folklore to a higher artistic level. His innovation consisted in writing about a farmer seen with a farmer’s eyes. His poetry is devoid of mythological comparisons and ornament. Although he began his literary work as a sentimentalist his later works include parodies of sentimentalism, e.g. Elegy on the Death of My Sheep Mary. He had a keen eye for some of the beauties of natural scenery – flowing streams, trees waving in the wind, nature in motion of seasons. There is little description, however, of natural scenery for its own sake. For him nature was but a pleasant background for man’s daily work. Writing about the severe nature of Scotland he glorified the unity of man and nature. In the poem To a Mouse the lyrical hero turns the mouse up in her nest with the plough and seeing its fear associates its fate with his own fate:

I’m truly sorry man’s dominion

Has broken nature’s social union,

An’ justified that ill opinion

Which makes thee startle

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion

An’ fellow mortal!

My Mousie, thou art not thy lane,

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best-laid schemes o’mice an’ men

Gang aft a-gley,

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

For promised joy.