SOURCE: "'Tam o' Shanter': The Truth of the Tale," in Robert Burns and the Sentimental Era, The University of Georgia Press, 1985, pp. 149–61.

[Below, McGuirk analyzes Burns's use of irony in "Tam o' Shanter."]

"Tam o' Shanter" tells the story of a drunken farmer who encounters a witches' dance on his way home from a market day carousal in Ayr. The poem offers an adult's retrospective view of horror stories; there is an overtone of indulgent irony in the sections of the poem that describe the witches' dance and its gruesome concomitants. Thomas Carlyle [On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History, 1966], writing of the poem, objects to its evident detachment:

"Tam o' Shanter" itself, which enjoys so high a favour, does not appear to us, at all decisively, to come under this last category [of Burns's melodious, aerial, poetical poems]. It is not so much a poem, as a piece of sparkling rhetoric; the heart and body of the story still lies hard and dead. He has not gone back, much less carried us back, into that dark, earnest, wondering age … he does not attempt, by any new-modelling of his supernatural ware, to strike anew that deep mysterious chord of human nature, which once responded to such things.

Carlyle's objection to Burns's "cold" treatment of supernatural themes is essentially that of a Romantic throwing off the traces of eighteenth-century skepticism and restraint to which Burns does hold in "Tam o' Shanter." It was not the grotesque activities of witches and Satan that piqued Burns's imagination as he wrote; it was the behavior of his protagonist, ordinary Tam, when confronted by those weird phenomena. Like Burns's songs, "Tam o' Shanter" adapts folk sources to emphasize a central character's independence and vitality; and like them it shares John Aikin's view [in Essays on Song-Writing, with a Collection of such English Songs as are most Eminent for poetical Merit, to which are Added, Some Original pieces, n.d.] that local tales should be integrated within an emotional perspective by the bard who works with them.

Perhaps no other poem by Burns illustrates so well the false conclusions to which false assumptions about the poet inevitably lead. The notion that Burns is always autobiographical, for instance, has led several critics to miss the irony of Burns's masterpiece. Thomas Crawford, whose discussion of "Tam o' Shanter" [in his Burns: A Study of the Poems and Songs, 1960] provided my own interpretation's point of departure ("pleasure" and "community" as key words in the poem, and the alternation between several narrative "voices"), nonetheless illustrates the shortcomings of an autobiographical approach in several of his generalizations:

The strain of realism that runs through the work derives, at the level of the superficial and the merely obvious, from Burns's own quizzical recognition that he, too—emancipated man of the eighteenth century though he was—could, in the appropriate circumstances, feel some of the terrors that afflict the superstitious and the simple-minded…. ["Tam o' Shanter"] is typical not only of Burns, but of the Scottish mind; for it is—next to "The Vision"—the most genuinely national of all his poems.

What Crawford praises as the "strain of realism" in "Tam o' Shanter" is its descriptive, autobiographical component. Burns was a riding officer for the Excise; in his later life, he spent most of his free time at taverns such as the Globe Inn at Dumfries. As a child, he had been spellbound by tales of local atrocities and supernatural visitations spun by a relative, Betty Davidson; many of her stories had focused on weird happenings at Alloway's nearby ruined kirk. Since "Tam o' Shanter" begins at a tavern, describes a wild, drunken ride, and features a witches' dance at Alloway kirk, it is clear that autobiographical material is an important factor. It is not all-important, however, because it fails to provide a means of analyzing the complex tone of the poem—the implied attitude toward the things described. Crawford's praise of a descriptive "strain of realism" had led him in the passage quoted above to see superstitious terror as part of the emotional message in "Tam o' Shanter." For all his reservations about "Tam o' Shanter," Carlyle is actually closer to the truth when he speaks of its sparkling "rhetoric," which distances readers from any naive immersion in horror. Burns's presentation of the supernatural material is mock-heroic (as was Pope's presentation of Belinda in one of Burns's favorite poems, The Rape of the Lock); in any mock-heroic work, the challenge to critics is determining where the irony stops.

It is a challenge that critics working from the current assumptions about Burns fail even to perceive, let alone to meet. Critics whose thesis has been Burns's inability to master English diction become trapped when they turn to "Tam o' Shanter" in discussion of whether the epic digressions in the poem (brilliant examples of bravura English) disprove their position. (Kurt Wittig [in his The Scottish Tradition in Literature, 1958], wanting to praise the poem but disliking any English influence, concludes that these passages are "near English.") Critics wedded to the notion of an earthy, "peasant" Burns usually prefer Burns's other, less obviously artful, masterwork, "Love and Liberty." Those who approach Burns from eighteenth-century perspectives usually do appreciate the elegance and irony of "Tam o' Shanter," yet seldom consider the relationship of tone to the folkloric subject. Others, such as Carlyle, are drawn to its subject but baffled by its tone. Indeed, while illustrating the partial truth of all the labels that have been applied to Burns—the poet of the people, the national bard, the Romantic in love with excess, the Augustan in love with form—"Tam o' Shanter" also illustrates their only partial adequacy by seeming to transcend them all.

Before coming to the particulars of the poem, I should make one point about Burns's ironic treatment of supernatural forces. The story of Tam's ride as Burns received it from local sources itself existed on different levels. The prose summary that Burns supplied to Captain Grose along with his poem relates the history of a nameless Carrick farmer who, while riding home from Ayr one night, discovers a witches' dance in progress at Alloway kirk (as mentioned above, a source for local ghost stories; incidentally, this was also the burial place of Burns's father). A humorous variant, however, was also current in Burns's day. Douglas Graham, an acquaintance of Burns and tenant of the farm "Shanter" in Carrick, once had told his superstitious wife a similar tale of interrupting a witches' dance—to account for his late return from a market-day journey to Ayr. The joke was that shrewish Helen Graham had actually believed her husband's story. In short, the original for "Tam" himself used folk material ironically, to deceive a real-life "Kate." It is fitting, then, that Burns's poem demonstrates a dual perspective on its own truth, as it alternates narrative between an artful narrator and a drunken protagonist.

The first twelve lines of "Tam o' Shanter" provide, as usual in Burns, a context stanza for the poem to follow. Neither the poet-narrator nor Tam is yet in evidence. This stanza speaks of "we," meaning by that a convivial male fellowship of farmers and local tradesmen, drawn together temporarily at the close of the Ayr market day by a common disinclination to leave their tavern and return home to their wives:

When chapman billies leave the street,
And drouthy neebors, neebors meet,
As market-days are wearing late,
An' folk begin to take the gate;
While we sit bousing at the nappy,
And getting fou and unco happy,
We think na on the lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters, slaps, and styles,
That lie between us and our hame,
Whare sits our sulky sullen dame,
Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.

From within this fellowship, Tam is then presented: "This truth fand honest Tam o' Shanter, / As he frae Ayr ae night did canter…."

The poem has already begun to complicate its relationship to a local source. "Honest" Tam is drawn from real life liar Douglas Graham; and Graham's lie about witches is the "truth" that Tam will soon find (or that will soon find Tam—the phrasing is ambiguous). The poem then modulates to ironic praise of the percipience of Tam's "ain wife Kate," who has warned him about the danger of riding by the haunted kirk after midnight:

O Tam! hadst thou but been sae wise,
As ta'en thy ain wife Kate's advice!
She tauld thee weel thou was a skellum,
A blethering, blustering, drunken blellum;
That frae November till October,
Ae market-day thou was nae sober;
That ilka melder, wi' the miller,
Thou sat as lang as thou had siller;
That every naig was ca'd a shoe on,
The smith and thee gat roaring fou on;
That at the L——d's house, even on Sunday,
Thou drank wi' Kirkton Jean till Monday.
She prophesied that late or soon,
Thou would be found deep drown'd in Doon;
Or catch'd wi' warlocks in the mirk,
By Alloway's auld haunted kirk.

Our first extended view of Tam is provided by a hostile witness, his wife. Even in this first glimpse of our "hero's" character, ironic distance prevails.

This is increased when Burns's narrator (until this point silent except for a passing couplet in praise of Ayr) emerges to underscore Kate's ill temper by appearing to regret Tam's disregard of her "sweet counsels":

Ah, gentle dames! it gars me greet,
To think how mony counsels sweet,
How mony lengthen'd sage advices,
The husband frae the wife despises!

Kate's invective has stressed Tam's extremes of misconduct, but the narrator returns us to Tam as a norm: all husbands neglect the "sage" advice of their wives. This changing perspective on Tam is so far the most dynamic feature of the poem. There is no amassing of tension about Tam's imminent encounter with a witches' dance. The supernatural theme is actually deflated by the context in which it is first mentioned: the lurid and spiteful prophecy of Kate.

Then the tale itself properly begins. Lines 37 to 78 constitute the first segment of the poem after the introduction. Tam is described as "planted unco right" by the fireside, the best seat in the tavern. He is enjoying his drink ("reaming swats that drank divinely"), the "queerest stories" of his crony Souter (cobbler) Johnny, and even the "secret" favors of the landlady. All these pleasurable activities work as Burns undoubtedly intended: to create an atmosphere of total gratification for Tam. This tavern is a perfect place:

Care, mad to see a man sae happy,
E'en drown'd himsel amang the nappy:
As bees flee hame wi' lades o' treasure,
The minutes wing'd their way wi' pleasure:
Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious,
O'er a' the ills o' life victorious!

Here the narrator has taken over the poem to meditate on the implications of Tam's simple pleasures, and in the next fifteen lines, he warms to his meditative theme:

But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white—then melts for ever;
Or like the borealis race,
That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow's lovely form
Evanishing amid the storm.—
Nae man can tether time nor tide;
The hour approaches Tam maun ride;
That hour, o' night's black arch the key-stane,
That dreary hour he mounts his beast in;
And sic a night he taks the road in,
As ne'er poor sinner was abroad in.

… Passages such as the last two quoted from "Tam o' Shanter" show an unusually condensed integration of local and literary influences. Critics have mentioned literary sources for these epic digressions in "Tam o' Shanter" from writings as diverse as The Rape of the Lock, Thomson's The Seasons (the rainbow image), Ovid, Dr. Johnson, and, from the vernacular poets, Allan Ramsay and Hamilton of Gilbertfield. And in telling the tale of Douglas Graham, Burns also suggests a number of autobiographical themes. His point of departure is Ayr—close to his birthplace at Alloway—and behind his description of tavern life at Ayr is his own adult experience of its pleasures at Dumfries.

Burns's letters often distinguish between his life and his art, asserting his values in two modes—"as a man and as a poet." In "Tam o' Shanter," especially in these early lines on the pleasures of sociable carousing and the reluctance with which working men leave them for home and renewed responsibility, Burns views the tavern culture both descriptively (as a man) and evocatively (as a poet). Tam is his "man" and the narrator is his "poet," and the narrative alternates between their two levels of appreciation.

In the ensuing section—lines 74 to 104—Burns seems to remember he had promised Captain Grose a horror story, and he describes the violent storm into which Tam reluctantly emerges from the shelter and good fellowship of the tavern. It is worth mentioning, as do most commentators on this poem, that Burns rode through many night storms in the course of his work. As usual, when Burns is moved to describe natural forces in order to explicate his human theme, his description is authoritative and precise:

The wind blew as 'twad blawn its last;
The rattling showers rose on the blast;
The speedy gleams the darkness swallow'd;
Loud, deep, and lang, the thunder bellow'd:
That night, a child might understand,
The Deil had business on his hand.

Like line 13, in which Tam either finds or is himself found out by "truth," lines 77 and 78 are fundamentally equivocal. A "child might understand" that the bad weather signified Satan's presence in the countryside: how might an adult react? The narrator seems daunted, but feckless Tam mounts his old mare Meg, "despising wind, and rain and fire." The difference between Tam and the narrator is drink. Tam is just sober enough for a gesture of prudence, "glowring around … / Lest bogles catch him unawares". Tam proceeds without incident until he reaches the ruined kirk, the very place mentioned in Kate's "prophecy." Before description of the witches' dance Tam discovers there, the narrator describes some grim local landmarks: the boulder where "Charlie" had broken his neck in a drunken fall, the well at which "Mungo's mither" had committed suicide, the cairn of a murdered infant. This is local color directed to Captain Grose, a collector of such stories.

Tam's ride brings him to Alloway, where he hears in the distance, through the noise of the storm, unholy sounds of "mirth and dancing." Yet the narrator interrupts, with another digression, any focusing of tension that may have been created by the description of Tam's stormy progress:

Inspiring bold John Barleycorn!
What dangers thou canst make us scorn!
Wi' tipenny, we fear nae evil;
Wi' usquabae, we'll face the devil!—
The swats sae reamed in Tammie 's noddle,
Fair play, he car'd na deils a boddle.

Such passages, in which an external voice ironically discusses "Tammie," seem to disprove the notion of James Kinsley [Robert Burns and the peasantry, 1974] and Ian Campbell ["Burns's Poems and Their Audience," in Critical Essays on Robert Burns, edited by Donald Low, 1975] that this poem is a "dramatic monologue." The digressions seem intentionally to distance us from any immediate identification with Tam; at least, his simplicity is deliberately contrasted with the more intricate consciousness of the narrator.

What Tam sees at Alloway follows his wife Kate's prediction. It is a satanic festival, with "Auld Nick" himself playing the pipes for a community of witches. In contrast to the male fellowship at Ayr, the witches' dance at Al-loway is largely female. The sole woman of the prologue, a tavern landlady, is here paralleled by the "proprietor" at the dance, musician Satan. (Warlocks are mentioned, but not described.) And Kate's admonitory presence in the opening section of the poem is paralleled by Tam's appreciative presence at the witches' dance. After more scene setting (swords, scimitars, tomahawks, a knife, the enshrouded dead holding candles, the chained corpse of a hanged murderer, two more dead infants), Burns proceeds to his central interest: Tam's response to all this. Drunken Tam, "amaz'd and curious," watches the dance, while the narrator again interposes himself—he has aesthetic objections to Tam's involvement:

Now Tam! O Tam! had thae been queans,
A' plump and strapping in their teens,
Their sarks, instead o' creeshie flannen,
Been snaw-white seventeen hunder linnen!
Thir breeks o' mine, my only pair,
That ance were plush, o' gude blue hair,
I wad hae gi'en off my hurdies,
For ae blink o' the bonic burdies!

But wither'd beldams, auld and droll,
Rigwoodie hags wad spean a foal,
Lowping and flinging on a crummock,
I wonder didna turn thy stomach.

Tam's taste is vindicated, however; there is one young recruit at the dance. In yet another of the poem's symmetrical oppositions, the narrator's offer of his worn-out breeches is quickly followed by description of the young witch Nannie largely in terms of her scanty shift—a present received in childhood from her grandmother which she has now outgrown:

But Tam kend what was what fu' brawlie,
There was ae winsome wench and wawlie,
That night enlisted in the core,
(Lang after kend on Carrick shore;
For mony a beast to dead she shot,
And perish'd mony a bony boat,
And shook baith meickle corn and bear,
And kept the country-side in fear:)
Her cutty sark, o' Paisley harn,
That while a lassie she had worn,
In longitude tho' sorely scanty,

It was her best, and she was vauntie.—

The poem perceives the witches' dance much as it has perceived the drunkenness of market-day tradesmen in Ayr: not as something to be censured so much as something that is a feature of local life. Incidentally, the folkloric content of the narrative has at this point become explicitly parenthetical.

The next section begins with the narrator's confession of the inadequacy of his Muse to "sing" of Nannie's dance in suitably epic terms. For the only moment in the poem, Tam takes initiative away from the narrator when, losing his "reason a' thigither," he cries out, "Weel-done, Cutty-sark!" in response to an especially bold leap of Nannie's. My earlier discussion of sentimental fiction stressed its voyeuristic overtones, and Tam's presence at the witches' dance has created some tension related to voyeurism. Will Tam just look on, or will he assert himself as a responsive presence and deal with the consequences? Made heroic by drink, pot-valiant Tam does "roar out" a reaction to what he sees. His outcry stops the dance, and the "hellish legion" "sallies" out against him.

In an earlier section of the poem, Tam's precious hours of respite at the tavern were compared to the homeward journey of bees. Here, the angry sortie of the witch community is evoked with the same simile:

As bees bizz out wi' angry fyke,
When plundering herds assail their byke;
As open pussie's mortal foes,
When, pop! she starts before their nose;
As eager runs the market-crowd,
When "Catch the thief!" resounds aloud;
So Maggie runs, the witches follow,
Wi' mony an eldritch skreech and hollow.

This poem began with a description of market-day crowds. Its transition to a conclusion is marked by another reference to them; in this case, to the market outcry against a petty thief. The earlier allusion stressed the common inclination of the community to relax after work; this instance stresses their common organization against an intruder.

Burns's earlier long poem, the cantata "Love and Liberty," offered a mirror image of Calvinism. The narrative in "Tam o' Shanter" also presents a series of opposing reflections on central themes. Indeed, "Tam o' Shanter" is structured by the opposition of the hedonistic community of men-drinkers at the beginning of the poem and the hedonistic community of women-dancers at its climax. The distance between the two societies is bridged in literary terms by the narrator because he applies similarly epic descriptions to both. The two cultures are bridged emotionally by Tam, with his instinctive shout of approval for Nannie. Kate stood opposed to the tavern culture in the prologue, but Tam, though an outsider, reacts to Nannie with an instinctive shout of "weel done" in the gesture that earns him the "heroic" status the narrator has applied ironically to him from the beginning. This response changes him from outsider to intruder, and another bridge becomes central to the poem: Tam must reach the keystone of the bridge of Doon to elude the witches' pursuit.

The concluding twenty-five lines, in which Tam's old mare Meg saves her master's life but loses her tail to a vindictive Nannie, account for Tam's fate after his exclamation. By now, a reader is sure that Tam is heroic enough to deserve survival, if only to prove Kate's "prophecy" ultimately false. He is not found drowned at Doon, but Meg and Tam do not come off entirely unscathed. There is a warning implicit in Maggie's lost tail:

Now, wha this tale o' truth shall read,
Ilk man and mother's son, take heed:
Whene'er to drink you are inclin'd,
Or cutty-sarks run in your mind,
Think, ye may buy the joys o'er dear,
Remember Tam o' Shanter's mare.

It is characteristic of the symmetrically inclined narrator that he concludes his "tale" with Maggie's loss of hers (or its homonymie counterpart). However, this warning is no strong deterrent: like all the narrator's warnings throughout the poem, it seems designed to be disregarded.

What is the truth of the tale, then? It is not to be found in the narrator's parodic moral. The tale, in fact, suggests exactly its opposite: don't think, don't remember. "Tam o' Shanter" celebrates the tendency of people—for good or ill—to refuse to reckon the price of their pleasures. The drinking at the tavern goes on each evening despite the disapproval of the farmers' wives. (The purpose of the prologue is to emphasize Tam's habitual, not just occasional, drunkenness.) The dancing in the kirkyard goes on with similar regularity, despite societal and even divine sanctions. Indeed, the witches are a perfect symbol for the tendency Burns saw in human nature to prefer self-assertion to prudent abstention. Witches give up a hope for a feeling, a concept of redemption for a sensation of present pleasure. The narrator does not stint his description of the gruesome trappings of the witches' dance, but it is basically hedonism, not evil, that he perceives in their conduct. Tam himself acts from a motive similar to Nannie's when his "roar" of approval indicates the victory of his instinct for pleasurable response over his less powerful one for self-protection and caution.

If this notion of the inexorably instinctive basis for human behavior were the whole "truth" of "Tam o' Shanter," however, the poem would not sound so different from "Love and Liberty," which shares that central theme. The difference is that in "Tam o' Shanter" the view that imprudence is a prerequisite to heroism is stated ironically: the reader is left to puzzle out views on instinct and repression that Burns presented unequivocally in "Love and Liberty." No character in "Tam o' Shanter" is unequivocally perceived. (Even Kate, spokeswoman for prudence, demonstrates in her diatribe a quality of reckless energy that is not exactly circumspect.) And in "Tam o' Shanter," Burns complicates the tone by his artist-in-residence narrator, whose high-flown digressions actually keep the poem going until Tam reaches the witches' dance. The cautious narrator's application of literary allusion to Tam's simple pleasures and temptations shows that Burns uses art itself as a kind of "prudence" in the poem: he uses it to anticipate consequences, to order and control things, and to counter Tam's policy of playing life by ear.

The poem shifts perspective between Tam and the narrator, the man and the poet—between life and literature. In a way, the truth of the tale is this very sense that human instinct and creative synthesis follow parallel if not always contiguous paths and that an affectionate irony in presenting both can be the "bridge" between them. In "Tam o' Shanter" it is a double consciousness, expressed as irony, that brings both life and art, energy and order, into the world of the poem. The tendency of the narrator to enlarge and reflect on the events in the poem is as necessary to "Tam o' Shanter" as the tendency of its "hero" to pursue immediate gratification. A special feature of the irony in Burns's poem is that, though certainly not tragic, it is not exclusively comic. In the ironic distance between Tam's and the narrator's perspectives we can see Burns's assertion of a mediating consciousness somewhere between the facts of life and the seductive lies of fancy. "Honest Tam's" heroism may be qualified by drunkenness and some other defects of character, but he is still much more than the butt of a poet's joke, as was Cowper's John Gilpin, for instance. Cowper's "diverting tale" also features the misadventures of a working man on horseback, but Cowper's mockery is directed against incompetent Gilpin, who cannot get his horse to stop. Burns's ironic view of Tam stops short of imposing haplessness on him. Tam is a good rider and his one speaking line, "Weel done," establishes him as an aggressive presence. The irony in "Tam o' Shanter" is a sympathetic and integrating force, like the stress on mutual affection that underlies Burns's love songs. In "Tam o' Shanter," an affectionate irony brings together an artful narrator and artless Tam in a world where both can operate freely. Like so much of Burns's best work, "Tam o' Shanter" chooses to perceive its world optimistically.

In "Night the Second" of The Four Zoas (1795–1804), William Blake introduces to his epic some of the same themes that engaged Burns in his mock-epic:

What is the price of Experience? do men buy it for a song?
Or Wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,
And in the wither'd field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.
(Complete Writings)

It is either Burns's shortcoming or his distinction—I think chiefly the latter—that perceiving as Blake did a central disjunction between joyous human instincts and the generally downhill course of life, Burns still addressed himself to issues like Blake's largely in an affirmative spirit. For Burns in his later years, whatever his personal disappointments, a song—a Scottish song—became exactly the "price of Experience." In "Tam o' Shanter" the market is far from "desolate"; and the beauty of a song—or the "wisdom" of a witches' dance—happens to be truth enough.