[In this essay, MacLachlan examines Burns's varying role as narrator in the context of his literary-historical position.]

A recent volume of essays on Burns [The Art of Robert Burns, edited by R. D. S. Jack and Andrew Noble, 1982] has placed new emphasis on the poet's adoption of roles. 'Burns's use and arguable abuse of a poetic persona,' the editors write in their introduction, 'the distinction discernible between the creativity present in his best, mainly early, poetry and songs and the much more questionable "self-creativity" displayed in his letters is … a theme of considerable interest' for many of the contributors to their volume. This interest centres upon Burns's letters, where they remark upon 'the plasticity Burns felt he had to adopt in order either to fashion a tone suitable to his correspondent or to achieve the social role or position he desired'. The result is an enigma, the problem of deciding 'not only the degree of sincerity present towards the person addressed, but also the degree of sincerity in the writer towards himself at the moment of composition'. Consideration of where Burns seems to stand in relation to what he is writing can, I think, be usefully extended from the letters to the poetry. It must, however, be accompanied by an awareness of Burns's complex literary-historical position, especially his combination of Scottish and English influences and trends, in short, the classic insight of twentieth-century Burns criticism, given classic statement by [David] Daiches [Robert Burns, 1952] and [Thomas] Crawford [Burns: A Study of the Poems and Songs, 1960].

The starting point for such a consideration of Burns must be that fascinating poem, "The Cotter's Saturday Night." Here we have one of Burns's most obvious attempts to straddle his two cultures. On the English side are the allusions to Gray, Goldsmith and others, the quotations from Pope and the use of the Spenserian stanza. This last was adopted by Burns as a signal to his readers of the kind of poem he was writing—rustic, moralising, perhaps slightly archaic, certainly nostalgic. Its affinities are with Shenstone and Beattie. The stanza form, then, along with the allusions and literary echoes, appeals to a developed literary taste. Yet in contrast the subject of the poem is a Scottish working-class household, observed with often minute accuracy. Where in Gray's Elegy the ploughman merely 'homeward plods his weary way', Burns, in a stanza which is surely an elaboration of Gray's opening one, carefully lists the cotter's tools, 'his spades, his mattocks and his hoes' (line 16), with an assured familiarity Gray cannot match. Repeatedly "The Cotter's Saturday Night", shows such first-hand acquaintance with its subject, as, of course, we would expect. So Burns, even more obviously than Fergusson in 'The Farmer's Ingle', brings together English influences, mainly literary, and his own Scottish experience.

What is curious about the poem, and perhaps the reason for its ultimate failure, is the position of the poet himself. He seems somehow outside the poem, for all his intimate understanding of its subject. As Daiches says, 'Burns's attempt both to be his subject and to stand outside it and show it off to a genteel audience spoils the poem'. He appears able to describe the cotter and his family at first hand, but also seems detached from these scenes, seeing them from a different point of view from the cotter's, because of his awareness of a broader culture, implied in the form and allusions of the poem. The way the poem is written conflicts with what it wishes to say; and yet Burns's effusive patriotism at the end and his explicit rejection of some aspects of a grander culture than the cottar's ('luxury's contagion', he calls it in stanza 20) work against a simple identification of Burns with the literary culture he is exploiting. The poet comes to occupy an uncomfortable isolation, being neither a cotter nor, by his own assertion, a man of easy refinement, though his affinities with each contribute to his estrangement from its opposite.

Given the awkwardness of Burns's point of view in "The Cotter's Saturday Night," the reader should approach the central purpose of the poem with care. The climax of the poem is the scene of religious worship in stanzas 12 to 17. The view of religion presented is both selective and not a little tendentious. It is noteworthy that Burns describes family worship, without a clergyman or ritual, and without a sermon. It consists of prayer, hymn-singing and Bible reading: in other words, a churchless religion, without institutions or intellectual discussion. It is very much an emotional occasion, one of 'heartfelt raptures' (stanza 13). The Bible passages mentioned in stanza 14 concern 'how the royal Bard did groaning lye', 'Job's pathetic plaint' and 'rapt Isaiah's wild, seraphic fire'; the hymns and prayers similarly have emotional effects on the worshippers. Metters of doctrine and church government are absent. Instead, the attention is upon 'the language of the Soul', which proceeds, not from method or art, but from the heart (stanza 17). Here, surely, is a view of religion which is sentimental, in the Sternian sense, and Burns seems genuinely to admire this form of Christianity, perhaps because of its limitations. It is curious, though, that it should have met with favour elsewhere, even among the orthodox, because its corollary, an antipathy to formal religion, is obvious from stanza 17.

Burns's antipathy to formal religion is, of course, made even more obvious in his religious satires. What he attacks in them are the opposites of what he approves of in "The Cotter's Saturday Night." In the greatest of the satires, "Holy Willie's Prayer," Burns completely adopts a role, for satiric purposes. He disappears, leaving the victim to condemn himself in his own words. Like Swift, Burns shows complete mastery of his victim's language—or languages, for many of the satirical touches come from the switches in language in the poem. Willie's self-satisfied rhetoric at the prayer's beginning fractures into something less controlled when he blurts out his own misdemeanours with Meg and Leezie's lass or remembers his humiliation by Gavin Hamilton. But the unctuous rhetoric is intrinsically satirical. As Daiches explains, while Willie maintains a tone of religious solemnity and often sounds conventionally pious, his meaning is outrageous and morally absurd. He glorifies a God who condemns ten out of eleven to hell without regard for their actions, good or bad; he affects humility at having been chosen by this God six thousand years ago; and he contrives to excuse his sexual incontinence as a penance he has to bear. In all this Willie is quite orthodox. Burns does not travesty Willie's Calvinism; he merely lets it speak for itself, and, as Daiches says, 'there is certainly nothing left of his creed by the time the poem comes to an end … a character damns himself and his doctrine before the reader's eyes'. The poem is much more than a personal lampoon. It goes beyond that, beyond satirising Willie Fisher, to attack through him the more rigid traditions of the Scottish Kirk, perhaps even of Christianity itself.

The question I want to ask is where Burns himself stands in all this. Daiches writes of his 'apparent indifference' to the way Holy Willie's beliefs are progressively self-destroyed, and of course such detachment is tactically necessary to allow the victim enough rope to hang himself. But aloof though he may be, Burns in not entirely absent from the poem and we can discern his position fairly well. Three points can be made. First, Burns clearly sees the forms of religion as a natural hiding place for hypocricy. Willies language is a screen for his real thoughts, by Burns's genius here made transparent for us, but not, one supposes, always so penetrable to the view; indeed, Willie himself seems unaware of his real meaning. Traditional language, and perhaps even traditional religion, appear empty conventions, apt to be filled with human selfishness and corruption. Second, Burns finds the very outward forms of this religion repugnant: the ferocity and lack of mercy of the Calvinist God; his inexorable logic of election and damnation; his readiness for vengeance and openness to Willie Fisher's kind of specious wheedling. Burns hates the very face of Willie's creed, quite apart from the hypocrisy behind it. Third, in opposition to this rejected religion Burns places human pleasure and satisfaction, including the sexual. We know Willie is a hypocrite because he admits he is 'fash'd wi' fleshly lust' and his objection to Gavin Hamilton is that 'he drinks, and swears, and plays at cartes', that is, he enjoys some of the ordinary freedoms of human society. Over against the image of man Holy Willie presents (and hides behind) is another image, the Burnsian one, based on a contempt for logic-chopping, a hatred of hell-and-damnation preachers and their God, a conviction of their hypocrisy in maintaining a part which human nature cannot sustain and a belief in the essential innocence and worthiness of happiness, both social and sexual, provided it is free from cant and bigotry.

There are clear connections between the positive view of human nature discernible in "Holy Willie's Prayer" and the view of religion in "The Cotter's Saturday Night." The cotter and his family avoid the hypocrisy of Holy Willie by frankness of emotion and innocence of intellect and demonstrate in their simple pleasures, sketched in the earlier part of the poem, the natural joys of humanity, including sexual love. Yet the idyll is never quite convincing. It is too selective. There is, for instance, an aspect of rural life hardly mentioned in the poem which is closely related to the religious. This is the supernatural. Burns's attitude to this is complex and revealing, as can be seen in another poem, "Halloween."

Neither Daiches nor Crawford warms to "Halloween": the first calls it 'tedious', the second finds it parochial and quotes W.P. Ker on Burns's aloofness in the poem: 'his is not the voice of the people, but the voice of a judge to whom the people are more or less indifferent, who is far above them, and who sees them as small creatures moved by slight and trivial motives'. Once again, Burns's point of view in relation to his poem seems to be the issue. One can begin by noting the poem's place in the eighteenth century's growing if sometimes uncomprehending interest in both the supernatural and in folklore. In turning to this subject, Burns shows himself once again in touch with his times. Yet although there was growing fascination with the emotional effects of horror and the irrational, as well as a widespread feeling that the genius of the untutored claimed attention, there was considerable diffidence about both. Frequently they had to be justified on antiquarian or anthropological grounds. This is the pose struck by Burns in the headnote to the poem. The first sentence mentions 'the manners and traditions of the country', as though it were not his own rural environment. Burns talks of the importance of these to 'the Peasantry in the West of Scotland', which sufficiently distances him from them and gives the poem an anthropological purpose. In the next sentence he elevates this into philosophy: 'the passion of prying into Futurity makes a striking part of the history of Human Nature, in its rude state, in all ages and nations … ' He goes on to refer to the 'philosophic mind' of the potential reader, as opposed to the 'more unenlightened' subjects of the poem itself.

All this sounds nervous or apologetic, as though Burns cannot present the poem as it is but must justify it as a serious study. Yet it is hardly to be doubted that Burns himself had participated in many of the superstitious rituals he presents in this cold, quasi-scientific manner. As with "The Cotter's Saturday Night," Burns seems split between an intimate acquaintance with his subject and a detached manner of presenting it. He takes both the supernatural and the common people seriously enough to write a poem of over two hundred and fifty lines about them and yet is careful to reassure the reader of his own possession of 'a philosophic mind'. The awkwardness of this position is, I suspect, related to his own religious views. Against the harsh logic of Calvinism Burns sets the heart and its affections, what he calls 'the language of the Soul'. But too strong a reaction against reason would tilt over into the irrational. To prefer the cotter's simple religion before 'Religion's pride' and Holy Willie's hypocrisy is fine, so long as it does not run to an acceptance of superstition. As "Halloween" shows, such superstition is part of the outlook of the cotter's class, even if it is carefully excluded from "The Cotter's Saturday Night." Burns has to perform a balancing act whose strain shows in both poems. Folk-superstition also threatens his view of human nature. He is against hell-fire and damnation and for a more humane set of values; he must be similarly suspicious of the supernatural, as it appears in folk-customs. He rejects the Calvinist doctrines of a vengeful God and man's depravity as bogeymen; and hence must reject bogeymen too. But superstitions are less easy to combat than theology, partly because they are not presented as propositions you can debate and partly because they are acquired in a manner which renders them tenacious, as Burns himself noted in his autobiographical letter to Dr Moore of 2 August 1787. After mentioning the old woman who filled his boyish mind with stories of the supernatural, he goes on to say that they 'had so strong an effect on my imagination that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more sceptical than I am in such matters, yet it often takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these idle terrors'. This ambivalence, between the strong effect on the imagination of these dark wonders and the effort of reason which attempts to dismiss them as old wives' tales, is clear in this passage, and so too, in the jocular tone, is the escape from the dilemma. Burns resolves his embarrassment by treating the superstitious humorously.

"Halloween" therefore describes the various folk customs faithfully enough, but almost every one is undercut by a comic outcome. In stanza IV, Will gets lost in the dark and pulls a cabbage stalk instead of a kail stalk; in stanza XII Merran gets such a fright when her blue thread is caught in the kiln that she fails to stay the question; and in stanza XXII Meg is frightened by a rat in the barn and runs through the midden to escape. The broadest humour is contained in the incident of Jamie Fleck and the hemp seed (stanzas XVII to XX): he sows the seed, glances back and sees a terrible apparition, which turns out to be, not his future beloved, but Grumphie the sow. Here Burns provides a common-sense resolution of the mystery (rather like Ann Radcliffe's practice in her Gothic novels); there is a vision, but it is not supernatural. Similarly, in stanza XXVI, Leezie is so frightened by a noise in the dark that she jumps in the pool; the sound might have come from the devil, but Burns also adds the possibility that it came from a cow. In short, "Halloween" shows the same lack of involvement noticeable in "The Cotter's Saturday Night." The detail is true and faithful, but it is observed from outside, and Burns, both in and out of the poem, seems detached and aloof. The power and mystery of the supernatural are neutralised by the philosophical pose and by humour.

This seems to bring us close to Carlyle's judgment on "Tam o'Shanter":

He has not gone back, much less carried us back, into that dark, earnest, wondering age, when the tradition was believed, and when it took its rise; 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; and which lives in us too, and will for ever live …

This certainly applies to "Halloween," although it is central to my argument that Burns, far from wishing to go back into 'that dark, earnest, wondering age' of superstition, was fearful of doing so and adopted certain devices to exorcise the supernatural. At least one of these devices, the philosophical headnote to the poem, derives from an Anglified literary culture which also confuses Burns's standpoint in "The Cotter's Saturday Night."

Carlyle's remarks, however, apply not to "Halloween" or "The Cotter's Saturday Night" but to "Tam o'Shanter" and as such seem quite beside the point. He seems, as Crawford says, 'Quite out of touch with the hostility of the Enlightenment towards the supernatural'. Yet, if anything, the poem is remarkable for not treating the supernatural with disdain. Indeed, "Tam o'Shanter" can be best described as a poem which combines Enlightened attitudes with traditional material and finds the literary means, in various modifications of English literary forms, to make this synthesis not merely convincing but a creative whole. As in "The Cotter's Saturday Night" the essentially unsophisticated subject is surrounded by evidence of sophisticated literary taste; and as in "Halloween" the supernatural is undercut by humour. But the difference in "Tam o'Shanter" is that the literary form adopted is an ironic one, so that neither the sophisticated culture nor the sceptical humour is unequivocal and what might have been a conflict of values becomes instead a range of ambiguities, among which the unsophisticated and the supernatural may, just, survive.

The literary form of "Tam o'Shanter," as Mabel I. Mackenzie ["A New Dimension for 'Tam o'Shanter'", in Studies in Scottish Literature, I, 1963-64] and, apparently independently, John MacQueen [The Enlightenment and Scottish Literature Volume I: Progress and Poetry, 1982] make clear, is mock-heroic. Burns takes over a form much used in Augustan English literature and employs it, with wit and skill, as the medium for a Scottish folk narrative. Both aspects of the work gain from the association, and the final effect is nicely balanced between literary sophistication and earthy humour, all darkened with horrible imaginings. The close amalgam of the neo-classical and the local is evident is the very epigraph to the poem:

Of Brownys and of Bogillis full is this boke.

This comes, as Professor MacQueen notes, from Gavin Douglas's invocation to the sixth book of the Aeneid, the book in which Aeneas descends into the underworld. 'Like Aeneas in Virgil's Book VI' says MacQueen "Tam o'Shanter" pays a visit to the Otherworld' (Dr Mackenzie is more racy: 'Tam does not descend to the underworld; it comes up to him'). Along with epic echoes in the fable of the poem, there are stylistic parallels. Both critics note the use of epic similes: 'the bees which appear in Homer, Virgil, Spenser and Milton are not missing from Burns's poem. They appear twice … '. Their second appearance, at line 193, is as an intrusion between the outrush of the witches after Tam and the result of their pursuit. Not for the first time the impatient reader damns the narrator's love of his own eloquence. His moralising interjections are similar. Appropriate though they may be to a would be heroic poem, there are too many to be taken seriously. Lines 33 to 36 are a brief sample:

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!

The penultimate line here rhetorically elaborates on the 'counsels sweet' of its predecessor, thus delaying the conclusion of the sentence. The speaker dwells oratorically on his words and makes them seem more decorative than functional. This is part of the irony, along with the implications of the word 'lengthen'd' and the suggestion that all this moves the narrator to tears. A similar ironic posturing surely affects the oft-disputed lines 59 to 66:

But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flow'r, 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.

Here Burns, as Dr Mackenzie says, 'piles up similes in carefully stated, neo-classical language', what Daiches calls 'a deliberately "fancy" English … as though to draw attention to the literary quality of the utterance'. The difficulties the passage has caused seem to me to come exactly from the problem Jack and Noble define, 'to decide not only the degree of sincerity present towards the person addressed, but also the degree of sincerity in the writer towards himself at the moment of composition'. In a mock-heroic poem, however, such ambiguity is not merely permitted, but a peculiar grace.

Another mock-heroic feature of "Tam o'Shanter," is its use of prophecy to anticipate the action. Just as Pope introduces the Baron's prayer in Canto 2 of The Rape of the Lock, amid several other prophetic touches, so Burns introduces Tam's wife:

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.
(ll. 29-32)

And like the Baron's, only half this wish is granted, or nearly (a point made by Dr Mackenzie). The prophetic elements, however, shade into the Gothic ones, another literary influence on the poem, in Tam's night ride:

By this time he was cross the ford,
Whare, in the snaw, the chapman smoor'd;
And past the birks and meikle stane,
Whare drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane;
And thro' the whins, and by the cairn,
Whare hunters fand the murder'd bairn;
And near the thorn, aboon the well,
Whare Mungo's mither hang'd hersel.
(ll. 89-96)

This is an accumulation of ominous portents of disaster, comic in its exaggeration, but also an exploitation of the grim and ghastly, something pursued into the kirkyard itself, especially in the list of things Tam sees on the table:

Five tomahawks, wi' blude red-rusted;
Five scymitars, wi' murder crusted;
A garter, which a babe had strangled;
A knife, a father's throat had mangled …
(ll. 135-138)

Ironically, these lines are perfectly neo-classical in their balanced organisation, yet what is described is far removed from neo-classical taste. Another, and less lurid, departure from neo-classicism is the low-life setting, which, although it is part of the mock-heroic effect, is not treated ironically. The opening of the poem describes a common-place scene and the joviality in the tavern, too, is described straightforwardly; there may be a moral point, serious or otherwise, here but we are not being asked to make a social judgment, or to judge the characters for anything other than their excess.

It is this genre quality of the poem, however, which gives it body, filling out the mock-heroic literary scheme with solid fare. "Tam o' Shanter"'s exact topography and its use of local superstitions and folk-lore balance its literary sophistication. Some of these allusions are slight, as in the reference to 'snaw-white seventeen hunder linnen' in line 154, or the later four lines on the cutty sark itself:

Ah! little kend thy reverend grannie,
That sark she coft for her wee Nannie,
Wi' twa pund Scots, ('twas a' her riches),
Wad ever grac'd a dance o' witches!
(ll. 175-178)

By means of such allusions, "Tam o' Shanter" is connected in a multitude of ways, great and small, with a real society, economy and culture. Burns takes once again the role of recorder of local life which he plays in "The Cotter's Saturday Night" and "Halloween". The Gothic incidents of Tam's journey, for instance, have a folk-lore quality—each landmark has a traditional story attached to it—and the poem is full of asides which link it to a context of superstition and legend; for example, there is Nannie's career as a witch:

For mony a beast to dead she shot,
And perish'd mony a bony boat,
And shook baith meikle corn and bear,
And kept the country-side in a fear …
(ll. 166-169)

Killing cattle, wrecking boats, blighting crops—these are the traditional accusations made against witches. The supernatural and uncanny element of the poem gains much from these circumstantial details and references to real superstitions. We cannot dismiss as a literary joke a poem so obstinately rooted in popular conviction, in what a recognisable community of real people believed to be true. At the same time, Burns's use of a very Augustan mode of writing shows his detachment from the subject matter. He has preserved his distance once again, so that it is not immediately obvious whether he believes in Tam's witches or not, or whether he believes in the devil here at all. All this is to the good. The supernatural element in the poem is the better for remaining ambiguous, neither easily dismissed nor quite free from common-sense scepticism; and, like the great mock-heroic poems of Dryden and Pope, "Tam o' Shanter" uses the form to unsettle the reader and his sense of values in a satiric way.

A major unsettling factor is the shifting standpoint of Burns himself, acting as narrator of the poem. It is tempting, indeed, to separate the two and talk of the poem as an exercise in the use of a poetic mask or persona (like "Holy Willie's Prayer") Earlier, the ironic nature of one of the narrator's intrusions (lines 33 to 36) was described. The very first paragraph puts him in an equivocal position: he says that 'we sit bousing at the nappy' and that 'we think na on the lang Scots miles … That lie between us and our hame' (lines, 5, 7 and 9), which makes him a crony of Tam's and hence no fit judge of him. The implicit association between Tam and the narrator contributes to the curious effect of lines 59 to 66, which, as noted above, present a series of beautiful sentiments, aptly expressed, but perhaps a little too self-advertisingly poetical. The narrator seems to call attention to his superior refinement and cultured outlook. In contrast, in lines 151 to 162 he reveals a lustful quality. Tam is staring at the witches dancing in their underclothes. The narrator rebukes him, but not, as we might expect, for his interest in the sight of underdressed females, but rather because the females in question are not worth looking at. And the narrator makes his point by saying that, if they had been young girls, he would have given his own breeches for a sight of them, an obvious sexual quibble. This almost makes the narrator a hypocrite, one whose moral rectitude is a pose and who really shares the immoral desires of those he admonishes. The narrator formally comments and moralises, but his meaning subverts convention. He is a device of irony and humour, sometimes, indeed, a device of intensification, as in lines 201 to 204, where he prophesies a false ending to the tale:

Ah Tam! Ah Tam! thou'll get thy fairin!
In Hell they'll roast thee like a herrin!
In vain thy Kate awaits thy comin!
Kate soon will be a woefu' woman!

The lack of moral consistency in the narrator prepares us for the tongue-in-cheek moral at the end.

What, then, is the real moral of "Tam o' Shanter"? Here it helps to draw upon the conclusions already reached in considering other poems by Burns. In "Holy Willie's Prayer" Burns counters the Calvinist view of man with another, in which human pleasure, including sexual pleasure, has a positive value. "Tam o' Shanter" is about this pleasure, but the description of it comes with a warning about its transience and the retribution that falls, or may fall, upon indulgers. Tam's boozing is clearly an indulgence in pleasure. It is excessive, perhaps, but otherwise Burns hardly condemns it. The mock-heroic style, with its ironic presentation of heroic values, allows Burns to slip out of a conventional moral judgment without being forced into an aggressive unorthodoxy. The tavern scene, then, is one of gaiety and abundance, associated with positive qualities: note the prominence of the word 'divinely' in the description of Tam, sitting

Fast, by an ingle, bleezing finely,
Wi' reaming swats, that drank divinely;
And at his elbow, Souter Johnny,
His ancient, trusty, drouthy crony;
Tam lo'ed him like a vera brither….
(ll. 39-43)

Brotherly love is not the only kind in evidence:

The landlady and Tam grew gracious,
Wi' favours, secret, sweet, and precious:
(ll. 47-48)

As Crawford says, 'the drink, the warmth, the talk, the landlady's "secret favours"—these are the Pleasures that are "like poppies spread"' and for these Tam has to pay, with the hardships of his night journey through storm (although admittedly the alcohol at least fortifies him somewhat). The importance of this cycle of pleasure and retribution is clear when it is noticed that it occurs three times in the poem. First, in the first paragraph, where it is described in general terms; the boozers in the pub eventually have to face the journey home:

Whare sits our sulky sullen dame,
Gathering her brows like gathering storm.
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.
(ll. 10-12)

This of course is Tam's particular case, a point made by Daiches, at the very least, he has to pay for his pleasure by a soaking in the storm and a tongue-lashing from Kate, of which we are given a sample. But the second half of the poem transposes the theme into an eldritch key; now the pleasure/retribution cycle becomes weird, and perhaps symbolic. Tam's erotic pleasure in Nannie's dancing is punished by the pursuit of the witches, leading to the loss of his mare's tail—a fairly obvious sexual innuendo. As MacQueen says, 'the poem ends with a castration symbol', but in writing that 'Tam has escaped, but he has finally lost the virility which he almost recovered at the Kirk' MacQueen seems to me to confuse the symbol with reality. MacQueen's view is that Nannie the witch is 'Kate's opposite'. It seems more coherent to take Nannie as the supernatural equivalent of the vengeful wife, the third manifestation of what MacQueen himself calls 'an unnamed archetype, brooding like a storm outside the inn' in the first paragraph of the poem. The agents of retribution in the poem, then, are female: 'our sulky sullen dame', Kate the wife and Nannie the witch. The moral, on the other hand, is directed towards the other sex, 'ilk man and mother's son'. There is, of course, a class of females in sympathy with Tam in the poem. It is represented by Kirkton Jean, who provides drink on Sundays (lines 27 to 28), the landlady who flirts with Tam and lastly Tam's faithful grey mare, Meg, who both suffers symbolically for him at the end and also symbolically lifts a leg for him (line 80). This class of female is allied with Tam and his male friends in a world of pleasure. Opposed to them are wives and witches, who significantly meet in a church and are engaged in a parody of a religious service led by a figure in black.

As W. Montgomerie writes [in his New Judgments: Robert Burns, 1947], 'Auld Nick's place in the poem is significantly in the Kirk', though why, given Burns's views on the Kirk's hypocrisy and moral depravity, he should add that the devil is 'in opposition to it' is not easy to follow. Montgomerie goes on to call Auld Nick 'a creature of the historical past, like his warlocks and witches,

like the dead'; as such, rather than being 'part of the human personality suppressed by Calvinism', as Montgomerie would have it, he is in fact an apt representation of rigid Calvinism itself. Of course, what his congregation do looks, at first sight, much like a drunken orgy and this is how Tam sees it; but he is swiftly disabused. Just as Holy Willie has little difficulty persuading himself of the theological justification for his own sins of the flesh and yet attacks Gavin Hamilton for lesser indulgences, each witch, happy enough to go 'at it in her sark' (line 150), turns in self-righteous anger upon the man who, like the boy in the fable, has the temerity to remark on the exiguity of dress. The spell breaks, and the witches' fury is roused, when Tam shouts out the truth; just as one supposes the kind of celebration described in "The Holy Fair," could not long survive that poem's revelation of its connection, despite high pretensions, with drink and houghmagandie. In "The Holy Fair" as in "Holy Willie's Prayer," Burns cuts through the disguise of cant and self-delusion and shows us the human reality. In so doing he attracted the opprobrium of the orthodox. It is this pattern of events that occurs in "Tam o'Shanter," although in that Gothic fantasy Burns attacks conventional religion much more severely than he does elsewhere, by placing the devil himself at its centre, and depriving him of any hypocritical disguise.

Despite its vividness and humour "Tam o' Shanter" is fundamentally a pessimistic poem. Victory, however hollow, goes to the forces of convention and the pleasures of life are shown to be transient and penalised. This accounts for a degree of pathos in the poem, which centres upon Tam o' Shanter himself. As MacQueen points out, only two adjectives are applied directly to Tam. In line 129 he is termed 'heroic', appropriately enough, but with some irony, given the poem's mock-heroic nature. The other adjective occurs when the character is first mentioned; in line 13 he is 'honest Tam o' Shanter'. What 'honest' means here is not clear, but it becomes more so after the aside about Ayr:

Auld Ayr, wham ne'er a town surpasses,
For honest men and bonny lasses.
(ll. 15-16)

The conjunction with that sort of female suggests that honest men are those of a convivial and fun-loving disposition, which is a paradox given the usual meaning of 'honest'. This is part of the poem's subversion of conventional morality, of conventional honesty. Tam, then, is the representative of the Burnsian attitude to life, in opposition to the pious and the douce. But the most interesting description of Tam is more extended and occurs at the height of the pub scene, when our hero is in his element:

Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious,
O'er a' the ills o' life victorious!
(ll. 57-58)

Again, there is irony here, as well as pathos. Tam is glorious—for the moment; he is victorious over life's ills—an enviable position, while it lasts. Immediately after this couplet come the similes on the transience of pleasure, culminating in the bleak proverb, 'Nae man can tether time or tide' (line 67). In lines 57 and 58, then, are concentrated the poem's central meaning: the power of pleasure and its transience, the conflict between Tam's euphoria and the ills of life which have assailed and will again assail him. Perhaps that is why virtually every critic of the poem draws attention to these lines. None, however, has noted an evident allusion, perhaps because it is so obvious, to a well-known song (in Britain, at least) which requests a blessing on a king (or queen) and wishes he (or she) may be victorious, happy and glorious. At a key point in the poem, then, Burns expresses himself in an allusive way. With his hero getting fou in an Ayrshire pub, he lifts his diction with a reference to a poem with quite other associations. The effect, of course, is mock-heroic, though not entirely so. At this point in the poem Tam indeed is a king, or rather, as Mackenzie says, he 'has attributes a king might envy'. The poem balances between mocking Tam and glorifying him, and it does so by successfully combining Scots and English in a way which is typical of Burns's genius and nowhere more evident than in "Tam o' Shanter". But the balancing, too, is typical of Burns, leaving the reader in teasing doubt of his exact position, so that reading the poem requires a constant alertness to the play of meanings and values around the text and to the shifting point of view of the poet.