SOURCE: "Poet: Kilmarnock Edition," in Robert Burns: The Man and the Poet; A Round, Unvarnished Account, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1970, pp. 107–23.

[In this excerpt, Fitzhugh discusses several poems included in Burns's 1786 collection, Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect.]

Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, by Robert Burns, Kilmarnock, 1786, was a well-printed paper-bound volume of 240 pages, priced at three shillings. Burns and his friends had gathered over 300 subscriptions, enough to defray expenses, before printing began. In his original proposal to his subscribers, Burns had offered only Scotch poems, but he finally included half a dozen melancholy and moralizing English pieces apparently to increase the volume's appeal. And, it should be noted, although the subscribers and the presumed audience were to be almost entirely local, or at least Scottish, Burns added a liberal glossary of his Scots vocabulary. The 612 copies brought in £90, of which the printer's bill took £34/3/—; but Burns says that he cleared only £20. Perhaps the difference is accounted for partly by the £9 passage money for Jamaica which he paid down, and may have lost. His settlement with Betty Paton took a substantial amount, and he must have given some to the family at Mossgiel. Burns cannot have had much in his pocket when he set out for Edinburgh.

The Kilmarnock volume made Burns famous at once. Review notices appeared promptly in Edinburgh and London. But Burns withheld from his book, or wrote within three months of its appearance, enough poems and songs to make another volume of the same size and quality. Some of this poetry, and a few songs, he added to his Edinburgh edition of April, 1787, but most of the poetry he never published at all. Later he sent the bulk of the songs to James Johnson and George Thomson for their collections. Of the unpublished poetry, some was too personal to appear publicly ("A Poet's Welcome"), or too likely to provoke recrimination (the epistle to John M'Math), or too broad ("The Court of Equity"), or even downright bawdy ("The Fornicator").

Of the poems written by November, 1786, … there are five of limited interest—three moralizing and melancholy pieces ("Despondency", "Lament," and "To Ruin"), and two parochial poems that require heavy annotation ("Hallowe'en" and "The Ordination"). The opening stanzas of "Hallowe'en" are promising, but the poem progresses to a detailed account of Ayrshire folk customs, and fails to transcend its particularities. "The Ordination" concerns a Kilmarnock parish quarrel over patronage.

A song, and two minor poems, of serious social comment, are readable enough, and contain memorable passages. The song, "Man Was Made to Mourn," is a vigorous recital of human suffering and injustice, and the inequality of human reward, with the famous lines,

Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn.

This song concludes, in the words of the aged protagonist,

Of the two minor poems, one is bitterly ironic, with a cumbersome explanatory heading:

"Address of Beelzebub": To the Right Honorable the Earl of Breadalbane, President of the Right Honorable the Highland Society, which met on the 23rd of May last, at the Shakespeare, Covent Garden, to concert ways and means to frustrate the desires of five hundred Highlanders who, as the Society were informed by Mr. M'Kenzie of Applecross, were so audacious as to attempt an escape from their lawful lords and masters whose property they were, by emigrating from the lands of Mr. Macdonald of Glengary to the wilds of Canada, in search of that fantastic thing—Liberty.

In this Address, the Devil, writing from Hell, urges the lords and masters to "lay aside a' tender mercies," and not merely to distrain and rob such ungrateful and troublesome tenants,

But smash them! crush them a' to spails [chips]
An' rot the dyvors [bankrupts] i' the jails!
The young dogs, swinge [whip] them to the labour:
Let wark an' hunger make them sober!
The hizzies [girls], if they're aughtlins fawsont [at all good looking]
Let them in Drury Lane be lesson'd! [as prostitutes]

An' if the wives an' dirty brats
Come thiggin [begging] at your doors an' yetts [gates],
Flaffin wi' duds [flapping with vermin] an' grey wi' beas' [fleas],
Frightin awa your deuks an' geese,
Get out a horsewhip or a jowler [bulldog],
The langest thong, the fiercest growler,
An' gar [make] the tattered gypsies pack [beat it]
Wi' a' their bastards on their back!

The other poem, "A Dedication to Gavin Hamilton, Esq." like the Author's Preface to Tristram Shandy appears in the middle of the volume. It opens with some banter, and then proceeds to ironic sympathy. Hamilton, although he is "the poor man's friend in need, / The gentleman in word and deed," does not satisfy his orthodox neighbors because he is generous and kind merely from "carnal inclination" and not because he subscribes to proper Calvinist doctrine. Burns continues,

Morality, thou deadly bane,
Thy tens o' thousands thou hast slain!
Vain is his hope, whase stay an' trust is
In moral mercy, truth, and justice!

No—stretch a point to catch a plack [make money].
Abuse a brother to his back;
Steal thro' the winnock [window] frae a whore,
But point the rake that taks the door;
Be to the poor like onie whunstane,
And haud their noses to the grunstane;
Ply ev'ry art o' legal thieving;
No matter—stick to sound believing.

He adds a good deal more in the same mordant vein.

There are also ten light-hearted and felicitous poems, laced and graced with pungent observations, but all essentially jeux d'esprit. These poems give an idea of the vivacity and salty readiness which so delighted those who heard Burns speak. "Scotch Drink" celebrates whiskey and Scotland, and parodies Fergusson's "Caller [Fresh] Water," "To a Haggis" was written to amuse a gathering of Ayrshire friends, "Adam Armour's Prayer" is goodnatured ridicule of his brother-in-law to be, "Poor Mailie's Elegy" pays further tribute to that immortal sheep, "The Inventory" presents a versified report to a tax gatherer, "Epistle to a Young Friend" gives "good advice" to Robert Aiken's (the tax gatherer's) son, "Tam Samson's Elegy" is rough joking on a good friend, "The Brigs of Ayr" has fun with municipal improvements pushed by Burns' friend John Ballantine, "Lines on Meeting with Lord Daer" is a bread and butter note celebrating a dinner, and "Nature's Law" bursts into joy on the birth of Jean's twins….

It remains to comment on a few major poems so far unnoticed but written by November 1786. First, "The Twa Dogs," which Burns used to open the Kilmarnock volume. Here, after a famous description of the two dogs, not merely speakers in the guise of dogs, Burns has them discuss their masters, and the rich and the poor, and the gentles and the cotters, all with admirable good sense and humor, and then lets them part without coming to conclusions, although simple life obviously comes off the better, and the gentles are shown up for the hollow-hearted wastrels they too often are. In the central speech, dog Luath, the ploughman's collie, answers dog Caesar, the aristocratic democrat who would just as soon make love to a mongrel, and who has remarked that "surely poor-folk maun [must] be wretches!" …

"The Auld Farmer's New-Year Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare, Maggie," shows Burns being kindly and warm without the sentimentality to which he was prone. He catches the old man's feeling for his work partner of many years, and he creates sure and clean the quality and tone of a farmer's life. Much of the old man's affection for Maggie, for example, comes from her having done good work on the farm, and from her having given him healthy colts to sell. Here, as in "The Twa Dogs," the language, the feeling, the purpose, the illustrations are finely at one.

This is not true of "The Cotter's Saturday Night," in which the style and the statement are often at odds, and the commentary seems intrusive and self-conscious rather than a natural out-growth of the narrative. What Burns says in "The Cotter" he says in Epistles and elsewhere—the simple and natural life is better than the artificial, love and friendship are life's richest rewards, the lower classes are the strength of the country, and Scotland for Aye. The poem, a projection of Burns' father and his household, idealizes the life of poverty, family affection, and honest work, and poor is he who denies the virtues it celebrates. The father's homecoming and the family gathering, the supper, and the Bible reading, are generally touching and right, but such lines as these jar the effect of stanza five:

The parents partial eye their hopeful years;
Anticipation forward points the view.

Stanzas nine and ten begin the self-conscious intrusions. And after stanza twelve, only the satiric seventeen is more than competent; and not a few stanzas seem contrived. Burns no doubt hoped to elevate the poem by introducing the manner of his admired English models, but the result is unfortunate.

And yet the poem is still widely admired, and properly so, for a reason neatly stated by Henley and Henderson. "Burns's verse falls naturally into two main divisions. One, and that the larger, appeals with persistency and force, on the strength of some broadly human qualities, to the world in general: for the reason that the world in general is rich in sentiment but lacks the literary sense. The other, being a notable and lasting contribution to literature, is the concern of comparatively few." Yet for the few, also, "The Cotter" certainly leaves its mark and makes its point, even while they are conscious of its defects.

Three of Burn's most famous poems help further to illustrate the remark quoted above, and all follow a similar pattern—a series of narrative-descriptive stanzas which lead up to a sententious conclusion. "To a Louse" is artistically by far the best, and by far the least popular. "To a Mountain Daisy" is generally agreed to be the weakest. But "To a Mouse" has always enjoyed high popularity, and critical esteem as well. The distress of the "wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie" is vivid and touching; and "the best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley," surely; but what of a mouse as a symbol for brotherhood? The general experience of man is otherwise. Who feels "social union" with a mouse? In this central symbolism the poem is artificial and contrived, and sentimental. And the self-pity of its conclusion is not appealing. But for the great majority who are "rich in sentiment but lack the literary sense," these remarks are beside the point. The poem moves them, and Burns was not writing for academic critics.

Professor Sir Walter Raleigh makes a shrewd comment to this same effect. "The Scottish people feel a hearty, instinctive, and just dislike for biographers of Burns. The life of Burns, full as it was of joy and generous impulse, full also of error, disappointment, and failure, makes a perfectly devised trap for the superior person. Almost everyone is superior to Robert Burns in some one point or other—in conjugal fidelity, in worldly prudence, or in social standing. Let him be careful to forget his advantages before he approaches this graveside, or his name will be added to the roll of the failures." True, and fair enough. But it could be wished that Sir Walter had added: The story of Burns is the more moving the more fully told, and the wonder of the man and his work the more deeply felt, the more completely it is understood. Romanticizing admirers no less than "superior persons" have too often made a monstrous caricature of Burns.

"To a Louse" seems a perfect poem. It opens briskly, it sets a memorable scene, it tells a lively story, it maintains its tone of genial irony with a rich association of incident and image, and it moves quickly and surely to its conclusion, probably the most famous stanza Burns ever wrote. It may be remarked that one's feeling about a louse, and about the occasion, are entirely appropriate to the satiric purpose of the poem, in which not one figure or image is inept, not one line weak. And the theme is quintessential Burns—the absurdity of pretence, especially religious pretence….

A stanza from the epistle to William Simpson makes an apt comment on "The Vision."

In "The Vision" written over a period of time, and revised, Burns "thinks lang," for forty-six stanzas, and the poem is mainly a versified record of his thoughts about Scotland, and poetry, and his place as a "rustic bard." (He makes it clear that he feels he is one of the "humbler ranks.") Here is Burns' apologia, his "Defence of Poesie," his view of his calling as an honorable one and significant to his country and his people. The poem opens with stanzas describing the poet weary after a day of threshing. Stanza four continues:

Suddenly there appears the figure of Coila, in the trim shape of Jean Armour.

The lassie wears a mantle bearing a map of Ayrshire, with pictures on it of distinguished figures, historical and contemporary. She is the spirit of the district (Kyle), and a member of a "light aerial band" which Burns invents to inspire Scotland and Kyle. Coila speaks of patriots, soldiers, poets, improving landlords, judges, professors, rustic bards, artisans, wooers—all important in the general society; she says she has had Burns in her care since his birth, and points to what he has done under her influence:

Finally she encourages him,

Then she places a holly wreath on his head, and "like a passing thought" fades away. It should be noted that Coila encourages her Scots poet in purest English, as a seriousminded and thoughtful Scot should. This elaborate poem is smoothly versified, and of biographical interest, but after the opening stanzas it does not have the full force and grace of Burns at his best.

As we have seen, Burns took his position as poet seriously, and he enjoyed his success, but he recognized that it helped him little in what he called "the sober science of life." In June, 1786, he had written David Brice that his Kilmarnock edition was to be his "last foolish action," after which he intended to "turn a wise man as fast as possible." All during the exciting months which followed in Edinburgh, he was worried about his problem of a livelihood, made even greater by his more prominent position. He felt he could not live on his poetry, and fame paid no bills. His essential position was much the same after both his publications as before. …