Scottish life and character. Burns’s poetry may not always be even in quality or consistent in force, but it certainly always conveys an air of truthfulness.

If Burns’s poetry reverberates with the remoteness of rural Scotland, it is because he found the perfect poetic environment for the universal themes of his works. In 1803, William Wordsworth stood beside his grave and contemplated “How Verse may build a princely throne/ On humble truth.” The throne was carved out of Burns’s understanding of the most significant theme of his time—the democratic spirit (which helps to explain Wordsworth’s tribute). Throughout, the Scottish bard salutes the worth of pure “man,” the man viewed outside the context of station or wealth. Certainly, Burns was sensitive to the principles and causes that spawned the revolutions in America and in France; in fact, closer to home, the Jacobite rebellion sparked by the landing of the Young Pretender from France had occurred only nine years before the poet’s birth. By nature, he was a political liberal, and his poems take advantage of every opportunity for humans or beasts to cry for freedom. Again, it was Wordsworth who identified Burns as a poet of the literary revolution—Romanticism—that later rushed through the open gates and into the nineteenth century.

Poetic qualities

Few will question that, ultimately, Burns’s strength as a poet is to be found in the lyrical quality of his songs. That quality simply stood far above his other virtues—his ability to observe and to penetrate until he discovered the essence of a particular subject, his skill in description and satire, and his striving to achieve personal and intellectual independence. In his songs, he developed the ability to record, with the utmost ease, the emotions of the common people of whom he wrote. Burns’s reliance on native Scottish tradition was both a limitation and a strength. For example, although he genuinely enjoyed the poetry of James Thomson (1700-1748), the Edinburgh University graduate who ventured to London and successfully challenged the artificiality of English poetry, Burns could not possibly have written a Scottish sequel to The Seasons (1730, 1744). Instead, he focused upon the simple Scottish farmer, upon the man hard at work and enjoying social relationships, not upon the prevalent eighteenth century themes of solitude and retirement. In Burns, then, the reader sees strong native feeling and spontaneous expression, the source of which was inherited, not learned.

Another quality of Burns’s poetry that merits attention is his versatility, the range of human emotions that exists throughout his verse. He could function as a satirist, and he could sound the most ardent notes of patriotism. His humor was neither vulgar nor harsh, but quiet, with considerable control—as in “Address to the Deil,” “To a Mouse,” and “To a Mountain Daisy.” As a lover, as one who obviously loved to love and be loved, he wrote lyrical pieces that could capture the essence of human passion. The lyric forms allowed for the fullest expression of his versatility, most of which came about during the last ten years of his relatively short life.

Capturing national spirit

From 1787 until his death in the summer of 1796, Burns committed himself to steady literary activity. He became associated with James Johnson, an uneducated engraver and enthusiastic collector and publisher of Scottish songs. From 1787 to 1804, Johnson gathered those songs into a five-volume Scots Musical Museum, and Burns served as his principal editor. Then the poet became associated with George Thomson, whose Select Collection of Scottish Airs reached six volumes between 1793 and 1811. Burns’s temperament seemed suited to such a combination of scholarly activity and poetic productivity, but he never accepted money for his contributions. The writing, rewriting, and transformation of some three hundred old songs and ballads would serve as his most singular gift to his nation. In reworking those antiquated songs and popular ballads, he returned to Scotland, albeit in somewhat modified form, a large portion of its culture that had for so long remained in obscurity. Thus, an old drinking song emerged as “Auld Lang Syne,” while a disreputable ballad became “John Anderson My Jo.” Finally, the Johnson and Thomson collections became outlets for certain of his more famous original songs: “For A’ That and A’ That” and “Scots, Wha Hae wi’ Wallace Bled,” as well as such love lyrics as “Highland Mary” and “Thou Lingering Star.” Because of his love of and gift for the traditional Scots folk songs and ballads, Burns wrote and sang for Scotland. He became the voice and the symbol of the people and captured the national sentiment.

Melancholy strains

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that all is happily rustic, nationalistic, or patriotic with Burns. On the contrary, he has a decidedly melancholy or mournful strain. A look at such poems as “A Bard’s Epitaph” and the “Epistle to a Young Friend” demonstrates that the intellect and the passion of the poet were far from being comfortably adjusted. A conflict raged within the mind and heart of Burns as the sensibilities of an exceedingly gifted soul vied with the sordid lot that was his by birth and social position (or the lack of it). Despite the appearance and even the actuality of productivity during his last five years, the final stage of Burns’s career reflects, in the soberest of terms, the degradation of genius. Nevertheless, his muse remained alive and alert, as his passions seethed within him until they found outlets in rhyme.

Burns controlled his passion so that, particularly in his songs, there is abundant evidence of sense and beauty. To his credit, he remained aware of the conflict within him and drew strength from the clash of experiences, of habits, and of emotions which, somehow, he managed to regulate and harmonize. Few will argue that certain of the songs (“Mary Morison,” “My Nanie O,” and “Of A’ the Airts the Wind Can Blow”) hang heavy with serious and extremely pathetic and passionate strains. Since such heaviness had its origin in the Scottish tradition, Burns could effectively hide his own melancholy behind the Lugar or the banks of Bonnie Doon.

Moral element

Such conclusions invariably lead to the question of a religious or moral element in Burns’s poetry. Assuredly, the more religious among Burns scholars have difficulty with such poems as “The Holy Fair,” “Holy Willie,” and the satiric pieces in which the poet ridiculed religious and ecclesiastical ideals and personages. No doubt Burns’s own moral conduct was far from perfect, but the careful reader of his poetry realizes immediately that Burns never ridiculed religion; rather, he heaped scorn only upon those religious institutions that appeared ridiculous and lacked the insight to recognize obvious weaknesses. Indeed, the poet often seems to be looking for virtue and morality, seeking to replace the sordid scenes of his own world with the piety of another time and place. He sought a world beyond and above the grotesqueness of his own debauchery, a world dominated by order, love, truth, and joy. That is about the best he could have done for himself. Even had Burns been the epitome of sobriety, morality, and social and religious conformity, religious expression would probably not have been high on his list of poetic priorities. He inherited the poetic legacy of Scotland—a national treasure found outside the limits of the Kirk, a vault not of hymns and psalm paraphrases, but of songs and ballads. Such were the constituent parts of Burns’s poetic morality.

Burns’s language and poetic methods seem to distract only the impatient among his readers. To begin with, he believed that the vernacular ought never to be seen as low or harsh, or even as prostituted English. Rather, Burns came to know and to understand the Scots dialect and to manipulate it for his own poetic purpose. At the outset, he claimed to have turned his back upon formal bodies of knowledge, upon books, and to have taken full advantage of what he termed “Nature’s fire” as the only learning necessary for his art. Nature may have provided the attraction toward the Scots dialect, but Burns himself knew exactly what to do with it.

Close attention to his letters and to the details of his life will yield the steps of his self-education. He read Thomas Salmon’s Geographical and Historical Grammar (1749) and a New System of Modern Geography, History, and Modern Grammar (1770), by William Guthrie (1708-1770), both of which provided descriptions and examples of Scotland’s traditions and language, although nothing of poetic contexts. Then he turned to Jethro Tull (1680-1740), the Hungerford farmer and inventor, who wrote several volumes on the general subject of “horse-hoeing husbandry” (1731-1739), and to the Reverend Adam Dickson of Edinburgh, who wrote A Treatise on Agriculture (1762, 1765, 1769) and the two-volume The Husbandry of the Ancients (1788). Thus, Burns was well versed in the specifics of rural Scotland by the time he discovered his most helpful source, the poetry of Robert Fergusson, who had managed successfully to capture the dialect of enlightened Edinburgh. Burns had his models, and he simply shifted the sounds and the scenes from Scotland’s capital to rural Ayrshire.

Poems

To simplify matters even further, Burns himself had actually stood behind the plow. Little wonder, then, that the Kilmarnock edition of the Poems succeeded on the basis of such pieces as “The Twa Dogs,” “The Holy Fair,” “Address to the Deil,” “Halloween,” “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” “To a Mouse,” and “To a Mountain-Daisy.” Burns had effectively described Scottish life as Scots themselves (as well as those south of the Tweed) had come to know it. More important, the poems in that initial collection displayed to the world the poet’s full intellectual range of wit and sentiment, although his readers received nothing that had not already been a part of their long tradition. Essentially, the Edinburgh edition of the following year gave the world more of the same, and Burns’s readers discovered that the poet’s move from Ayrshire to Edinburgh had not changed his sources or his purpose. The new poems—among them “Death and Dr. Hornbook,” “The Brigs of Ayr,” “Address to the Unco Guid,” “John Barleycorn,” and “Green Grow the Rushes”—still held to the pictures of Scottish life and to the vernacular, still held to the influence of Robert Fergusson’s Scots Poems (1773).

By the time Burns had done some substantive work on James Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum, however, his art had assumed a new dimension, the writing and revision of the Scots song. The poet became a singer, providing his own accompaniment by the simple means of humming to himself as he wrote, and trying (as he explained) to catch the inspiration and the enthusiasm so strongly characterized in the traditional poetry. He set out to master the tune, then to compose for that particular strain. In other words, he demanded that for the song, musical expression must dictate the poetic theme. Nevertheless, Burns was the first to admit his weakness as a musician, making no claims even to musical taste. For him, as a poet, music was instinctive, supplied by nature to complement his art. Thus, he felt unable to deal with the technical aspects of music as a formal discipline. What he could do, however, was to react quickly to what he termed “many little melodies” and to give new and fresh poetic and musical expression to something like “Scots Wha Hae,” one of the oldest of Scottish airs. Through the songs, Burns clearly preserved tradition, while, at the same time, he maintained his originality. This tradition was the genuine expression of the people who, from generation to generation, echoed the essence of their very existence; Burns gave it sufficient clarity and strength to carry it forward into the next century and beyond. The effect of those more than three hundred songs was, simply, to cede Burns the title of Scotland’s national poet—a title that he earned because of his poetic rather than his political voice.

“Tam O’ Shanter”

Perhaps the one poem that demonstrates Burns’s ability as a serious and deliberate craftsman, a true poet, is “Tam O’ Shanter” (1790, 1791). More than anything else, this piece of 224 lines transports its creator away from the “Heaven-taught plowman” image, from the label of the boy genius whose poetry is nothing more than one large manifestation of the spontaneous overflow of his native enthusiasm. Burns wrote “Tam O’ Shanter” for a volume on Scottish antiquity and based it on a witch story told about Alloway Kirk, an old ruin near the poet’s house in Ayr. However, he turned that tale into a mock-heroic rendering of folk material that comes close, in genre and in poetic quality, to Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” Burns specifically set out to construct his most sustained and most artistic production; in his own words, he remained aware of the “spice of roguish waggery” within the poem, but he also took considerable pains to ensure that the force of his poetic genius and “finishing polish” would not go unrecognized. Burns’s manipulation of his dipsomaniacal hero and his misadventures constitutes a masterful blending of the serious and the comic. The moralists of his day objected vehemently to the ribald elements of the poem. Early in the next century, William Wordsworth, whose strongest drink was probably water, attacked the attackers of “Tam O’ Shanter” (as well as those who objected to all of Burns’s poetry on moral grounds) by labeling them impenetrable dunces and narrow-minded puritans. Wordsworth saw the poem as a delightful picture of the rustic adventurer’s convivial exaltation; if the poem lacked clear moral purpose, maintained England’s laureate, it at least provided the clearest possible moral effect.

Legacy

The final issue raised by Burns’s poetry is his place in literary history—an issue that has always prompted spirited debate. There is no doubt that Burns shares common impulses with Wordsworth and the Romantic movement, particularly in his preoccupation with folklore and the language of the people, yet neither is there any evidence of Burns’s fundamental dissatisfaction with the dominant critical criteria and principal literary assumptions of eighteenth century England. The readers of his songs will be hard put to discover lush scenery or majestic mountains, or even the sea—although all were in easy reach of his eye and his mind. If he expressed no poetic interest in such aspects of nature close at hand, however, he turned even less in the direction of the distant and the exotic.

Instead, he looked long and hard at the farmer, the mouse, and the louse, and he contemplated each; the mountains, the nightingale, the skylark he also saw, but chose to leave them to the next generation of poets. In other words, Burns did not seek new directions for his poetry; instead, he took full advantage of what existed and of what had come before. He grasped literary imitation firmly and gave that form the most significance and prominence it had enjoyed since the late Restoration and the Augustan Age. Burns wrote satire and he wrote songs, but he invented neither. Rather, he served as an exploiter of tradition; he gathered inherited motifs, rhetorical conventions, and familiar language and produced art. The reader of the present century should see no less or expect no more from Burns’s poetical character.