SOURCE: "Burns and Narrative," in The Art of Robert Burns, edited by R.D.S. Jack and Andrew Noble, Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1982, pp. 59–75.

[In the following essay, Wells explores the narrative structure and didactic content of several of Burns's poems.]

Almost everyone, if asked to categorize Burns's work, would describe him as a lyric poet; indeed, the popular image is that of incomparable master of love-songs. Burns, in keeping with his lyrical inclinations, is very much an occasional poet; his canon, in fact, contains well over one hundred poems of a more expository or dramatic nature: verse epistles, addresses, laments and elegies, a cantata, dramatic prologues and fragments, descriptions, epigrams, dialogues, and dramatic monologues.

No one, I believe, would place Burns among the narrative poets. Including 'Tam o' Shanter', there are barely a handful of poems Burns himself thought of as 'a true story' or 'a tale'. My present purpose is not to challenge the established view. Yet Burns's 'occasional' poems do make use of a variety of narrative techniques; and in this essay I intend to examine some of these poems in terms of narrative kind and structure.

The first task in such an undertaking is to establish a definition of narrative, momentarily omitting from the general description considerations of genre and tone. I am concerned here only with fictitious narratives. Fictitious narratives may be divided into two basic kinds: stories, and story-like narratives which I shall call mimetic transcripts.

Story (or Tale): in prose or verse, a narrative which is a sequence of connected mimetic events or episodes, the sum of which comprises a complete whole (i.e. represents an action) with a definite beginning, middle, and end; further, it has unity in that the transposition or removal of any of its connected incidents will disjoin and dislocate the whole. A story must be concerned with human or anthropomorphic agents. A story must have the element of peripeteia, depicting a change of some kind in the agent or agents (e.g. misery to happiness, or vice versa), an unexpected change which, though unforeseen, is a necessary or probable outcome of the agents' actions. This peripeteia frequently but not invariably involves anagnorisis, recognition in the agents of this change and their own part in effecting it. Most often recognition means movement from illusion or opinion to fact or reality, a shift from ignorance to knowledge. A story must also have a sense of being addressed directly to a real or imagined audience (as opposed to lyric forms, which do not necessarily presuppose an external audience). A story may be brief, a single complete episode, such as an anecdote; or developed, a story of several or many episodes. Stories may be simple or interwoven. By simple, I mean a single unified tale usually but not necessarily unfolding sequentially (events may be removed from chronological sequence, as in a flashback); by interwoven, two or more tales joined together to form a whole. Stories may be told from the point of view of the first or third person, or in combination. These qualities are equally applicable to tragic or to comic tales.

There are many varieties of stories, often based on nonfictional narrative modes: mimetic autobiographies, biographies, epistles, journals, reports of experience, allegories, and fantasies (e.g. faerie tales, 'science fiction'). In these latter two unrealistic modes especially sequential events are often impossible or highly improbable in nature and so neither necessary nor probable outcomes of antecedent episodes, although such stories usually follow an internal logic. These separate categories may also appear in combination with one another; thus we may find allegory joined with fantasy (e.g. Aesop's Fables), and so on.

Mimetic Transcript: in prose or verse, a fictional narrative which may have many or all save one of the essential qualities of a proper story, that one element being the lack of a distinct peripeteia. Without peripeteia, the 'story' must be considered a mimetic transcript. A mimetic transcript may have many or all of the recognizable appurtenances of a story, such as fictional characters or real characters in fictional situations, dialogue, a sequence of connected mimetic incidents, or even contain a tale or tales within the whole work, yet not of itself comprise a story as previously defined. Mimetic transcripts sometimes lack unity as well as peripeteia in that episodes may not relate the chronicle of an agent or agents but that of a distinct group of people; or in that episodes may be transposed or deleted without seriously disrupting the whole work.

There are several varieties of mimetic transcripts, corresponding largely with the different varieties of story: biography, allegory, diary, fantasy, and so forth. This is to be expected of story-like narratives. One major kind of mimetic transcript, equivalent to the anecdote among stories, is the situational mimetic transcript. A situational mimetic transcript is one in which meaning is not dependent upon 'story' but upon a particular context; it involves narrative elements at only a rudimentary level. It tends to be brief, a whole but usually single episode; and it does not in itself comprise an action, although it may involve descriptions of activity. In verse it is often cast in a lyric form, and may take the shape of a mimetic complaint, lament, argument, dialogue or dramatic monologue reported by or tacitly assumed to be reported by another witnessing it. 'Situational' does not mean static—i.e. purely descriptive—but a single scene that raises the impression of mimetic action by providing details of an agent's life and thought even though no action takes place and so no change occurs in the characters' circumstances and emotional states.

The basic difference between stories and mimetic transcripts, reflected in their structures, is one of purpose. It is a division that arises from different patterns of emphasis. Stories can often appear to have no ulterior aim other than self-fulfilment; mimetic transcripts almost invariably appear to have been written as a means of conveying a particular idea or set of ideas. A story concerns itself with, and closely directs itself toward, the expression of plot. A story may have an underlying theme, but theme is usually subordinate to the plot, made manifest through plot. A mimetic transcript conversely tends to place much greater emphasis on theme. The expression of theme takes precedence over the vehicle conveying it. That is, dominated by thematic considerations, mimetic transcripts often appear as 'dramatic' expressions of observation (e.g. fictional travel books, addresses, catalogues), discourse (e.g. philosophy, monologue, debate, dream-vision, parable), and satire, a mode necessarily governed by theme. Divided by differences of design rather than subject matter, both forms have an equal potential for aesthetic excellence.

What may seem complex in the abstract will become clearer as this theory is applied in practical terms. To that end, I shall begin with a comparison of 'Tam o' Shanter' and 'Death and Doctor Hornbook' as narratives, and then proceed to discussions of various other narrative poems. I do not intend to examine more than a few examples representative of Burns's narrative art—for instance, 'Holy Willie's Prayer' (a dramatic monologue), 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' (observation of scene), and 'The Holy Fair' (a peasant festival), among others. But I believe the exploration of only a few of the available kinds of stories and mimetic transcripts will enable us to draw some general conclusions about Burns and narrative verse.

I begin with 'Tam o' Shanter' and 'Death and Doctor Hornbook' because, according to their subtitles, both poems are tales in Burns's own estimation. 'Tam o' Shanter' is a comic tale of the supernatural, the account of Tam o' Shanter's drunken confrontation with the Devil and several of his devotees; it is told by an ironical 'I'narrator outside the action described. Tam's adventure is simple and, if fantastic, straightforward. Despite the poem's elaborate introduction, the narrator's frequent digressive intrusions, and the mocking moralitas which summarizes the import of the night's events, it may be demonstrated that the poem fits the criteria of a story as defined above. It has unity, in that a complete action is portrayed in a sequence of episodes that lead logically but not inevitably from one to the next: Tam, drunk on market-day, leaves a tavern for home at midnight in a terrible storm; on the way he spies the haunted kirk of Alloway ablaze with light, and, riding up to investigate, he is amazed to see a witches' dance at which the Devil himself provides the music; struck by the charms of the scantily clad young witch Nanny, Tam forgets himself and cries 'Weel done, Cutty-sark!'; instantly the witches give chase, and Tam narrowly escapes over the Brig o' Doon and home, his gray mare Meg sacrificing her tail to Nanny during her frantic dash for safety. The loss of any component episodes or the disruption of their sequence would seriously affect the story as a whole.

The story has a probable but unforeseen outcome. The reversal of fortune is an unexpected movement from joy ('O'er a' the ills o' life victorious') to terror at the threat of destruction ('In hell they'll roast thee like a herrin'). This peripeteia occurs when Tam unwittingly calls attention to himself by shouting his encouragement to Nanny. We may say that his drink-induced mistake is accompanied by anagnorisis, for he immediately recognizes his error and its consequences. The dénouement and resolution of the action swiftly follow, a comic anticlimax in which the threat of death is absurdly reduced to the loss of a horse's tail.

Even the lengthy introduction and deliberately inappropriate concluding 'lesson', although strictly speaking not part of the action, are essential components in the narrative's comic structure. The opening stanzas establish the scene, set the comic tone in discussing wifely wisdom, and provide a foreshadowing of events. This foreshadowing turns out to be ironical, in that what almost happens to Tam coincides with the far-fetched, nagging warnings of his wife Kate:

She prophesied that late or soon,
[Tam] would be found deep drown'd in Doon;
Or catched wi' warlocks in the mirk
By Alloway's auld haunted kirk.

Except that this is an outsider's account (and apart from the comic eroticism of Nanny's dance), Tam's adventures sound suspiciously like an excuse concocted by a drinkfuddled husband to turn aside his wife's wrath. We can almost visualize her grudging acceptance of it, as the tale obligingly confirms her dire predictions. This quality of private joke further increases the ridiculousness of the tale.

The narrator, however, calls the story's veracity into question himself by referring ironically to 'this tale o' truth'. The tongue-in-cheek moralitas that follows is an example of comic misdirection, humorously confounding the reader's expectations by providing absurdly inappropriate commentary. The sabotaged 'lesson' rounds off the ironic strategy of the poem: by drawing our attention to the sufferings of Meg (an innocent creature) and away from Tam (a sinner who escapes physically unscathed), the narrator completely deflates the seriousness of the final admonition. In effect he winks at Tam's follies, and mocks those who give the story credence.

The narrator is omnipresent although he does not seem to be fully omniscient; he could be considered a secondary character. He hovers close to the action, shaping our perceptions of and guiding our responses to events. Seventy lines, a third of the poem in fact, are taken up with the narrator's commentary. 'Atmospheric' catalogues comprise a further twenty lines, lists of the horrible places that Tam passes on the road and of the grisly sights displayed as a kind of macabre stage-dressing to the witches' sabbath. The narrator, placing himself among the neighbourly tavern-frequenters, introduces the scene in his own persona. A little later, when the tale is barely begun, he steps back from the immediate scene to offer philosophical reflections on the transitory nature of pleasure, and—with mock-heroic delight—on the follies of courage induced by drink. He further interrupts with a comic apostrophe on the appearance of the witches, with a brief use of the traditional humility topos; and with a warning addressed directly to Tam in full flight. Still in character, he finally offers his ironical moralitas.

The narrator seems to adopt different 'voices' for his various discursive intrusions. For example, he briefly elevates his diction to a rather Latinate, formal English in order to achieve a philosophical tone; or he mimics the shrewish quality of Kate's 'advice' to Tam, scolding advice that sounds like a medieval flyting: 'thou was a skellum, / A blethering, blustering, drunken blellum', et cetera. These dramatically effective postures represent basic shifts in perspective, in tone, but equally different levels of the narrator's involvement in the action—now a drinking companion, now musing aloud outside and above the scene, now at Tam's side advising him. The teller and the tale are inextricably linked, and our appreciation of the story depends as much on our knowledge of the narrator's personality and sympathies as on our awareness of the slowly unfolding action.

'Death and Doctor Hornbook' bears a certain broad similarity to 'Tam o' Shanter'. Both deal humorously with supernatural encounters, and both are told by genial 'I'-narrators who purport to be inebriated. 'Death and Doctor Hornbook', however, is a fantastic mimetic transcript of a dialogue between a narrator-character and the personification of Death; the poem is intended to satirize a pretentious but otherwise unqualified local apothecary, John Wilson. The poem, constructed with some of the constituent components of narrative, projects a story-like appearance. It has an ironical introduction; it animates two fictional agents in a particular locale who meet one night and carry on a dialogue; and it is a single, unified episode (although incomplete in that their dialogue is interrupted before Death makes a final revelation of his planned vengeance against the usurper Hornbook). But the narrative lacks a necessary peripeteia. There is no action other than discussion. While engaged in conversation neither Death nor the narrator takes actions or makes choices that result in any kind of reversal for themselves or others. They do not even alter in condition, physical or emotional: when they take their separate roads the narrator is no less drunk and Death no less ineffective than before their meeting. Nothing is different; nothing has happened, apart from an exchange of information. Without peripeteia, it follows that there is no anagnorisis, no recognition of a self-wrought reversal. The narrative could be considered the account of a situation, their meeting; but it could not be described as a story.

We learn a great deal about Hornbook, who is exaggerated into a larger-than-life figure in order to sharpen the comic contrast with his lowly reality. But his malignant activities are reported to us, not presented dramatically. The reason for this is simple: the focus of the poem, as is common among mimetic transcripts, is on theme rather than on plot. The impossible dialogue becomes a convenient and memorable vehicle for ridiculing Burns's victim, Wilson; it provides a solid foundation upon which to build his ideas, offering a maximum of satirical effectiveness and a minimum of personal risk.

The poem's basic premise rests on the incongruity of Death being made redundant due to the ministrations of Horn-book, who deals out life and death in the form of absurdly named medicines. Through the device of Death's selfpitying complaints, the poem is structured in such a way as to turn Hornbook into an inhuman object. Rather than a self-animated character with complex wants, needs, abilities, and choices, Hornbook is depicted as the mechanical, impersonal, ubiquitous force that death is traditionally thought to be. Death, in contrast, has a variety of human personality traits, and decided limitations. Because Hornbook is transformed into an object, sympathy for him is put out of reach, enhancing his ridiculousness. Ironically, we are instead invited to sympathize with Death, unable to earn his bread for the first time 'Sin [he] was to the butching bred', and piqued at the inequity of Horn-book slaying a score with malpractice for every one Death used to take off naturally. The use of this theme, which has its roots in Classical literature, is a potent, and well-executed, satiric strategy. Further, the narrator saves himself from the accusation of slander by carefully establishing his context: first, he claims his account 'Is just as true as the Deil's in h-ll, / Or Dublin city', superstitious nonsense; and second, he claims to be drunk, predicating unreliability. He is able to make wild, insulting, and damaging charges against 'Hornbook' while at the same time ironically disclaiming them as lies.

Initially, this may seem a dry method of approaching two vibrant, joyously comic poems; but an understanding of narrative structure is an essential first step toward appreciating the poet's purposes, his thematic emphases. The eighteenth century, known foremost as an age of satire, continued to value the ancient justification for imaginative literature, to teach and delight (utile et dulce). In narrative art, mimetic transcripts are particularly well suited to didactic productions of all kinds—to debate, satire, discourse, propaganda, parable. Stories may be didactic as well. But where an imbalance exists between the two functions, stories tend to be weighted more heavily toward delight; mimetic transcripts tend to be orientated toward education. Mimetic transcripts seem to be driven primarily by thematic considerations: that is, we can imagine Burns first deciding he wanted to ridicule Wilson, then casting about for the best method of achieving his purpose; we cannot imagine the reverse of that process. However, with 'Tam o' Shanter', we can envisage Burns holding the initial desire to tell a good story. For this reason mimetic transcripts often appear to be set pieces, stationary single episodes raising and resolving a limited theme. While this is by no means an inflexible rule, the majority of Burns's mimetic transcripts follow this pattern. Burns is not generally considered a didactic poet. Yet given the predilections of the age, no one should be surprised to find that a high percentage of Burns's narrative poems—not to mention various addresses and epistles—are fundamentally exemplary in nature, even if only mockingly so as in 'Tam o' Shanter'.

Satire is particularly favoured as an educational device, able to expose the ridiculous and discourage the emulation of folly in a delightful way, bringing credit to the satirist. And nowhere is satire more effectively employed than in Burns's dramatic monologue, 'Holy Willie's Prayer', the situational mimetic transcript of a hypocrite's confession and supplication to the Lord. As a satire it achieves the desirable state of serving both topical and universal interests.

'Holy Willie's Prayer', brilliantly conceived, compact and energetic, is not a story. Through the device of overhearing his devotions we learn everything essential about Willie's nature; but although he reveals the secrets of his heart Willie does not experience any kind of reversal while confiding in his image of God. He does not change one jot from first to last; in fact, the poem would be destroyed if he did, if he realized even for a moment what he was truly saying. He is, and must be, fixed in his ways, comically inflexible and thus, by implication, past redemption. Dispensing with a wry or mocking narrator, Burns gets inside Willie's mind, causing him to damn himself, unconsciously and so ironically. Willie remains serenely unaware of his many transgressions and of his uncharitable—not to say unchristian—attitudes. Or, if he does acknowledge a fault—for instance, confessing to several forays into the gratification of 'fleshly lust'—he displaces the blame, compounding the sin through a failure to recognize his responsibilities.

Out of Willie's mouth drop blind admissions of all of the traditional Seven Deadly Sins. He confesses to lust, which he sees as visited on him to try his spirit (lest he 'O'er proud and high should turn'); and he uses gluttony in the guise of drunkenness to excuse himself ('that Friday I was fou / When I cam near her'). He is envious of his foe Gavin Hamilton, not of Hamilton's venial slips ('He drinks, and swears, and plays at cartes'), which are tame compared to Willie's own malefactions, but of the 'mony taking arts' that enable him to steal 'frae God's ain priest the people's hearts'. Proof of Hamilton's success lies in his ability to raise the congregation's laughter at the accusations of the auld-licht faction against him. Willie has been publicly humiliated by Hamilton and the lawyer Aitken, and his revenge takes the shape of self-righteous wrath. He maliciously—and, of course, impotently—calls down the Lord's terrible 'curse' and 'vengeance' upon them and upon all those of 'that Presbytry of Ayr', unwitting comic blasphemy. Then, having distributed the Lord's punishments to suit himself, his avarice manifests itself as a request for enlarged

He had earlier described his salvation in terms of 'gifts and grace', seeming to equate showy, material prosperity with the singular blessings of Providence, temporal bounty with spiritual grace. With this request his prayer has returned to its place of beginning, having explored the idea of sin and salvation. This gives the poem a circular structure.

From the phrase 'excell'd by nane' it is apparent that pride is Willie's chief sin. He conceives of himself as 'a chosen sample…a pillar…a guide, a ruler and example / To a' thy flock', like so much of his prayer absurd presumption. He is indeed an example, but not, ironically, in the way he thinks: he is a ridiculous, negative model to be eschewed by all true Christians. Spiritual sloth is born out of this pride in that, though he admits he is mere 'dust / Defil'd wi' sin', he regards himself as one of the elect, predestined for salvation, and so has no fear of damnation, whatever he does. His belief that he is a righteous man is of course comical to any outside observer. But worse, even if it were true, moral behaviour is quite pointless. It does no good to serve the people as an example if salvation is denied them in any event, if damnation exclusively depends on God's whims and 'no for ony gude or ill' committed in this life. 'Holy Willie's Prayer', masterfully exposing a creed in a sharply defined dramatic setting, does not merely condemn an odious and adept practitioner of religious double-think but the whole system of extreme Calvinist belief which necessarily produces such creatures.

Almost all of Burns's satires and burlesques—for example, 'The Holy Tulzie', 'The Mauchline Wedding', the 'Address to the Deil', or the mock-heroic testament 'Death and Dying of Poor Mailie'—are mimetic tran scripts. Most are intended to edify as well as poke fun at persons, ideas, or literary genres. But Burns's efforts to be movingly informative are not invariably satiric or comic. 'The Cotter's Saturday Night', to cite a well-known instance, employs the structure of a mimetic transcript in order to depict the life of the average farm family and to discourse seriously on the felicities of such an existence.

The poem's narrative elements are arranged to explore a series of scenes, not to relate the tale of an individual's actions and their results. Narrated by an omniscient 'Patriot-bard', the poem traces the activities and especially the attitudes of one cottage family from dusk through the reading of the Bible before retiring to bed one Saturday in November. The time-scale is narrow, but the implications of the scene are universal. The account is purely descriptive, interspersed with commentary by the narrator. We follow in detail the family's home-gathering after toil, supper, the arrival of Jenny's young man, and their homely worship services. There is no dialogue. Only a few moral imperatives or prayers are quoted; and, in the same unrealistically elevated diction, the poet is once moved to declare his emotional experience of love. The few characters who are distinguished as individuals, the Father, Mother, Jenny and her beau, are representative stereotypes. Real personalities are better fitted for stories, where circumstance, motive and choice precipitate the plot. These characters are not real personalities but highly idealized figures. Indeed, the entire portrait is intended to represent the ideal, despite the realistic touches by the way. Each scene, each character, becomes a subject for extended philosophical discussion by the poet, who weaves together the several related themes of the good life, order, obedience, simplicity of heart, patriotism, and the manifestations of love, which descend as grace and bounty from the Creator and encompass even the smallest child. The scenes, insignificant in themselves, build into a pattern of moral consequence. In fact, the narrative's structure and materials (the scene, the characters, the narrator's rhapsodic or reverent tone) are wholly governed by didactic demands. Like 'The Auld Farmer's New-Year-morning Salutation', it is a narrative of distilled emotion. The list of soberly didactic mimetic transcripts, including 'The Vision', 'Man Was Made to Mourn', 'To a Mouse', and even the allegorical 'John Barleycorn', is somewhat shorter than the list of humorous didactic narratives, but it is nonetheless substantial.

Though I have pointed out that didacticism is a neglected aspect of Burns's art, I do not mean to imply that his narratives are solely or necessarily intended to offer serious moral instruction or even to be comically edifying. Most do have a moral point to make, and are designed to satisfy powerful thematic motives as well as aesthetic pleasure. Some, however, seem to be born primarily out of a spirit of fun: for example, 'The Holy Fair' and 'Love and Liberty', more popularly known as 'The Jolly Beggars'. Both poems, to be sure, are comical mimetic transcripts; but both are more celebratory than informative. They are lively, exuberant, and roguishly attractive.

The personification of Fun, in fact, is the narrator's guide in 'The Holy Fair'. Superstition and Hypocrisy are also in attendance, assuring a satirical flavour as well. This poem is identical in prosody, and similar in episodic development, tone and intention, to 'The Ordination' and 'Halloween'. It may therefore serve as a representative of the group.

'The Holy Fair' chronicles the activities of a gathering of Christians during a typical summer religious festival in Mauchline; it is a portrait of social mores and not a tale. Narrative components—episodic development, a heterogeneous congregation of characters pursuing a variety of activities and interests, dialogue, the visible spectrum of emotions—are set in motion for the purpose of painting a comedy of manners. The narrator, aloof from the scenes he describes, roves among the throng like a good-humoured camera, focusing, as it were, at random. Stanzas regularly begin or change direction with 'Here' or 'Now', signals pointing to each fresh set of observations, observations which act as implicit social criticisms. The foibles of both sexes and of all professions are much in evidence, but no one is scrutinized for very long, nor earnestly ridiculed. Few characters are even named; most are character types, representative figures, or indistinguishable in their various groups. They have recognizable traits, but are not full-blooded personalities.

A tableau effect is built up piecemeal. The events follow a rough chronology, growing ever more boisterous, but no other pattern; scenes seem to be haphazardly arranged, to appear less well-knit than in the sequential unfolding of a story. Unity is not fully apparent, a feature of some mimetic transcripts: scenes could be rearranged or even deleted without seriously damaging the structure of the whole poem. But the narrator's quick leap from one small, deftly sketched cameo to the next helps to ensure the rollicking pace and lively tone of humane delight. It is a narrative of comic behaviour, concerned with atmosphere, motive and faithful observation rather than action. Its air of jollity sharpens the incongruity of juxtaposing carnal and divine love throughout, the secular and spiritual aspects of charity, both generously lubricated with strong drink. The narrative's quick metre, indulgent comic tone, and episodic structure act in concert to preclude any suggestion of seriousness or indecorous disapproval. Because his levity is not diminished, the narrator's implicit superior judgements of his neighbours' ethics and beliefs do not give offence by striking a holier-than-thou attitude. Involvement in the revels, personal remarks, would destroy his neutral vantage. As it is, he can poke fun in all directions without behaving as a spoilsport or colouring his observations by partaking in the action.

'Love and Liberty' is concerned wholly with secular matters; however, the same riotous, bacchanalian spirit of 'The Holy Fair' still prevails. As the title suggests, freedom and love—of the most basic kind—are the twin themes that bind the various songs together. The poem is a celebration of freedom from social responsibilities and moral obligations, expressed by a varied cast of vivacious low-life characters, outcasts who harbour no higher desires than enjoying the fleeting pleasures of warmth, sex, and alcohol in an atmosphere of convivial fellowship. They have nothing to lose, and consequently nothing to fear, scorning the values and flouting the conventions that pertain to social stations above their own.

The poem, a cantata, is a collection of 'character'-songs linked by the bridging recitative passages of an omniscient narrator. Burns no doubt identified himself with the Bard who closes the poem. But the Bard is distinct from the narrator, who simply observes, and does not comment on, the festive scene. The narrative contains at least one story, the rivalry of the Fiddler and the Tinker for the 'raucle Carlin's' affections. The Fiddler attempts to charm her with a carefree song; the bullying Tinker threatens the Fiddler, and sings to the doxie an aggressive song of self-advertisement; 'o'ercome' with passion—and liquor—'th'unblushing fair' surrenders to the Tinker's blandishments, resulting in felicity for him and short-lived grief for the Fiddler, who soon finds comfort elsewhere. However, the presence of one or more stories in a text is not enough to transform a narrative into a story: 'Love and Liberty' is the mimetic transcript of a beggars' revel, an interweaving of separate character-revealing songs and tales into a complex, thematically unified new whole.

The songs, as exemplified by the Fiddler-Tinker rivarly, are appropriate to their assigned speakers. The crippled Soldier sings a swaggering, patriotic air; his trull, with an agreeable comic self-awareness, expresses her preferences for the camp follower's life; the pickpocketing Highland widow laments the political forces that turned her into an outlaw; and, after the Tinker's quarrel, the Bard rounds off the foregoing with a toast to love and women. Asked for an encore, the Bard provides a general climax to the libertines' feast which tightly knits together the different thematic threads: his song rejoices in sensual pleasure, freedom from care, love in its many forms, and scorn for the laws of society as represented by the church and court. Although the previous songs are more amoral than openly rebellious in nature, we are to understand that he functions as spokesman, his attitudes epitomizing the spirit of the group at large. It is a vibrant song conducted with the characteristic brio of Burns at his rakish best. The patriotism of the Soldier aside, the various views expressed throughout are anti-Establishment in the extreme, and the poem can hardly be described as exemplary or edifying.

Certain songs could be reordered, but there is a general pattern discernible in their presentation. The Soldier loves his country, the doxie loves the soldiers; the Tinker and Fiddler campaign for the attentions of the unattached widow, the strong prevailing but without violence or genuine loss of amicability; and the Bard voices an all-embracing salutation to earthy, unsentimental love. The structure is that of theme-and-variations, the unity of idea, rising to a crescendo climax in the final song. In fact, most of the mimetic transcripts that I have examined or mentioned are organized on the principle of theme-andvariations.

It should be evident by now that Burns rarely attempts to animate or explore complex personalities in his narratives. The characters in his mimetic transcripts are usually personifications (Death, Fun) or stereotypes. They are figures of convenience, presented entire and not developed. Occasionally, as with Holy Willie, we see deep into the core of an individual. Yet even Willie symbolizes a code of belief (extreme Calvinism) as well as the Seven Deadly Sins. Most often, as in 'Love and Liberty', with its characters drawn from low-ranked occupations, the agents are limited to fixed qualities associated with a trade, a trait, a belief, a narrow aspect of behaviour. They function in a proscribed way; and they are usually used to illustrate a point or promote an idea, as do the rich and poor dogs or the new and old bridges in the slightly comic but essentially philosophical dialogues of 'The Twa Dogs' or 'The Brigs of Ayr'. Burns's use of character types and spokesmen reflects the fundamental aim of mimetic transcripts aptly to express ideas.

Burns wrote only a few verse stories, and those rather late in his career. Most of his efforts in narrative modes come in the form of mimetic transcripts—monologues, dialogues and dramatic scene-paintings harnessed in the service of satire, comical and sentimental observation, and philosophical discourse. The majority of these mimetic transcripts were written prior to his first trip to Edinburgh, near the beginning of his professional career. Many of his verse addresses and epistles also appeared at this time, so he was then obviously interested in philosophical issues, questioning behaviour in individuals and in society at large, and exploring concepts. He had always written lyrics. But later, as the work of song-collecting and song-writing increasingly demanded his attention, Burns virtually abandoned theme-orientated verse in favour of more purely emotive expressions. Despite his numerous efforts in narrative genres and the lasting popularity of 'Holy Willie's Prayer' and 'Tam o' Shanter', Burns is remembered as a lyric poet. This bias has nothing to do with the quantity of lyric as opposed to narrative verse produced over his lifetime. The reason for this lies instead in the natures of lyrical and occasional verse. A number of his songs have a timeless, universal quality which has helped to assure them a lasting place in people's hearts. Lyrical emotions have not changed, whereas interest in the topical issues and social concepts of his philosophical verse has largely faded from the world.

Limited by considerations of space, I have had to slight significant features of Burns's narrative art: for example, his use of traditional genres, rooted in Classical and especially medieval and folk literature; or matters of craft—prosody, patterns of imagery, techniques of creating tone, all of which contribute to the final experience of the poem in the reader's mind. I have instead concentrated on aspects of kind and structure—narrative perspective, the use of character types, the arrangement of scenes—especially as they relate to thematic purpose. First it has been necessary to establish the existence of a body of verse which may be properly described as narrative. In considering narrative function and effect, I think it should be evident by now that, early on, Burns was strongly concerned with didacticism, and that most of his narratives are of a kind designed to express ideas in an agreeable form.