SOURCE: "Robert Burns's Declining Fame," in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 11, No. 3, Summer, 1972, pp. 207–24.

[In the following essay, Bentman contends that Burns's poetry is a significant part of British literary history, despite his declining popularity in recent decades.]

Robert Burns's poetry is all but ignored in current scholarship of British literature. During the past twenty-five years, critics and scholars have often acted as if his poetry did not exist or have treated him as if he were a poet worth scant attention. This recent indifference to Burns's poetry has not been effected, as is usual in such instances of declining fame, by a critical downgrading of his work. It seems, rather, to result from an assumption that Burns is not in a British tradition. He is ignored because he is considered either to be in a purely Scottish tradition or to be one of those rare poets who are in no tradition at all.

I submit that Burns figures in the major tradition of British poetry and is indeed significant in the transition from the style of poetry written in the early eighteenth century to the style of poetry written in the early nineteenth century. Burns considered himself a follower of the important British poets who preceded him. The important poets who followed Burns considered him an important predecessor of their own theories and practices. His language, while presenting certain problems peculiar to dialect literature, does not separate him from poetry in standard English. On the contrary, it demonstrates some aspects of the development of British poetic diction. And he demonstrates, in thought and technique, part of the actual process of change that occurred during the latter half of the eighteenth century, the change that allowed Romantic poetry to grow out of the poetry of the Augustan Age.

Yet wherever one looks in the scholarship and criticism of the past twenty-five years, Burns is given little or no attention. Works which discuss the eighteenth century generally, works which concentrate on the poetry of "sensibility" in the eighteenth century, and works which concentrate on the transition from eighteenth-century to early nineteenth-century ideas and styles mention Burns either incidentally or not at all. Studies of the influence of the eighteenth-century writers who might well have influenced Burns, such as Thomson, may discuss Thomson's influence on Cowper, Crabbe, or Blake, but not on Burns. Works which trace the origins of the nineteenth-century Romantic movement into the eighteenth century, discussing Cowper, Crabbe, Blake, treat Burns as if he had no significant influence. Even an essay devoted to demonstrating Burns's anticipation of nineteenth-century comic theories [Frederick L. Beaty, "Burns' Comedy of Romantic Love," PMLA, 83, 1968] makes Burns "unwitting" and almost irrelevant to the Romantic poets: "His poetry had unwittingly sanctioned in advance many of the tenets enunciated in Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads." Why not: "Burns influenced Wordsworth"? The author of "The Holy Fair," "The Jolly Beggars," "Address to the Deil," "Holy Willie's Prayer," "To a Louse," "Epistle to J. Lapraik," "Epistle to Davie," would seem to be one of the most important satirists between Pope and Byron, yet histories of English satire, even of the satire of the late eighteenth century, make, at the most, a passing reference to Burns as a satirist. Anthologies have begun to exclude him. H. E. Pagliaro excludes him from an anthology of eighteenth-century literature [Major English Writers of the Eighteenth Century, 1969], without explanation. Donald Davie excludes him from an anthology of poetry of the late eighteenth century [The Late Angus tans, 1958]. The Penguin Book of Satirical Verse [edited by Edward Lucie-Smith, 1967] ignores him. And anthologies of Romantic poetry, even those with sections on eighteenth-century Romantic poetry, frequently exclude him. The few studies which run counter to this trend, and which attempt to document Burns's position in the British tradition, fall on barren ground. No one refutes them and no one accepts them.

Yet it has not always been so. Historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw Burns as a major predecessor of Romantic poetry. Hugh Walker [English Satire and Satirists, 1925] devoted an entire chapter to Burns and Byron in his history of English satire. Alan Dugald McKillop [English Literature from Dryden to Burns, 1948] saw him as the terminal figure in the period beginning with Dryden, and George Sherburne [in A Literary History of England, edited by Albert C. Baugh, 1948] considered him and Cowper the major predecessors of Wordsworth. The change in attitude has mostly taken place in the past twenty or thirty years.

Two assumptions seem to have effected this change. One argument, which is often explicitly stated, but not usually given in general works as a reason for omitting Burns, is that Burns is a Scottish, not a British poet. He did write some "English" poems, the theory goes, but they were always bad and unimportant. The second argument is not explicitly stated but seems to run through much of the thinking about Burns. It is consistent with the general shift in taste that has taken place in the past twenty or thirty years, which has resulted in "The Jolly Beggars" being preferred to "The Cotter's Saturday Night." This argument postulates a good Burns and a bad Burns. The bad Burns is primarily English in diction and sentimental in tone, the Burns of "The Cotter's Saturday Night," "Man Was Made to Mourn," "The Lament," "Despondency," etc. He is influenced by bad poetry of the eigh teenth century and has some influence on the bad poetry of the nineteenth century—including bad poetry by good poets. This is the Burns who admired English poetry, was admired by nineteenth-century poets, and to whom the older historians referred when they considered Burns a poet in the British tradition. This Burns deserves little critical attention because he is part of a tiresome, insignificant trend. The good Burns, the Burns of "To a Mouse," "To a Louse," "Epistle to J. Lapraik," "Holy Willie's Prayer," "The Jolly Beggars," "Tain O'Shanter," many of the songs, is considered a rare example of a British poet who does not participate in the British tradition. Since he is an original and is without significant influence, he has no place in general studies of the period.

These theories have distorted our reading of British literary history and have resulted in a misreading of Burns's poetry. They have obscured significant relationships between Augustan and Romantic poetry, in particular those similarities which demonstrate that Romantic poetry in some ways evolved out of Augustan poetry. And they have, worse, contributed to the failure to recognize a body of poetry that, in partaking of the actual groping for new expression, has particular relevance now.

Burns considered himself a part of a British tradition and showed little awareness that a purely Scottish tradition even existed. He did admire Ramsay and Fergusson and expressed a desire to "kindle at their flame" (Preface to the Kilmarnock Edition). But he also referred to Goldsmith as his "favorite poet" and to Cowper as "the best Poet out of sight since Thomson." The Task was "a glorious Poem." Thomson was the one poet whom he repeatedly mentioned and praised, starting with his list of favorite authors "of the sentimental kind" in 1783 and continuing to "Address to the Shade of Thomson" in 1791. Thomson was one of the great joys in life, an "important addition" to his early reading (the autobiographical letter), a criterion of excellence, and a poet who has "looked into Nature for himself: you meet with no copied description." He named Pope as the paragon of poets who have "raised the laugh" and he wished for Pope's "satire's darts" ("To the Rev. John M'Math"). He quoted most frequently (after the Bible) Shakespeare, Thomson, Pope, Young, Milton, Addison, Blair, Gray, Shenstone, and Goldsmith, in that order. He apparently had an easy familiarity with a number of British poets of his own century, and looked to British poets for guidance.

There is, of course, no question of the Scottish influence on Burns, of Fergusson on his early poems and of Ramsay on his songs, of both poets on his verse forms, his language, his subject matter, and of the Scottish songs on his songs. One need spend only a few days in Scotland to see how Scottish Burns was, how typical of his countrymen he was in his assured manliness, his musicality, his easy democracy, his capacity for friendship, his passionate temperament, his marvelous love of life. And the Scottish elements in his poetry have been frequently pointed out most convincingly. Yet there is a negative side. Burns rarely quoted Ramsay or Fergusson. Ramsay is the only poet about whom Burns found occasion to make unfavorable remarks. Burns never mentioned Dunbar, Henryson, Lindsay, or Ramsay's The Evergreen, Negative evidence is, I grant, always suspect. But it is surely difficult to argue a strong influence from authors who are never so much as referred to. His pro-Scottish, anti-English remarks tend more to deal with history and politics—e.g. the Scottish struggle for freedom—than literary heritage. When he looks for literary training, he turns to English literature. For example, when he talks about giving himself a "preparatory course … of Men and Books" he begins with Shakespeare.

Burns's general popularity in England in the later eighteenth century is unmistakable. Lucylle Werkmeister ["Robert Burns and the London Daily Press," MP, 63, 1966] has pointed out Burns's popularity in London newspapers between 1787 and 1797. The magazines are full of imitations, reviews of book-length imitations, commemorations, even parodies. He seemed to be very much part of the literary scene in early nineteenth-century London. The interest, as I have pointed out elsewhere, was shared by most of the important poets of the early nineteenth century, especially Wordsworth and Keats.

Since Burns knew and admired the best eighteenth-century British poetry, and since his poetry was known and admired by the best nineteenth-century British poets, it seems to me that any notable similarities that Burns's poetry has with British poetry before and after him would describe a trend. To deny that such similarities are a part of the development of British poetry is surely a distortion of historical method and forces the facts to fit the theory.

Burns's language is always at the fore of any discussion of his place in British poetry. Certain poems, customarily called his "English" poems—e.g. "Man Was Made to Mourn," "Despondency"—are regarded as evidence that Burns could not write well in English, from which it is deduced that he is not connected with English literature. I agree that these poems are bad. Their badness, however, does not result from Burns's inability to use English well but from his inability to write good sentimental poetry. He uses Scottish, as I have pointed out elsewhere [in "Robert Burns's use of Scottish Diction," From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays in Honor of Frederick Pottle, edited by Frederick Hilles and Harold Bloom, 1965], in a way that anticipates and probably influences Wordsworth's and Coleridge's theories of poetic diction. And he uses English words as competently as he uses Scottish words.

"Despondency," for example, deals with the same theme as "To a Mouse," that life for all living beings is painful and uncertain. But in "Despondency" Burns neither clarifies nor makes concrete the vague and abstract subject. The principal metaphor is that of a man walking down the road of life, carrying and galled by a huge burden. "Grief and "care," which describe the burden, repeat each other, unlike "grief an' pain" of "To a Mouse." When we are told that the road of life is "rough" and "weary" and that the load is "galling," we know no more about the trouble the poet is experiencing than we did in the first line. Yet Burns uses "gall" effectively in "Address to the Deil" to describe Job's state: "While scabs an' botches did him gall." The trite metaphor of "sick'ning scenes" contrasts with the more direct diction of "prospects drear" of "To a Mouse," which is further developed by the sensuous imagery: "the winter's sleety dribble / An' cranreuch cauld!" In "Despondency" the failure of "pierce" ("What sorrows yet may pierce me thro'") is due more to the lack of supporting imagery in the poem than Burns's inability to use the word effectively (cf. "His piercin words, like Highlan' swords, / Divide the joints an' marrow"—"The Holy Fair"). "Too justly I may fear" contrasts with the "guess an' fear" of "To a Mouse." In the latter phrase, uncertainty makes the fear worse. That the second line of "Despondency" is an impossible cliché, that "set" be comes unfortunately entangled with "burden," that "life" is apparently both the road and the burden, that the meter, used effectively in "Epistle to Davie," is ridiculously inappropriate to this subject, are all aspects of the general ineptness of the poem. Obviously lines like "How blest the Solitary's lot … Within his humble cell" display more than bad diction.

Mr. Thomas Crawford is the only critic I know of in this century who states his admiration for the sentimental poems and the only critic who takes the trouble actually to read the poems rather than repeat the clichés about them. But his defense of them is based on their ideas or on rather generalized poetic techniques. In his discussion of "Man Was Made to Mourn," for example, he argues that the poem "gains rather than loses from the repetition of certain key words, such as 'pleasure' (three times), 'youthful' (four times), 'poor' (four times), 'weary' (four times), 'age' or 'aged' (three times). … Much of our delight in reading it comes from these recurring, and partially varied, sounds and concepts." Mr. Crawford does not explain how the poem "gains" or how we achieve this "delight." To my mind a repetition is effective when a word is developed to acquire richer meaning as it is repeated. "Aged" and "youthful" are accompanied either by no images or by trite ones, "aged step," "aged limbs," "youthful breast," or by words that do not develop the meaning, "youthful prime" (two times). "Weary" is accompanied by "worn with care" or "life"; "poor" by such images as "weeping wife" and "helpless offspring." "Pleasure" has only one image, "On Pleasure's lap carest," which suggests either inversion or infantilism. Mr. Crawford ignores other problems of the poem, for example that it is spoken by an old man who spends all his time standing at the "banks of Ayr" giving gratuitous sermons on the wastefulness of everyone but himself, "Oh Man! … How Prodigal of time." That the old man contradicts himself in stanzas five, seven, eight, and ten, that he leaves points unfinished in stanzas four and six, and that the person addressed understandably disappears in the course of the sermon are, again, indications that something is wrong with the entire conception of the poem.

The badness does not result from Burns's weakness in using English words but from his weakness in writing poetry of abstraction. His best poems express intense feeling derived from experience and conveyed by sensuous detail. Their themes are closely interrelated with the imagery and often appear to grow out of it. The sentimental poems fail because Burns is apparently so uneasy in a tradition which does not call for sensuous detail that he does not control metrics, imagery, or diction. In the sentimental poems Burns uses English because he follows an eighteenth-century tradition but he would have failed in any language when writing abstract poetry.

Sir James A. H. Murray demonstrated [in "Historical Introduction," The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, 1873], a long time ago, that Burns did not write in vernacular Scottish but in a mixture of Scottish and English, and William Allen Neilson [in "Burns in English," Anniversary Papers by Colleagues and Pupils of George Lyman Kittredge, 1913] demonstrated that many of Burns's best works, especially his songs, are almost entirely in English. Burns's language obviously presents special problems, as do other aspects of his regionalism, but it does not in itself exclude him from the British tradition.

Burns's poetry seems to me to participate in and even inaugurate a great many shifts in ideas and style in the transition from Augustanism to Romanticism. I wish to discuss here two of them as examples of Burns's contribution to British literary history: the statiric identification of sexual desire with religious enthusiasm and the lyrical image of man wandering through nature.

The association of sexual desire with religious fervor is, of course, ancient in Western thinking and Western literature. In England the baroque poets, like their counterparts on the continent, used the association as a metaphor which expresses a particular human experience. That the physical sensations of intense religious feeling and sexual impulse are similar seemed to Donne and Crashaw to exalt both. The Augustans, in their reaction against Enthusiasm, took over the image which combines religion with sexuality as they took over so many metaphysical conceits, turned it upside down, and made it satirical. By the middle of the eighteenth century the idea became commonplace. The lesser satirists imitated and exaggerated the satirical image as they so frequently imitated and exaggerated Butler's, Dryden's, Swift's, and Pope's ideas and styles. But they tended, now, with the movement of Dissenters toward a more restrained style of worship, to apply the image to the Methodists. In Christopher Anstey's New Bath Guide, for example, a silly young virgin is unable to distinguish between Visionary Election and rape. In Even Lloyd's The Methodist, the whole Methodist movement, or at least White-field's branch of it, is a scheme of the devil's for mass seduction. The satirist may, with this image, be attacking the Methodist movement or the whole of mankind, but in either case he sees the combination as an example of depravity. This tradition, by the time it reached Burns, would seem to have been taken as far as it could go.

But Burns, characteristically, transforms the satiric conceit, freshens it, alters its statement. He does not satirize from the standpoint of a less enthusiastic religion, as his satiric predecessors did, but from the Enlightenment's standpoint of no organized religion. The alternative to the Holy Fair, for example, is not the Church of England or the New Lights of the Church of Scotland, but a kind of general common sense. He alters the older satiric attitude toward the participants from one of condemnation to one of amused acceptance. The men attending the Holy Fair are not cynically using the similarity of sensation between sexual desire and religious enthusiasm as an opportunity for seduction. Neither the men nor the women are hypocritically using the antinomian implications of Calvinism (as Dissenters and Methodists often do in Augustan satire and as Holy Willie does in one of Burns's less innovative satires) as an excuse to seek sexual opportunities. Nor do they go to the Fair naively expecting religious inspiration but allowing themselves to be easily diverted. Rather, no one seems very clear which of the two experiences he comes to the Fair for in the first place, The transformation from love of God to love of sexual intercourse is portrayed as a consequence of human nature. The satire is directed against those who expect otherwise rather than against those who are subject to what Burns suggests is inevitable and not reprehensible.

Burns uses the satiric techniques of Augustan satire, particularly of his favorite satirist, Pope, but changes them to serve his varied tones. For example, he uses ironic quotation. The young men and women leave the Holy Fair, in the evening:

Wi' faith an' hope, an' love an' drink,
They're a' in famous tune.

The "drink" reflects back onto the first three nouns, making them ambiguous. These nouns can, indeed, refer to Christian virtues. But the first two can imply the men's faith and hope that the women will prove compliant, the "love" can mean sexual desire or sexual love. When Pope uses Biblical quotations the distinction is precise:

Yet, to be just to these poor men of pelf,
Each does but hate his Neighbour as himself.
(Epistle to Bathurst, 109–10)

Pope sees the Biblical admonition as clear. He also says that some people depart from it completely. Burns says that Biblical admonitions are ambiguous (he may even be satirizing Protestant dependence on Bible-reading) and most people neither quite obey them nor quite disregard them. Pope expresses the polarities of love and hate. He may grant that most people behave somewhere in between, but he unambiguously advocates the Christian ideal. Burns expects less from mankind and is satisfied with less. That "love" can mean many things to many men does not in Burns, as in Donne, lend a mystical elevation to all the meanings, but neither does it denigrate them.

Burns's puns contrast with Pope's similarly, in this same passage from "The Holy Fair":

Pope's "passion" can refer either to sexual desire or to the suffering of a martyr. The hypocrite he describes can alternate her feelings but she cannot have them both as the same feeling. Burns's "love divine" is partly love of God, partly wonderful drunken desire simultaneously.

Burns uses this combination in "The Jolly Beggars," a work that, in being a mock-cantata, descends from the Augustan mock-poem and, in describing low life with a musical form generally reserved for more exalted subjects, derives from The Beggar's Opera. In the "Concluding Hymn" Burns uses music ironically, making the words and music wittily inappropriate to each other, much in the way that Gay uses music throughout The Beggar's Opera. Yet this hymn that toasts "callets" and asks "Does the sober bed of marriage / Witness brighter scenes of love?" is not a violent parody of religion in the manner of Medmenham Abbey but an affirmation of a way of life. The beggars allow to the "sober bed of marriage" as much love as to their own, illicit, sexual encounters. But they refuse to allow it more. The justification of sexual license within the form of a hymn, then, like the conclusion of "The Holy Fair," asserts that religion and sexual pleasure often cannot be separated and the insistence that they always can be is self-delusion and hypocrisy. Sexual license is not, for all people, depravity, and can, for people in certain styles of life, become part of a true religion.

Donne's treatment of the identification of lust with faith says that every aspect of man can be exalted. Pope's treatment says that every aspect of man can be depraved. Burns's treatment says that we can praise man without exalting him, we can observe man's shortcomings without condemning him, and we can accept man as an imperfect being without trying to change him.

Burns prefigures certain attitudes which Byron expresses about Christianity and sexual desire, that some people use the similarity as an excuse for illusory self-exaltation, as Donna Julia rationalizes her sexual attraction to Juan:

And then there are such things as Love divine,
…..
Thus Julia said—and thought so, to be sure;
And so I'd have her think, were I the man
On whom her reveries celestial ran. (Don Juan)

Byron, like Burns, says that few take Christianity's sexual restrictions seriously: "ladies … break the—Which commandment is't they break? / (I have forgot the number …)" (Don Juan). Byron follows Burns in arguing that the belief in Christian sexual denial is a symptom of man's pride. Both exclude orthodox Christianity as a satiric alternative and substitute the satiric alternative that man accept his limitations rather than aspire to ideals of which he is incapable.

The doctrine that we should accept man's limitations can lead away from satire to lyricism. Byron occasionally follows this lead, but more frequently moves toward a different form of satire, ironically driving to its logical conclusion the very acceptance Burns advocates. In "The Jolly Beggars" the party stops at its high point. In Don Juan we go on to the next morning, facing the hangover, the bills, and the moral complications.

Burns, however, in turning from satires to songs, develops the lyrical implications of his satiric ideas:

In his songs he does not often discuss the identification of religious feelings with sexual desire, but concentrates on its implications. He develops, from the Augustan satiric conceit, an almost religious belief in man's sensations, emotions, and senses:

Ghaist nor bogle shalt thou fear—
Thou'rt to Love and Heav'n sae dear
Nocht of ill may come thee near,
My bonie dearie.
("Ca' the Yowes to Knowes")

His treatment of a different theme, that of wandering in nature, demonstrates how this belief emerges in Romantic poetry.

The theme of wandering is another ancient poetic subject which changes form in the Augustan period. The tragic theme of wandering as a curse, the romantic theme of wandering in search of Adventure, and the comic theme of bewildered wandering in search of something not clearly defined are among the several older variations. Augustan satire employs the old satiric themes of the naif wandering in search of absolutes (Rasselas) or the observer of the human scene wandering through the city in search of satiric material (Trivia). Burns does follow these satiric variations, with his characteristic changes in tone, in such works as "Address to the Deil" and "Tam O'Shanter." But more significant, I think, is his inheritance of a variation that is probably original with Augustan poetry and occurs mostly among the Descriptive School of poets, the theme of deliberately wandering footloose, usually in a rustic scene, not in search of anything specific but aware of the natural world and responsive to it. The theme as such occurs, to greater and lesser degrees, in such poems as Denham's "Cooper's Hill," Waller's "On St. James's Park," Anne Finch's "A Nocturnal Reverie," Pope's "Windsor Forest," Dyer's "Grongar Hill," Goldsmith's "The Traveller," and so forth. But most significantly, it appears in Burns's two favorite poets, Thomson and Cowper.

Thomson and Cowper both structure their major works, The Seasons and The Task, around the theme of wandering. Thomson started his earliest section, Winter, with "Pleas'd have I wander'd through your rough domain" (1. 10) and carried the theme through the sections written later, at times applying it to the actions of natural phenomena: clouds are "wanderers of heaven" (Winter, 1. 80), the Nile "wanders wild o'er solitary tracts" (Summer, 1. 817). He combines his own wanderings with that of nature: "Here wandering oft, fired with restless thirst / Of thy applause, I solitary court / Th' inspiring breeze" (Autumn, 11. 668–670). He also employs variations on this theme, particularly emphasizing the profusion and freedom of nature, "Oft let me wander o'er the dewy fields / Where freshness breathes … Where the raptured eye / Hurries from joy to joy" (Spring, 11. 103–111).

Cowper, like Thomson, structures his entire poem about the idea of wandering, both physically and mentally, and like Thomson, seems to note things as they happen to appear, to think thoughts as they happen to occur. The Task becomes interesting, of course, when he starts his "ramble." His muse is "wand'ring," and he frequently employs synonomous words and phrases, "Roving as I rove, / Where shall I find an end, or how proceed," "There early stray'd / My fancy, ere liberty of choice / Had found me." The opportunity to wander is, in Cowper, somehow intrinsic to the superiority of the rural life: "God made the country, and man made the town…. Our groves were planted to console at noon / The pensive wand'rer in their shades."

Both Thomson and Cowper do, at times, impose some theory on their rambling observations. Thomson imposes the Noble Savage theory (Autumn) for example, and Cowper sees nature as a demonstration of Calvinistic Christianity. Yet they both seem, almost unawares, to accept certain philosophic and poetic assumptions. As Burns says of The Task:

Is not the Task a glorious Poem? The Religion of
The Task, bating a few scraps of Calvinistic Divinity,
is the Religion of God & Nature; the Religion that
exalts, that ennobles man.

Thomson and Cowper do not, however, develop this idea beyond occasional observations. It remains for Burns to develop the implications of their unexplored assumptions and techniques. If one can make some sense out of nature by simply wandering through it and allowing one's senses to respond, and if one can report these responses in poetry, then one can create poetry which is based on a "Religion of God & Nature," and which, in allowing man to apprehend this religion solely through his senses, "exalts … ennobles man." Burns does create such poetry. He develops the image of wandering through nature, combining it with more complex poetic devices than Cowper or Thomson used, to express, as do the Romantic poets after him, a new vision of God, nature, and ennobled man.

To Burns, learning to wander through nature and joining in the rhythm of nature's wandering is essential to the writing of poetry:

In his satiric poetry, the opportunity to wander in and enjoy nature is a satiric alternative. The way to deal with the evils of the world is not to correct them but to ignore them, using the freedom of nature as an opportunity which social injustice, human cruelty, economic inequality, even the hardness of natural phenomena, simply cannot touch:

Then, as in his treatment of so many other ideas, that which in the satires and epistles is explicit, a bit didactic, becomes implicit in the songs and seems to grow out of the imagery.

Burns will often place the song in a natural setting that has no logical association with the action. But he will make the speaker and the natural phenomena move in similar ways so that the emotions of the speaker become reflected in nature:

The crystal waters round us fa',
The merry birds are lovers a',
The scented breezes round us blaw,
A wandering wi' my Davie.
("Now Rosy May")

He often explicitly compares wandering humans to wandering streams, drawing the poetic implications that humans achieve a degree of freshness, freedom, the capacity for uncluttered feeling, by being like things in nature:

In "Sweet Afton" Burns plays on the similar sounds of "winding," and "wander," the alliteration with "wild," "woodland," "wanton," "water," "wave," and the related but varied kinds of nature's motions described by "glides," "blow," "rises," and "wave," and entwines all these techniques with the speaker's gentle feeling for nature and his love. The interlocking of emotion and poetic techniques, the combination of feelings for both nature and humans, and the breadth of emotion expressed by "lofty," "clear," "sweet," "pleasant," "wild," "lonely," and "wanton," unite human emotions with nature as successfully, barring a few lapses in diction, as does any poem in British literature:

How lofty, sweet Afton, thy neighboring hills,

Far mark'd with the courses of clear, winding rills!
There daily I wander, as noon rises high,
My flocks and my Mary's sweet cot in my eye.
How pleasant thy banks and green vallies below,
Where wild in the woodlands the primroses blow …

Thy crystal stream, Afton, how lovely it glides,
And winds by the cot where my Mary resides!
How wanton thy waters her snowy feet lave,
As, gathering sweet flowerets, she stems thy clear wave!

Burns uses the image of wandering, in the songs, mostly to express happy love. But he goes beyond those limits, using similar movements and similar sounds to imply that the emotions of man and the motions of nature are one, that loving people can see this unity simply by giving themselves over to their own feelings and to the nature comprehended by their senses.

This idea, expressed by this image of wandering, is taken over by Wordsworth to a great extent and by Coleridge, Byron, and Keats to a lesser extent. Coleridge employs the theme occasionally ("This Lime-tree Bower My Prison" and "Frost at Midnight"). Byron satirizes the theme (Don Juan). Keats theorizes on the device in a way similar to Burns ("Fancy" and "I Stood Tip-Toe") and employs it in some of his earlier poetry, characteristically inverting it so that nature seems to take meaning from man. The River Alpheus speaks: "I will delight thee all my winding course…. 'Mid exuberant green, / I roam in pleasant darkness" (Endymion). And Wordsworth uses it most frequently. Much of his early work seems strongly influenced by Burns, whose work he knew and admired from the time he was seventeen.

… and should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way….
…..
… whither shall I turn,
By road or pathway, or through trackless field,
Up hill or down, or shall some floating thing
Upon the river point me out my course?
(The Prelude)

Like Burns he sees this capacity to wander in nature as a symbol of personal freedom:

For I, bred up 'mid Nature's luxuries,
Was a spoiled child, and rambling like the wind,
As I had done in daily intercourse
With those crystalline rivers, solemn heights,
And mountains, ranging like a fowl of the air,
I was ill-tutored for captivity.
(The Prelude)

In some of his shorter poems, such as "To the Cuckoo" and "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," he uses the wandering theme as the image around which to construct the poem. In the latter poem, for example, his own wanderings are paralleled by similarly free actions in nature, all described in human terms, but with a gradually increasing purposefulness that gives meaning to his walk and to his recollected thoughts, without denying him the freedom granted natural phenomena. As Mr. Frederick Pottle points out [in "The Eye and the Object in the Poetry of Wordsworth," YR, 40, Autumn 1950], the flowers are "fluttering," that is, being moved; then "dancing," that is, selfmoving; then "tossing their heads in sprightly dance," self-moved with emotion. In the third stanza "glee," "gay," and "jocund" tell the reader how to take the emotions, the same emotions ascribed to the flowers. Without any direct statement, and with only faintly apparent artistry, he brings the wandering of the speaker and the fluttering of the flowers together in a manner strikingly similar to Burns.

In "Tintern Abbey" Wordsworth seems to go beyond Burns, in ascribing an order within nature, so that when he does join nature's wanderings, it guides him beyond freedom to a deeper understanding. He parallels the action and the mood of his own wanderings with the boundings "like a roe" of childhood, with the "sportive woods run wild," with the "Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods," and with the "presence" which is a "motion and a spirit" that "rolls through all things" and which becomes, when order is restored, "The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being." Wordsworth remains a "lover of the meadows and the woods" but can feel a "sense sublime"

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

Burns creates a religion of man and nature, developing the themes of Thomson and Cowper, but does not realize all the philosophic implications that are part of Wordsworth's nature mysticism.

Burns shows the transition from Augustan to Romantic modes in a number of other ways. He creates, in his description of animals—not as talking parodies of humans nor as allegories of human traits but as real creatures with no more attributes than animals normally have—symbols of the universality of beauty and sympathy which anticipate the animal poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley. He uses Pope's satiric technique of the shifting persona, changing the naif to a wide-eyed country bumpkin. But this bumpkin seems to improve in intelligence until he is the clear voice of Romantic simplicity, symbolizing the universality of human understanding. He takes the Standard Habbie verse form from Fergusson and introduces, under the influence of Pope, ironic rhyme, parallel and contrast within the line. He uses the short fourth and sixth lines for further variation to give some of the rhythms of ordinary conversation in a way that anticipates both Byron's conversational ottava rima and Wordsworth's attempt at conversational diction.

Burns seems to have achieved the fearless honesty of Byron, the perfect simplicity of Wordsworth, the sensuous passivity of Keats. Yet he achieved all this Romantic feeling without losing the common-sensical social awareness of Pope. He sought a way to deal with what he called a "vile warl'" but he sought this way in self-expression, in personal freedom, and in reliance on his emotions. He often combined in one passage an awareness of the every-day world and all its difficulties, a faith in the guidance of art, and a belief in nature not just as a symbol of order but as a guide and comforter and part of ourselves at once:

The current trend, which insists that Burns is not a transition poet, denies him his rightful position as one of the great innovators in British poetry and excludes an important dimension from his poetry. There are, I believe, many of us who do not share the Augustan belief that the old political and religious schemes will make the world better and who cannot feel a sense sublime nor see into the life of things. For those of us who believe that the perceptions of each man are enormously important, that man's feelings do provide a basis from which he can attempt to give the world some meaning, but who do not believe that man can or indeed should ascend to visionary insight in order to understand the world, Burns provides a poetry that is marvelously human.