История литературы / 24. Robert Burns

The word “romance” meant originally the literature written in this language (vernacular). The adjective “romantic” first appeared in English in the mid 17th century as a word to describe fabulous, extravagant, fictitious & unreal. Gradually the term “romanticism” was applied to denote the birth of literature depending on instinct & emotion. The romantic literature came to oppose the rational literature of the 18th century. The literature of romanticism is very much diverse in all European countries. In every country it had its peculiar features. Even within the same country no two writers are necessarily romantic in the same way. Usually romantic writers are divided into 3 groups. This subdivision depends upon the vision of this or that writer. 1) Some of them connected their hopes & desires with the future development of humanity. 2) Some relied upon the past. The heroes of the past served the subject matter for their writing. 3) Others relied upon the human instincts of the human being & disregarded the outer world as being unworthy & corrupted. A romantic person (a romanticist) is a person who is not satisfied with the present. He seems to escape from familiar experience and from the limitations of reality. He delights in the marvelous. He may range from the most trivial literary fantasy to the most exalted mysticism. At the same time, he usually loves the realistic detail and associates the remote with the familiar. His main effort is to live constantly in the world of imagination. The typical romanticist is a dreamer, though no single writer conforms wholly to the type. In dreams a great significance is attached to symbolism. That’s why romantic literature is very rich in symbols. Burns’ romanticism bares a very earthly character. He oriented his activity neither on the past, nor on the future, he also disregarded all mysterious and supernatural attitude. He belonged to neither of the three groups of romanticists. His romanticism expressed itself in quite an earthly democracy, and it was tightly connected with the soil, it had a universal appeal, as well as Blake’s one. Robert Burns is quite a difficult poet for discussion. It doesn’t only concern the fact that he wrote in the Scottish dialect. The attitude to him is very different (if we mean critics). The idea that he was peasant poet endowed with genius is partially true. He was quite an educated man, knew French, some bits of Latin. He is shown by artists as a true representative of soil, some other artists show him as a gentleman poet. Burns has given literary expression and form to the most cherished tasted and feelings of people. His unique historical value depends also upon the fact that his poetry came into being when oral ballad literature was practically killed. The poetical genius of Scotland took a long sleep until it woke up one again in the life and work of Robert Burns (Robert Ferguson, Michael Bruce, John Logan – do not show the trace of intense patriotism that is so vivid in Burns’ poems). So Burns was the most prominent romanticist in Scotland. Burns’ romanticism is different from that of Blake, whose romanticism is philosophical. Burns may be considered as a contrast to Blake’s vision of life. His romanticism has a real world for a background, the world of everyday life. Burns understanding of democracy is very much different & was influenced by some historical events. Magna Carta (1215): The great charter of England signed by king John the Lackland under pressure of barons & the archbishop of Canterbury. As a statement of law the charter was chiefly intended to guarantee feudal rights against royal abuse & maintain baronial privileges. The King set limitations to his absolute power. This was one of the greatest revolutions in the history of humanity. It is considered to be the first document of democracy. Declaration of Independence (1776) (Thomas Jefferson) (during the American revolution): “We told these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights that among these rights are life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness.” These 2 documents are no righter documents of democracy than verses of Burns. Being a peasant Burns understood the democratic doctrine – everybody & everything has a right to exist and has a right to be happy. The idea of mice & men is Burns’ idea, it’s an idea that people should bear it in mind that the world of animals & plants is as important as their own. Burns was born in a small farm. Though his father was a worthy man, all his life he had a bitter struggle with poverty and misfortune. After his father’s death Burns and his brother took the farm to take care of it. During the next few years he wrote the most famous of his poems (Holy Fair, Twa Dogs, Twa Herds, Holy Willie’s prayer) that abound invigorous passages of description (the signal of merriment). The farm didn’t prosper, Burns went to West Indies, he gathered and published his poems to raise money, and they were received with great enthusiasm. E.g. “To a Mouse”. Practically all the poems devoted to animals, insects or plants have the same structure (to smb, the detailed explanation after the title – how and when it happened). The narrator of all the poems of such type is a peasant or a ploughman. Even judging by these poems we may say that Burns is a true poet who voiced a wide range of human experience. He wrote about things which were close to poor people. He was a poet of the working humanity. He made the Scottish dialect world-famous. One of his chief strategies – satire. His comedy and satire may be compared to Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” (we listen not only to characters talking, we listen to the poet himself, who appears to be an eye-witness and a shrewdly humorous commentator on the life. He presents himself as part of this life).Burns’ satire and his approach may be defined as a human comedy. His satire comes from the natural human sympathy, it was against those who ruined the creative energies of life and perverted the essential nature of man (The Louse and Holy Willie’s Prayer illustrate it).“To a Louse” In the first 2 stanzas Burns is a bit ironic and he is really angry with the louse who is so impudent. In the 7^th stanza Burns shows us a lady (O Jenny…). She is in church not for praying but for showing her new hat. Up to the last moment she is unaware that there is a louse on it. He draws parallels between the lady and the louse. Burns expresses his compassion with a louse, because it had worked its way to the top of the hat, but on the other hand there is nothing to eat there. In the final stanza Burns becomes philosophic. The contrast between the vulgarity of the louse and the social pretensions of the lady on whose bonnet it is creeping produces ever greater mock outrage on the poet's part until he finally, with effective abruptness, drops the pose of the disturbed onlooker and turns to address the lady herself. As soon as she is named - by the simple country name 'Jenny' - she ceases to be a fine lady and becomes just a girl to whom the poet is addressing a friendly remark. The note of amusement is not dropped, but it has become kindly. He formulates the all-embracing conclusion (O would some power…). The verse is a satire that is different from the satire of other poets. Burns relies on irony, not on sarcasm. Though the poem is short it gives us the opportunity to investigate Burns’ method. He uses small detail to generalize and to draw a philosophical conclusion. “Jolly Beggars” In this remarkable composition Burns describes the lowest stratum of society. The dregs of humanity are spending their time in the most reckless manner. Burns provides very detailed analysis of the company. The background for this poem is a story that happened to Burns himself when he visited a small public house. The poem was considered to be dangerous, revolutionary. The poems consists of seven songs belonging to different people, the whole forming a tightly integrated dramatic structure. The seven distinct characters are: a Soldier and his "doxy," a Pickpocket (tlraucle Carlin"), a Fiddler, a Caird (tinker), a "Dame," and a Bard (ballad-singer). Each of these, with the exception of the Dame, sings a song; the Bard sings two. In organizing this material, Burns cleverly interrelates all seven characters. Burns opens the poem with the wild scene of merriment in Poosie-Nansie’s, and then focuses on the story of the Soldier and his Doxy sharply emphasizing their lust (they are a couple who mated in youth, separated and then reunited in middle age). The Soldier praises for his two careers – a soldier and a beggar. Then Doxy sings her song recounting her life story as a camp follower. Then Pickpocket appears (her song of mourning for her dead John Highlandman is a reaction to the Doxy’s joy in rediscovering her “old boy”). The Fiddler is stricken by the charms of the massive Pickpocket and, moved by her grief, he consoles her with the song and offer of love. The fifth song is that of the Caird who is also captured by the Pickpocket. He defeats the Fiddler, and the Fiddler finds consolation with a Dame who turns out to be one of the three “wives” of the Bard. But the Bard is not offended (he still has two wives left, so he wishes Fiddler and Dame luck in another song). The Bard’s second song demanded by the whole company, brings the scene of drunkenness and profligacy to its crashing climax. In each of the songs we can see the theme of celebration of the beggar philosophy, of their freedom. This brief summary of the cantata reveals not only its tight dramatic organization, but also suggests Burns's ambivalence in the contrasting ideas and attitudes of the beggars and the narrator (the style of the poetry itself is significant). As for ideas or views of life these are expressed directly only in the songs, and they are traditional for beggar literature: "freedom" (all characters), sexual amorality (Doxy, Fiddler, Bard), contempt for property values (Pickpocket, Caird, Bard), contempt for the requirements of social respectability (all characters, but especially the Bard), and so on. The narrator, on the other hand, has no ideas, he pretends simply to report what he sees, without any commentary. But the narrator’s attitude reveals itself in his selection of detail (as wells as language), and in this way his point of view is differentiated sharply from that of the beggars. The narrator is under no illusions; he is very realistic choosing details which tend to bring out both the absurdity of the beggars’ pretensions and the misery of their lives. Burns had seen much of beggary and had feared being reduced to it himself. His sympathy for these beggars comes out in the heroics of the songs, but his clear grasp of the reality of their way of life is shown in the satiric attitude of the narrator. For the most part Burns was a realist, because the principles he used were based on terrestrial experience. In Burns’ poems devotion is a kind of holographic attitude to people. Burns was devoted to the place he was born in, to his family, to the wine he drank with his friends, to the stories they shared – all these attitudes he described in his long and short poems (Tom O’Shanter, Jolly Beggars). This immediate environment included those whom Burns hated and satirized. He spoke about his attitude to his country, to the mountains he saw being a child. His attitude to the world is democratic. The attitude to democracy included the beasts and the people (the basic motif of survival – do not kill), at the same time he was also romantic; his belief in the goodness of man and in the survival of God’s creation was quite romantic: realism+romanticism.