Arnold, a severe critic of Burns in general, could not resist describing “The Jolly Beggars” favorably as a “puissant and splendid production.” Literary antecedents of the work, which combines a medley of songs in a loose dramatic structure, go back to John Fletcher’sThe Beggar’s Bush (before 1622) or to John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (pr., pb. 1728). Slightly more than a generation after Burns, the French poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger would write song-comedic productions such as “Les Gueux” (“The Beggars”) and “Le Vieux Vagabond” (“The Old Vagabond”). However, nothing in Western literature can match Burns’s production for energy, sly wit, and lyricism.

Suggested by a chance visit by the poet with two friends to the “doss house” (brothel) of Poosie Nansie (her real name was Agnes Gibson) in the Cowgate, Mauchline, “The Jolly Beggars” transforms the sordid reality of the original scene into a bawdy, lighthearted comedy. Challenging the prudery of his own day, Burns exalts a kind of rough, natural sensuality, without a trace of sniggering. Although joyous sex is a theme of the poem, its real message is that people must have liberty to live in the way that they wish. No more defiant yet witty lines have been written in defense of freedom:

A fig for those by law protected!Liberty’s a glorious feast!Courts for cowards were erected,Churches built to please the priest!

“A Red, Red Rose”

First published: 1796 (collected in The Canongate Burns, 2001)

Type of work: Poem

The speaker in this well-beloved lyric bids his sweetheart farewell but promises to return to her.

“A Red, Red Rose,” also titled in some anthologies according to its first line, “O, my luve is like a red, red rose,” was written in 1794 and printed in 1796. The song may be enjoyed as a simple, unaffected effusion of sentiment, or it may be understood on a more complex level as a lover’s promises that are full of contradictions, ironies, and paradoxes. The reader should keep in mind the fact that Burns constructed the poem, stanza by stanza, by “deconstructing” old songs and ballads to use parts that he could revise and improve. For example, Burns’s first stanza may be compared with his source, “The Wanton Wife of Castle Gate”: “Her cheeks are like the roses/ That blossom fresh in June;/ O, she’s like a new-strung instrument/ That’s newly put in tune.” Clearly, Burns’s version is more delicate, while at the same time audaciously calculated. By emphasizing the absolute redness of the rose—the “red, red rose”—the poet demonstrates his seeming artlessness as a sign of sincerity. What other poet could rhyme “June” and “tune” without appearing hackneyed? With Burns the very simplicity of the language works toward an effect of absolute purity.

Readers who analyze the poem using the tools of New Criticism or other twentieth century critical approaches will observe, on the other hand, contradictory elements that seem to work against the speaker’s innocent protestations of love. The first two lines of the second stanza do not complete an expected (or logical) thought: “So deep in luve am I” (that I cannot bear to leave my beloved). Instead, the speaker rhetorically protests his love through a series of preposterous boasts. His love will last until the seas go dry, until rocks melt with the sun; he will continue to love while the sands of life (in an hourglass) shall run. Yet so steadfast a lover, after all, is departing from his beloved, not staying by her side. For whatever reason, he is compelled to leave her rather than remain. His final exaggerated promise, that he will return to her, though the journey takes a thousand miles, seems farfetched, even ironically humorous: Instead of such a titanic effort, why should he not simply stay with her?

These paradoxical reflections, however, which change a reading of the poem from one of “pure” lyric to one of irony, are not so difficult to reconcile on the level of common sense. What lover has not exaggerated his or her emotions? Are these exaggerated promises of Burns’s speaker any less sincere for being illogical? No matter how the reader resolves this issue, he or she cannot help but admire Burns’s art in revising the meter of his source for the last stanza, an old song titled “The True Lover’s Farewell”: “Fare you well, my own true love/ And fare you well for a while,/ And I will be sure to return back again/ If I go ten thousand mile.” Although Burns’s revisions are minor, they reveal the difference in technique between a merely competent poet and a master.

“Holy Willie’s Prayer”

First published: 1789 (collected in The Canongate Burns, 2001)

Type of work: Poem

The poet satirizes Willie, who is far from “holy,” caught in the act of prayer.

“Holy Willie’s Prayer,” written in 1785, was printed in 1789 and reprinted in 1799. It was one of the poet’s favorite verses, and he sent a copy to his friend, the convivial preacher John M’Math, who had requested it, along with a dedicatory poem titled “Epistle to the Rev. John M’Math” (published in 1808). To M’Math he sent his “Argument” as background information:Holy Willie was a rather oldish bachelor elder, in the parish of Mauchline, and much and justly famed for that polemical chattering which ends in tippling orthodoxy, and for that spiritualized bawdry which refines to liquorish devotion.

The real-life “Willie” whom Burns had in mind was William Fisher, a strict Presbyterian elder of the Mauchline church.

In his satire on religious fanaticism, Burns cleverly allows Willie to witness against himself. Willie’s prayer, addressed to the deity of Calvinist doctrine, is really a self-serving plea to be forgiven for his own sins of sexual promiscuity (with Meg). Willie’s God—more cruel than righteous—punishes sinners according to the doctrine of predestination of saints: Only a small number of “elect” souls, chosen before their births, will enter Heaven; the others, no matter their goodness, piety, or deeds, are condemned (predestined) to Hell. Willie exults in thoughts of revenge toward the miserable souls who are doomed to such eternal torment. The victims over whom he gloats are, from the reader’s point of view, far less deserving of hellfire than Willie, a hypocrite, lecher, and demon of wrath.

In the “Epistle to the Rev. John M’Math,” Burns defends his own simple creed as one superior to self-styled “holy” Willie’s: “God knows, I’m no the thing I should be,/ Nor am I even the thing I could be,/ But twenty times I rather would be/ An atheist clean/ Than under gospel colors hid be,/ Just for a screen.” His argument, he avers, is not against a benign doctrine of Christianity with its reach of forgiveness for sincerely repented sins, but against the hypocrites and scoundrels “even wi’ holy robes,/ But hellish spirit!”

“Is There for Honest Poverty”

First published: 1795 (collected in The Canongate Burns, 2001)

Type of work: Poem

This celebrated democratic poem advances claims for the simple dignity of the common man over those for class and caste.

“Is There for Honest Poverty” (also sometimes anthologized under the title “For A’ That and A’ That”) was written in 1794, printed in 1795, and reprinted in 1799. Burns adapted the meter and the phrase “for a’ that” from older songs. A Jacobite song published in 1750 has the following chorus: “For a’ that and a’ that,/ And twice as muckle’s a’ that,/ He’s far beyond the seas the night/ Yet he’ll be here for a’ that.” Also, in “The Jolly Beggars,” Burns had used the popular refrain, although in a different context.

Although the poem is clear enough in its general outline—that the honest worth of men of goodwill, no matter what their social class, rank, or financial condition, outweighs the pretensions of caste or privilege—readers often have trouble understanding Burns’s elliptical phrasing. His argument is that “honest poverty” has greater worth than the false pride of high social position. Symbols of rank—ribbons, stars, “and all that”—are superfluities. True merit is based upon “sense and worth,” the “pith o’ sense, and pride o’ worth,” not upon the “tinsel show” of fine clothing or the pretentiousness of fine dining.

Because Burns wants his reader to grasp the implied meanings of his poem, he often omits logical connectives between ideas. The beginning lines, with suggested additions, may be paraphrased as follows: (What) is there for honest poverty, that it hangs its head and all that (meaning, all that humility, all that false shame because of supposedly low status)? People pass by the coward slave (who lacks the authentic dignity of self-esteem); people dare to be poor for all that (in spite of “all that” lowly position implied by people’s poverty).

Throughout the poem, Burns invites the reader to participate in interpreting the poem. He wants the reader to understand the elliptical expression “and a’ that” in terms of one’s own experiences with the class system. As for Burns’s point of view, that is unambiguous. He hopes that men and women of goodwill in time will unite, so that “man to man, the world o’er/ Shall brithers be for a’ that!”

Tam O’Shanter

First published: 1791 (collected in The Canongate Burns, 2001)

Type of work: Poem

In this sustained narrative poem, a drunken befuddled Scottish farmer encounters witches, but he survives.

“Tam O’Shanter” was a favorite with Burns, who described the work in a letter to Mrs. Dunlop (April 11, 1791): “I look on Tam O’Shanter to be my standard performance in the poetical line.” He goes on to say that his “spice of roguish waggery” shows a “force of genius and a finishing polish that I despair of ever excelling.” The idea for the story came from several legends popular in the neighborhood of the poet’s birthplace, which is within a mile of Alloway Kirk (church). One of Burns’s friends, Francis Grose, sent him a prose account of the legend, one upon which Burns probably drew. If a reader compares the flat style of Grose with Burns’s jolly version, then he or she can better assess the poet’s talent. The conclusion of Grose’s narrative is as follows: “the unsightly tailless condition of the vigorous steed was, to the last hour of the noble creature’s life, an awful warning to the Carrick farmers not to stay too late in Ayr markets.” Burns’s rendering is: “Now, wha this tale o’ truth shall read,/ Each man and mother’s son take heed;/ Or cutty-sarks run in your mind,/ Think! ye may buy the joys o’er dear;/ Remember Tam O’Shanter’s mare.”

Tam himself may have been based loosely upon the character of Douglas Graham, whose father was a tenant at the farm of Shanter on the Carrick shore. Noted for his habits of drunkenness, Graham was, like Burns’s hero, afflicted with a scolding wife. According to D. Auld of Ayre (whose story was taken from notes left at the Edinburgh University Library), a local tradition held that once, while Graham was carousing at the tavern, some local humorists plucked hairs from the tail of his horse, tethered outside the tavern door, until it resembled a stump. As Auld’s account has it, the locals swore the next morning that the unfortunate horse had its tail depilated by witches.

Burns’s narrative is that oxymoron, a rollicking ghost story. With gentle, tolerant humor, the poet moralizes over the foibles of Tam, commiserates with his good wife, Kate, and philosophizes on the brevity of human happiness. Most of the narrative is perfectly clear to readers, so long as they follow notes on the Scottish words glossed from a well-edited text. The matter of the “cutty-sark,” however, confuses some. Burns has in mind, first, the short skirt worn by the most audacious of the witches; then he refers to the witch herself, when Tam blurts out, “Weel done, Cutty-sark”—meaning the hag who dances wearing the clothing. At this point in the narrative, Tam upsets the witches’ frolic dances, and witches and warlocks chase after the hard-riding Tam to the keystone of the bridge. Why cannot the witches pursue Tam over the bridge? Because they must not approach water, symbol of Christian baptism and grace. Nannie, leading the witches’ riotous pursuit, therefore can grasp only at poor Meg’s tail as the horse reaches the safety of the bridge. Horse and rider are saved, but not the tail. So ends, with an appropriate moral, Burns’s homily on the dangers of “inspiring bold John Barlycorn”—hard alcohol.