Burns is supreme in qualities of the heart
(Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Today Scottish local radio is very largely a subsidiary of Bauer Media, and West Sound Radio is a smallish cog in this large, commercial radio wheel that radiates from Clydebank. In 1985, however, West Sound was a small town station in a corner of Ayr, which was then a small seaside resort before it became a dormitory suburb of Glasgow. The manger of the radio station at that time was Joe Campbell, tenor and future President of the Burns Federation. Joe and I had met through a common admiration for Canon Sidney McEwan, the late, great Glasgow singer and Joe introduced me to the priest at his retirement home in Glasgow. I had wanted to do a documentary programme on him for television and had discussed it with the BBC and with Canon McEwan. ‘Och, leave it until I’m away,’ said that charming man with a deprecatory wave of his hand. So I did. He died soon after, but the programme was never made.
However, Joe Campbell had also talked about an idea he had for a Burns Supper to end all Burns Suppers and asked if I’d like to be involved. Of course I would. Joe wrote of that inaugural dinner for the 1987 issue of the Burns Chronicle:
On Friday, 17th January 1986, West Sound held a Burns Supper in the banqueting suite of the Hospitality Inn, Cambridge Street, Glasgow. This marked the bicentenary of the publication of the Kilmarnock edition of poems and the evening turned out a very important one in the Burns calendar. Assembled was the most glittering array of Burns talent ever to appear under the same roof. The principal toast of the evening, the Immortal Memory, was given by John Cairney, known throughout the world for his portrayal of Burns in There Was a Man. John flew back from the
Pacific especially for this occasion and we were fortunate to have such an important speech in such talented hands.
The Toast to Ayrshire and the Toast to Agriculture were delivered by George Younger and Ian Grant respectively. The Secretary of State for Scotland needs little introduction and Mr Grant is the current President of the National Farmers’ Union of Scotland.
The Burns singers are the finest of their generation, Moira Anderson and Kenneth McKellar. The irrepressible Andy Stewart recited Tam o Shanter as only he could. The Rev James Currie gave the graces. Ian Powrie, one of Scotland’s greatest ever fiddlers, now happily returned to his native shores from Australia, played while the legendary Jimmy Shand stepped out of retirement to play a selection of Burns waltzes. West Sound’s own John Carmichael with members of his famous band played throughout the evening. The current, and three times, world champion, Ian McFadyen was the piper. The Burns Supper menu was traditional with one notable addition: roast barons of Angus beef were served and carved at the table.
This dispassionate account is little more than a menu itself as it gives no real idea of the enormity of this, the largest Burns Supper ever held. A thousand people sat down at what seemed an airfield of tables under the chandeliers spreading out to the far horizon of the exit signs. The whole atmosphere might have seemed inimical to the essential close fellowship of the ideal Burns night but those thousand diners that particular night knew they were part of a special occasion and responded accordingly. Joe, in the chair, kept a tight but genial rein on things and the gargantuan affair rolled on through the long evening as if on oiled wheels. An LP was made of songs and speeches and sold later as A Night of a Thousand Tributes for charities of our choice. Even on the disc you can feel the atmosphere.
My only regret was that neither Joe nor I could persuade Moira and Kenneth to do a duet and all four of us found it difficult to get Andy Stewart to stop even after his brilliant mimicry in Tam o Shanter. It was that kind of night, with a lot of famous names living up to them. For me though, the highlight was not a song, or a recitation or a speech but it was the way in which a thousand people stood in absolute silence at the end of the Immortal Memory. It was only a moment, but it was powerful and unforgettable. And then the way that same audience at the end of a long night hummed the tune of Auld Lang Syne while I softly recited the words over. It was pure theatre, but, once again, the effect was created by the audience themselves not by the speaker.
Since that time, Joe Campbell has moved on to other and higher things but the West Sound Burns Supper has become a West of Scotland institution and is the hot ticket every January. They no longer strive for the thousand plus attendances but the figures are still very high and the calibre of the speakers reflects the quality of the evening. Tom Fleming, the actor and broadcaster, followed me in 1987 and sportscaster, Archie McPherson, followed him in 1988. The roll-call from then to the time of writing is like a ‘Who’s Who in Burns?’ – Maurice Lindsay, George Bruce, Irvine Smith, James Mackay, then another actor, Iain Cuthbertson, who was followed by the American hostage, Tom Sutherland; then the newspaper man, Jack Webster, David Shankland, Murdo Morrison, a Past President of the Burns Federation; Howard Haslett, David Purdie, the late Donald Dewar and finally, Len Murray in 2001, who thus completed the two hundred years exactly since the first-ever proposer of the toast, the Reverend Hamilton Paul.
Not all Burns suppers of course are so grand, but they could be exotic, as William Adair reported to the Burns Chronicle:
On Monday 27 January 1986, Provost Coyle of Strathkelvin District approached me and asked if I could assist with a proposed Burns Supper. I agreed, and he informed me that it was to be held on Wednesday 29th – rather short notice. Provost Coyle took the Chair, while I addressed the Haggis and also recited To a Mouse and Holy Willie’s Prayer. The Immortal Memory was rendered by J. Chalmers. The evening’s ongauns followed the normal pattern, but the menu was certainly the most exotic that I have ever encountered and, I must add, quite delicious. The meal began with Cockie Leekie Pakoras and was followed by curried Haggis and boiled rice as well as the more traditional neeps and tatties. The supper was held at The Oasis Tandoori Restaurant, Bishopbriggs. The proprietors, Messrs Mahmmod and Khan, hail from Pakistan and looked quite resplendent in kilt, velvet jacket and lace jabot. They have an engineering business by day and run the restaurant in the evenings. It was a lovely evening but they plan something on more traditional lines for next year.’
Lochgelly and District Childrens Burns Supper has been a feature of the annual celebrations in Fife since 1883, but in 1986, the No 1 Gothenberg Supper Room in Bowhill was the scene of the Young Peoples’ Burns Supper. The evening was supported by the Bowhill Peoples’ Burns Club and Charles Kennedy reported that the Immortal Memory was given by 12-year-old Fiona Delaney.
It is not easy to write well something that has been written a thousand times before. But I doubt if Robert Burns would mind a simple tribute to him because he liked the simple things in Life. We all know of the sorrow he felt at uprooting a common daisy and the gentle words he used:
Wee, modest crimson tipped flow’r
Thou’s met me in an evil hour;
For I maun crush amang the stoure
Thy slender stem;
To spare thee now is past my pow’r
Thou bonnie gem.
Scotland has had her fair share of famous men such as William Wallace, Sir Walter Scott, Alexander Fleming and Alexander Graham Bell to name but a few, but the most famous of all is Robert Burns. His fame is even greater now than when he was alive over 200 years ago. He understood nature, countryside and humanity, and because of this the Banks and Braes will always be green, sweet Afton will always flow gently and there will always be a Red Red Rose… Alexander Fleming gave us penicillin, Alexander Graham Bell gave us the telephone, but Burns left us all a legacy of understanding and this is my simple immortal memory.
On the point of Scotland’s famous men, this super-patriot theme was followed by one Scots-Canadian recently who, in his Immortal Memory, gave nothing more than a list of Scottish inventors. It was probably at the same Supper that a singalong followed which featured the best-known songs of Harry Lauder culminating in Will Fyffe’s I Belong to Glasgow.
The late Eddie Boyd certainly belonged to Glasgow but he was really an Ayrshire man. He was arguably the nearest thing to Dylan Thomas that Scotland has had, and like his fellow-Ayrshireman, Willie McIlvanney, had his own voice in dealing with the Scottish scene. Boyd became one of television’s finest writers in its halcyon days in the Fifties and early Sixties, but in 1986 he addressed a Burns supper in the Glasgow Art Galleries and gave them the benefit of his acerbic viewpoint and sardonic tongue. Eddie could wield a word like a single-syllable stiletto. This can be seen in this all-too-short excerpt from the end of his verse-speech. He spoke, as it were, in Burns’s own vernacular, in Burns’s own voice, albeit in a tone rather more urban Glasgow than Ayrshire rural. At this point, we come in half-way through his poetic Memory. Eddie gave me a signed copy of the text which I folded away among all my other treasured Burnsiana, but I’ve lost the first page somewhere, which is why we begin where he was quoting from The Twa Dogs:
I’ve noticed, on our Laird’s court-day
(An’ mony a time my heart’s been wae)
Puir tenant bodies, scant o’ cash,
Hoo they maun thole a factor’s snash;
He’ll stamp and thraten, curse an’ swear
He’ll apprehend them, poind their gear;
While they maun stan’ wi’ aspect humble,
And hear it a’ an’ fear an’ tremble!’
Then he (Boyd) extended the parallel to today’s poor families.
Yer warl’, this modern day, is filled
Wi’ factors daein’ naethin’ else
Bit dream up snash for puir bodies tae thole;
The bureaucrats they’re ca’ed nooadays,
The people without joy or faces,
The cuckoos claimin’ every nest,
The institutionalised rinnin’ the institution
Tae serve themsels an’ no’ the people:
‘That Burns Family is a problem family, no doubt about it.’
An’ next thing the social workers are fa’in a’ aroon’
Lik’ big pink snawflakes…
Ah’d better stop there. For, ye see,
Ah’ve answered ma ain question:
Whit wid Ah be writin’ aboot gin Ah were alive the day?
Ah’d be writin’ poetry for, an’ aboot,
The Bader-Meinhofs.
Is there a poet livin’ et this time
What kens the Land the wey Ah kent it?
The sight, the smell, the very taste o’t:
The deep luve for its treacherous loveliness,
The deeper hatred o’ its mindless cruelty.
Mount Oliphant
Lochlea – ‘the poorest soil in Ayrshire
At twenty shillings an acre.’
Mossgiel.
The Carrick Hills, flat as the Ayrshire speck,
The Firth o’ Clyde, glintin’ lik’ a broken gless,
The sma’ rain that wis tae kill me
No’ too mony years later.
Poor land,
Soor land,
It grew naethin’ bit stanes –
An’ poetry.
An’ yit…an’ yit – ah niver left it.
There wis some kinna recognition
Atween me ‘n that land.
We took frae each ither ‘n we gave,
Whiles a caress, whiles the back o’ oor haunds,
Expectin’, demandin’ – naethin’.
It wis a hopeless love affair: an’ Martial,
That Latin poet… fair summed it up:
‘I cannot live with you nor without you.’
An’ the Land wis a’ ma wimmen,
They a’ had the Land in their bodies ‘n their breasts
An’ the yins that didnae – weel,
That wis jist play-actin’.
A harsh mistress ‘n jist the same the day;
Bit leave her – an’ ye leave salvation.
Even the day
When the Lea Rig his become the oil rig,
She’s jist as harsh
Bit leave her – an’ ye leave salvation.
Adam Smith wis tellin’ me jist yesterday
That only fower per cent o’ the people noo wark on the Land.
Leave her – an’ ye leave salvation.
An’ noo ah think Ah’ve deeved ye lang eneuch:
Bit yin last thing Ah’d like tae say tae ye.
During’ the time ye’ve been listening’ here tae me,
A hunner folk have, somewhere in the warl’,
Died o’starvation.
If ye can live wi’ that, then everything Ah wrote
Wis jist no’ worth the effort;
Everything ah said
Wis wasted breath.
Ye say ah’m an immortal.
Not mortal.
Ma poems, ye say, imperishable.
Not perishable.
Ah’ve even been ca’ed immoral.
Not moral.
Every rebel is defined by negations;
Bit yin word naebody’s ever yit applied tae me
Is ‘impotent.’
Not potent? Ah kin hear the lauch ringin’ roon’ Ayrshire.
An’it… an’yit… it could happen.
Ah could be destroyed.
The poor we have always
The poor in heart,
The poor in charity,
The poor in deed,
The poor in compassion,
The poor in intention,
The poor in love.
Gin they inherit the earth, whit’s tae become o’Burns?
Jist an Ayrshire ploughman wha wrote verses
In an incomprenhensible tongue,
Banished tae a dreary library ‘n the key’s been lost:
An’ a’ that stuff aboot the Brotherhood o’ Man?
Banished wi’ him.
It could happen.
Fegs aye, it certainly could happen.
Ah’m warnin ye, ye’d better stert mendin’ yer weys.
How salutary to be brought up sharp like this. Eddie Boyd always knew what he was saying. He was a very careful word-maker, sharpening his point to thrust it home until it hurt. But it never bled. He chose to speak in Burns’s voice as he might have spoken today. For me, it was a latter-day Burns exactly, and it was disturbing.
It is almost a relief to turn again to someone who speaks for himself. Robert Davidson Ogilvie, delivered a more conventional Immortal Memory in January 1987 to the Canberra Highland Society and Burns Club of Australia, but it was none the worse for that.
Mr President, distinguished guests, members and friends.
If a roll call of famous men were read over at the beginning of every century how many would answer a second time to their name? There would be no doubt or question as to Burns. The adsum of Burns would ring out clear and unchallenged. There would be a few before him on the list, and it is not now possible to conceive of such a list without him. In Scotland, Burns is more than a literary figure – he is a popular hero, whose birthday is celebrated by Scots all over the world. He sprang from the country people and their traditions and his undoubted genius owed nothing to fortune…
The bare facts of Robert Burns life can be quite briefly told, since his life only extended over thirty seven years. He was born in the village of Alloway, close to the town of Ayr, on 25 January 1759. In a long autobiographical letter he wrote to Dr John Moore in 1787, he frankly admits the poverty of his home and his upbringing, and the unavailing fight of his father, a tenant farmer, to overcome that poverty, but in the same letter he dwells much more upon his own appetite for sociability. This appetite was a sure sign of the artistic temperament innate in Burns and it was to this, quite as much as to the very reputable schooling he had had from his father as well from various dominies, that we owe the poet that was to be.
Burns’ first love was song. He had a keen musical ear and a great feeling for rhythm. His first poems were song; the earliest were written when he was 15 years old. On his own evidence he never composed a song without first having the tune in his head. When, in the year 1773, he ‘first committed the sin of rhyme’ it is significant that the lyrics he wrote in praise of the young girl he worked with in the harvest field should have been set to the time of her favourite reel. From his middle teens onwards it was obvious that Burns was conscious of the poet within him, that he was not going to
be content to be an ordinary ploughman. Song was already in his heart.
An important part of his works are the epistles and satires, their style modelled on that of two earlier Scots poets, Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson. These show him as an acute Observer and critic of human conduct, with a warm heart, a strong sense of humour and a hatred for hypocrisy. His philosophy of the brotherhood of man was partly inspired by the ideals of Freemasonry.
Burns’ character was not a complicated one, but it has been variously distorted both by admirers and detractors… He could read, write and remember. He surcharged with emotion, awareness and sensibility and despite his background and foreground of poverty, hunger and never-ceasing toil, he could laugh. The only mystery concerning Burns, whether in manhood or boyhood, is that of the quality of his genius… and this genius expressed itself in poetry. As a poet he could not be suppressed. As a poet he triumphed. Burns was pure passion and imagination pure fire. Burns power was his own mind. No other poet had the clarity of
his vision.
It was the nature of Robert Burns’s experience that conditioned his poetry… his experience, if searing, was fundamental and therefore universal. It is this wonderful quality that makes Burns the first world poet. Burns embraces all humanity. Humanity has in turn embraced him. One reason why Burns is universally loved and adored is because he expressed himself in the thought and speech of the great mass of his countrymen…
His songs and memory are today enshrined in the hearts of the people whilst the law-makers of his day are forgotten like the snows of yesteryear… Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a handsome poem about Burns, written in the Burns style. I will read the last two stanzas.
For now he haunts his native land
As an immortal youth; his hand
Guides every plough
He sits besides each ingle-nook
His voice is in each rushing brook,
Each rustling bough.
His presence haunts this room tonight
A form of mingled mist and light
From that far coast
Welcome beneath this roof of mine
Welcome this vacant chair is thine
Dear guest and ghost.
Whether a man lives in Scotland, England, America, Australia or any part of the globe, he has the same sentiments for home or kindred, the same loves and fears, the same silent emotions whoever he may be.
In Burns’ poems and songs these sentiments are expressed for which we cannot find words. These silent emotions are given expression, our lives are enriched and our loves are made more intimate. The Holy Willies, The Hornbooks, The Cotters, The Man Made to Mourn, The Mouse, none of these are exclusive to eighteenth century Ayrshire, they are universal and timeless.
So many of Burns’ poems expressed his views to the fullest extent. There is no more flaming satire than Holy Willie’s Prayer. There is no greater tale than Tam o Shanter. No poem has more love and feeling than the Cotter’s Saturday Night. There is no more tender love song than My Love is Like a Red Red Rose. If A Man’s a Man for a’ that is the hope of humanity, then Auld Lang Syne is the world’s national anthem. What greatness did this man Burns have? So great is he, in fact, that he belongs not to Scotland alone. He belongs to the whole world… As James Russell Lowell said.
Burns is a citizen of a country of which we are all citizens, that country of the heart which has no boundaries laid down on man.
Burns takes his place with the marvellous William Shakespeare, with the great humanitarian, Abraham Lincoln, with Nelson, Wellington and Wilberforce, the great emancipator. All these men in various fields of endeavour have exerted an influence that extends far beyond the confines of their native countries.
He was endowed by nature with that vital spark which in him amounted to genius and his muse did touch the heart. That is one of the secrets of his greatness. He touched the hearts of men and what appeals to our hearts must appeal to our esteem. Scott, Keats, Milton, Byron are not revered
the way that Burns is, and yet they were great men and
great poets.
As Burns Clubs prosper and Burnsiana froths across the globe, we hear him quoted in parliaments, learned judges recite his texts in courts, he is hotly claimed, for their own, by all political parties. The Russians still maintain he was a communist. The works of Burns are now taught in Russian schools. When the first translated works of Burns were published in Moscow 100,000 copies were sold in one morning. His face has appeared on their stamps…
Today there are hundreds of Burns Clubs throughout the world and many of their members, as we have here tonight, are not Scotsmen. This, I think, typifies the power of Burns’ poetry and song. And what of the future? Man cannot live on Burns alone. If we are to ensure that his immortal memory continues with any meaning other than sentiment and hero worship, then some positive action is required.
Scotland, as a country, was dying when Burns emerged to re-popularise the Scots tongue and save some of its fast ebbing culture. Today, as far as native inspired culture is concerned, Scotland is probably at an even lower ebb, and there is no Robbie Burns to act the part of life saver.
Scotia’ my dear, my native soil!
From whom my warmest wish to heaven is sent
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil be blest
With wealth, and peace and sweet content.
Today, for the sake of the country he loved, we hope his prayers are heard and answered…
Mr Ogilvie concluded by reciting Colonel Ingersoll’s poem written at Burns Cottage. As he sat down the company rose to him.
In 1989, the Burns Howff Club in Dumfries celebrated its centenary and as part of the celebrations, Dr James Mackay, the noted Burns authority and sometime resident of Dumfries, was invited, in the tradition of Hamilton Paul, to propose the Immortal Memory in original verse on Burns Night at the Globe Inn. Dr Mackay did so and the result is a unique survey of Burns from one who should know. This Burns knowledge is worn lightly but it is all there between the lines. 500 copies of the speech were run off for distribution. The following is an abridged and slightly edited version from copy No 16 which was presented to the present editor by the author.
Mr Chairman, Howff members an honoured guests,
Ah’m here the nicht after mony requests
Frae David Smith, your Secretary,
Wha said tae me – ‘It’s necessary
To get someone for oor Centenary do;
In truth, it micht as well be you’.
It didnae tak me lang tae pon’er,
Tae address the Howff’s indeed an honour.
Ye’ve had some famous speakers here:
Men o mense an muckle lear.
As Ah look roun, ah’m verra prood
Tae think I staun whaur Burns ance stood…
This is the case, ah hae nae doot,
The bard himsel, in letters, put
The word around for a’ tae see:
The Globe Inn was his howff. Thus he
Describes it in letters, if ye please.
Within these wa’s he’d mony a squeeze
Wi stamp-house Johnie an Samuel Clark.
Upstairs he dallied wi Anna Park –
Fair Anna o the gowden locks –
Ach-
Ah wullnae dwell on maitters randy,
Whit Burns himsel cried ‘Houghmagandie’!
But ah’ve digress’t.
This auld inn’s fu o interest.
Little mair nor a but an ben
When it was fun’t in saxteen ten,
By Burns’s time a leading tavern,
Its close-mooth gloomy like a cavern,
But through yon door was hospitality,
A place o warmth an conviviality.
Ae time, the Hyslops o Lochend –
Will an his wife Jean, the poet’s friend –
Possess’d the Globe, a nice sideline.
Will was a merchant wha dealt in wine,
Jean was a Maxwell o Terraughty.
’Tis said that she was rather naughty,
Conspiring wi Anna Park tae trap
Oor guileless hero, Burns – puir chap!
Whit truth there’s in’t ah canna tell –
Ah dinna believe a word mysel!
In Burgh Archives ah’ve search’d in vain,
Explored each clue, turn’d owre ilk stane.
Altho she cast a puckle stigma,
Anne Park is aiblins an enigma.
But if this girl remains a mystery
Ah’ve solved the Hyslops’ family history.
In editing The Works, Ah must confess,
Jock an Meg had me in a mess.
Ah thocht Will an Jock were ane an the same,
An for that confusion Ah tak fu blame…
Ah’ve recently discovered that Jock
Entered intae holy wedlock
Wi a Margaret Geddes; an tae gie them a job,
Will Hyslop installed them baith at the Globe.
This happened in 1795
When Burns was verra much alive.
An thus this theory, please I beg,
Accept that Mrs Hyslop must be Meg.
’Twas she who dealt wi the poet’s seal.
She was a guid freen, tried an leal.
Meg was a niece o Bishop Geddes,
An frae her uncle she had his
Copy o the Edinburgh Edition,
Wi Burns’s manuscript addition.
In turn Meg Hyslop gied the buik
Tae a Dr Goadby, who it took
Tae America when he emigrated.
And in the Huntington Library it’s nou venerated.
Ah’m suir ye’ll also bring tae mind,
That Burns tae help Jock was inclined,
An asked James Johnson if he could
Engrave a billhead on a block o wood.
Ye may remember Rabbie tellin’
Johnson aff aboot his spellin.
He muddled postage, if ye please,
An spell’t tobacco wi twa b’s.
But his heart was in the right place;
The odd mistake was nae disgrace.
Far better than Thomson, yon stuck-up snob!
But –Ah digress again – back tae the Globe.
The King’s Arms might profess gentility;
This Inn was a haven o tranquillity.
A refuge frae a’ cares an woes,
A bed for the nicht when the need arose.
He needna heed o slaps an stiles,
Or wearied, hameward ride sax miles.
An efter he moved intil the toun,
The welcome here was aye a boon.
Ah like tae think, in his last years,
That here at least he shrugged aff his fears;
A’ thae worries that sairly raxed him,
A’ thae problems that sadly taxed him.
Fast by yon ingle bleezin finely,
Wi reamin swats that drank divinely –
Ye might have heard these lines afore!
Ach – ye ken what ah mean! Ahint yon door
Was the cosy snug, the elbow chair
In which he sat, Ah do declare.
The ambience was satisfyin.
Today, the atmosphere’s electrifyin.
Sat in yon chair, Ah get a shiver,
The hair on my neck begins to quiver.
Whit ah’m tryin tae say in essence
Is that ye can truly feel his presence.
Ye members o the howff are blest,
Nae ither Club is thus possesst
O premises wi the stamp o Rab
On every brick, and tile, and slate an slab…
Let’s face it – we a’ tak for granted,
Dumfries has got mair that it wanted.
See yon Vennel flat, ance sae negleckit?
But nou restored and much respeckit.
See the cobbles o the Millbrae Hole
An think how hard it was tae thole
Yon last dread illness frae the Brow,
That brought puir Rabbie doon sae low.
The times he must hae trod thae stanes:
In happier days, the vennels an lanes
Rang wi his manly, independent stride.
His was the toun in which we bide.
Thae Ayrshire birkies hae the gall
Tae state that, of the poems, all
The anes of any substance real
Were written ‘fore he left Mossgiel.
The Kilmarnock Poems are verra fine,
But Rabbie added mony a line
In the last decade o his life,
Spite a’ his fears for weans and wife:
Thou Lingering Star an The Wounded Hare,
Scots Wha Hae an mony mair.
Discernin fowks agree that Tam’s
His best wark; but his epigrams
Are masterpieces o shairp satire;
Fu’ o bite an tinged wi fire.
The wey he rhymed extempore
When he an Syme toured Galloway,
Whene’er he was in fightin mood,
E’n then the the witty lines ensued.
Oot at Ellisland, so they say,
Tam o Shanter, in a single day,
By Rab the Rhymer was composed;
Whit manic energy was here exposed!
It was regarded, as we learn,
The best day’s wark since Bannockburn.
Ye could argue just as forcibly.
If Burns wrote naethin after he
Published in se’enteen eighty-sax,
His reputation wad hae suffered cracks.
He wad wi Fergusson an Ramsay
Enjoy a standing rather flimsy.
The poet’s years in Dumfriesshire,
When Nith, not Afton did inspire,
Produced some o his finest wark.
On Scotia’s ballads he left his mark.
The fragments o the auld Scots sangs
He saved an mended. He belangs
Within the makars’ great tradition.
There’s nane o that in the Kilmarnock Edition!
By fittin words tae an ancient melody
Burns demonstrates his versatility.
His genius maks it seem sae easy.
He cleaned up sangs that were gey sleezy.
The Cumnock Psalms an ither bawdry
Had words that strike us nou as tawdry.
Mony an auld sang was gey coorse
Wi words obscene – an sometimes worse.
The sentiments oor Bard refined –
He had ministers and maids in mind …
The sangs o Burns run intae hundreds.
And maist are still considered standards…
Ten monuments to Burns ye’ll find
In Canada. If you’re inclined
Tae try the States, there’s anither score.
As ye’ll see frae shore tae shining shore.
Thae plaques an busts an cairns an statues
Generally extol his poetic virtues,
Wi scenes frae John Anderson my Jo,
To a Mountain Daisy – and oh –
The Cotter’s Saturday Night an many
A Tam o Shanter still pursued by Nannie.
But ane that really took ma fancy
Is the braw statue that stauns in Quincy.
Now yon’s a toun not really famous
For its Scots roots; its name is
Taen frae an ancient Pilgrim line
That spawned twa Presidents langsyne.
In much more recent times it seeks
Tae blend the Irish wi the Greeks.
Whit wey’s oor Rabbie’s figure here?
As Scotland’s national Bard? No fear!
The statue was planned in twenty-three
For the hunner an fiftieth anniversary
O the opening round o the American War
O Independence. An therefore
They hae anither quality waled.
Burns here is as a champion hailed
O liberty an democracry,
An opponent o bureaucracy.
Upon the base are sax lines quo’d
Frae Burns’s famous Birthday Ode
To General Washington: ‘Nae Aeolian lyre
Awake – tis liberty’s bold notes inspire.’
Tae sing the praises of a recent
Enemy was thocht hardly decent.
Dootless some fand it quite outrageous.
Mysel’ – Ah think he was courageous.
Oor Rab was aye a maverick
That for convention cared na stick…
Some think that Burns was irreligious
An The Kirk’s Alarm sacrilegious.
But Burns abominated cant
Hypocrisy an humbug. Scant
Attention has been given, it seems,
Tae Rabbie’s views, express’d in reams
O letters tae his valued friend
Mrs Dunlop. In these he penned
At length his weel-thocht-oot opinions
On God an His divine dominions,
Showin how he’d worked oot for himsel’
The way tae Heaven –or need be, – tae Hell.
Sae too, in maitters gey political,
Burns was candid an highly critical.
Sometimes he could be rather tactless;
And was advised to think mair, act less…
Sometimes he had a second thought
An tried tae undo what he wrought.
Those hasty words o dedication
Inscribed in De Lolme’s ‘Constitution’;
The ambiguous toast ‘May our success
In the present war’ (he did profess)
‘Be equal to the justice of our cause’
Gey nearly brocht oor Bard tae blows.
He had tae watch his step, however;
Being an Exciseman he could never
Afford tae tak too bold a stan’
In advocating the ‘Rights o Man’.
There were those quite ready tae betray him
As being disaffected. And wi him
Wi the reddest radicals acquainted
An wi democracy so foully tainted.
In makin his impassioned plea
Tae Robert Graham o Fintry, he
Became quite fearful, as well he might:
The loss o job an pension right
Were bad enough for a family man.
But even waur – the savage ban
On anythin the least seditious
Meant Burns was prey to tongues malicious.
There are aye plenty tae inform
On those who advocate Reform.
Burns was conscious, a’ too well
On what tae Muir an Palmer fell.
Ilk day he walked by the Midsteeple
He’d mind the fate the Friends o the People
Had suffered for their plea ‘One vote
Per man’. A frightened government smote
Them an sent them tae Botany Bay.
’Twas this inspired Scots Wha Hae.
It’s strange tae think our national song
Should hae frae an injustice sprung.
But we remember Rab for his love songs tender
An his nature poems: tae the Daisy slender,
An To a Mouse – sae fu o pathos.
Burns ne’er descended into bathos.
We mind his digs at people’s vanity,
But maist o a’ we mind his humanity;
It’s this knack o conveyin a’
The emotions, great an sma,
That strikes a chord in ev’ry heart;
That turns his verses into art
Burns is poet for a’ time,
Appealing tae fowk o ev’ry clime,
Race, colour, creed, an tongue.
It’s this’ll perpetuate his mem’ry long…
I gie ye the Toast – the Memory
O Robert Burns, Poet o Humanity,
Gentleman – the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns.
And if Jim will allow a lesser rhymer to add:
The applause for the feat was loud and long
For Jim, with the Bard, could do no wrong
The men of the Howff did not reason why
They knew they had had the real Mackay!
It was at another inn, the Open Arms at Dirleton, just outside Edinburgh, that Iain Crawford proposed the Immortal Memory in 1993. The unusual aspect of the speech was the way it allowed for the insertion of Burns songs and recitations by others, but then Iain Crawford always did the unexpected. All the same it made very pleasant punctuation in the address. Crawford has been in his time been many things – actor, journalist, war hero, and a writer on wine and golf, but not necessarily in that order. What he is essentially, is a good talker, and here he talks about Robert Burns.
The most amazing thing about Robert Burns is that he ever happened at all. Chaucer’s father was a vintner and honorary butler to the King Edward III of England; Dante was a lawyer’s son; Shakespeare came from yeoman stock and his father was a prosperous tradesman; Michelangelo’s father was mayor of Caprese and owned a marble quarry; all the earlier Scottish literati were either aristocrats like Gavin Douglas and Lyndsay or university men like Dunbar and Fergusson. Even Allan Ramsay’s origins were prosperous middle-class. But Burns was the son of a failed gardener and bankrupt small-holder. He was a man born out of time and out of place, perhaps the greatest example of that assiduous passion for learning which a few generations later was to make professors out of crofters’ sons and scientists and bankers from the families of fishermen and weavers.
He made his own time and his own place but never really reconciled the two. Yet with that irrepressible quality which is perhaps the most admirable thing about humanity he managed to make passion and poetry, laughter, music and magic out of the ingredients of misery, poverty, triumph and failure. ‘To treat these two imposters just the same’ as Kipling was to say much later.
MY LOVE IS LIKE A RED, RED ROSE (Song)
It was the romantic songs which Burns wrote and rescued from oblivion in two collections made at the end of his life – and for which he earned nothing for more than 250 songs – which are part of his most enduring and endearing legacy. He played the fiddle himself and, although he declared he was not much of a singer, he had a fine ear for a tune. You only have to listen to the old tunes he rescued from extinction by providing them with new words, to see how accurately and with what grace, he matched the poetic rhythm to the music. The relatively small world offered by the Ayrshire community in which he lived added reality to his book learning.
‘The joy of my heart’ he wrote to his schoolmaster and friend, Murdoch, in 1783 ‘is to study men, their manners and for this darling subject I cheerfully sacrifice every other consideration. I am quite indolent about these great concerns that set the bustling busy Sons of Care agog.’ Sometimes however, other ‘darling subjects’ got in the way. As when, at the age of sixteen, he went to his mother’s home village of Kirkoswald to learn Mensuration and Mathematics. ‘I struggled on with my Sines and Cosines until, stepping out in the garden one charming noon to take the sun’s altitude, I met with my Angel
Like Proserpine gathering flowers/Herself a fairer flower.
It was vain to think of doing any more good at school. The remaining week I did nothing but craze the faculties of my soul about her or steal out to meet with her; and the last two nights of my stay, had sleep been mortal sin, I was innocent.’
AY WAUKIN O (Song)
He confessed in the autobiographical letter he wrote to Dr John Moore in 1787, ‘Far beyond all other impulses of my heart, was un penchant à l’adorable moitié du genre humain; my heart was complete tinder and was eternally lighted up by some goddess or other.’
But was Burns any more than a lyrical lecher – as it is fashionable to portray him nowadays? He doesn’t win many brownie points from the feminist cabal – especially that selection of it which holds that lust is a male imposition on womankind. A point of view likely to threaten the extinction of the human race, I would have thought. Not that the human race was in any danger of dying out as long as Robert Burns was around…but he was concerned with other aspects of humanity. He lived in a time of revolution – the American Revolution, the French Revolution, fellow excise officer Thomas Paine’s ‘The Rights of Man’, Jefferson’s ‘Declaration of Independence’. He saw the social injustice and the hypocrisy which surrounded him with a dangerously beady eye.
A MAN’S A MAN FOR A’ THAT (Song)
Not all of his scorn was directed against the larger structure of 18th century society. Some of it struck nearer home, even taking on the extreme doctrines of Calvinism and the Divinely Chosen Few of the Elect, pre-ordained for Salvation, immortalised in his portrayal of a Kirk elder in the parish of Mauchline in Holy Willie’s Prayer.
HOLY WILLIE’S PRAYER (Recitation).
However, the Holy Willies ganged up on Burns when his hand-fasted marriage to Jean Armour was denounced by her parents and ‘the holy beagles and the houghmagandie pack’ were threatening such dire punishments that he made plans to emigrate to Jamaica. He must have thought back fondly on an earlier, idyllic and less tempestuous love affair.
CORN RIGS (Song)
That was one of the two songs which appeared in the book which stopped him going to Jamaica. His own book, Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect published in Kilmarnock in 1786. The Printed Proposals, by which he raised the subscriptions to publish, contained a justification by another, earlier Scottish bard, Allan Ramsay:
Set out the brunt side o’ your shin
For Pride in Poets is nae sin
Glory’s the prize for which they rin
And Fame’s their jo;
And wha blows best the Horn shall win;
And wharefore no?
In his Preface he said: ‘Unacquainted with the necessary requisites for commencing Poet by rule, he sings the sentiments and manners he felt and saw in himself and his rustic compeers around him, in his and their native language.’ But further on in the pages of the Kilmarnock volume he was more forthright:
…Your Critic-folk may cock their nose
And say, ‘How can you e’er propose
You, wha ken hardly verse frae prose
To mak a sang?’
But, by your leaves, my learned foes,
Ye’re maybe wrang.
What’s a’ the jargon o’ your Schools,
Your Latin names for horns and stools:
If honest Nature made you fools,
What serves your Grammars?
Ye’d better taen up spades and shools,
Or knappin hammers.
A set o’ dull conceited Hashes,
Confuse their brains in College-classes!
They gang in stirks, and come out Asses,
Plain Truth to speak;
And syne they think to climb Parnassus
By dint o’ Greek.
Gie me ae spark o’ Nature’s fire
That’s a’ the learning I desire;
Then, tho’ I drudge thro’ dub and mire
At pleugh or cart
My Muse, tho’ hamely in attire,
May touch the heart.
And hearts were touched. And the Kilmarnock edition became a literary smash hit. Jamaica and emigration were forgotten. Edinburgh and a second edition beckoned. And Robert Burns listened even more avidly to the music of
his time.
FIDDLE TUNE (Instrumental)
In Edinburgh, Burns was lionised… ‘The town is at present agog with the Ploughman Poet’ wrote Mrs Cockburn, author of The Flowers of the Forest. ‘The man will be spoiled, if he can spoil’ she added ‘but he keeps his simple manners and is quite sober.’ He concluded a deal for a second edition of his poems but he had to wait a long time to get the money from his publisher. Some things never change. During that time he made friends, useful acquaintances, who discovered what his friends back home already knew…
Sir Walter Scott, when a boy of 16, met Burns in Edinburgh. Years later he told J. G. Lockhart:
His eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large and of a cast which glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling and interest. I never saw such another eye in a human being, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time.
Burns enjoyed Edinburgh – and being lionised, although that wore off a bit as the 16 months dragged by. He enjoyed the company of people who were his intellectual equals – rare back home – but beneath the polite and witty façade, the rebel lurked. He wrote to one of his less genteel Edinburgh cronies, Willie Nicol, classics master at the High School.
I never, my friend, thought Mankind very capable of anything generous but the stateliness of the Patricians in Edinburgh, and the servility of my plebian brethren, who perhaps formerly eyed me askance, since I returned home, have nearly put me out of countenance altogether with my species.
He was fond of schoolmasters, for they had the learning which he admired, usually without the social pretension.
For Willie Michie, schoolmaster at Cleish in Fife, he wrote a mock epitaph:
Here lie Willie Michie’s banes:
O Satan, when ye tak him,
Gie him the schoolin o’ your weans,
For clever deils he’ll mak them!
He was good at this kind of thing. He’d always been a kind of ‘jobbing poet’ who could turn his hand to versifying any occasion – from solemn commemoration to digging his friends in the ribs with words. He was better at the second:
Lament him Mauchline husbands a’,
He aften did assist ye;
For had ye stayed hale weeks awa’,
Your wives would ne’er hae missed ye.
Ye Mauchline bairns as on ye pass,
To school in bands thegither,
O, tread ye lightly on his grass –
He micht hae been your feyther!
Edinburgh offered lots of opportunities for pompous declamation and too few for friendly jibes – and none at all for the rebellious fire which burns at the heart of his ‘human rights’ poems – like A Man’s a Man for a’ That, Holy Willie and The Unco’ Guid which like Scotch Drink opens with a lilting Biblical paraphrase:
My Son, these maxims make a rule,
An’ lump them aye thegither:
The Rigid Righteous is a fool,
The Rigid Wise anither:
The cleanest corn that ere was dight
May hae some pyles o’ caff in;
So ne’er a fellow creature slight
For random fits o’ daffin.
But the most radical of them all was The Jolly Beggars, written before the Kilmarnock edition but never published in Burns’ lifetime, the nearest thing he ever wrote to a play – or a piece of music theatre (although he was planning a drama at his death) – a rumbustious appeal to humanity’s ‘unofficial self’, an anarchic assembly of gangrel bodies outside the pale of social acceptance. No idealisation of the peasant as in Wordsworth or Yeats; the dark side of humanity caught in the act, sordid, lustful, drunken but also independent, comradely, scornful and courageous. Here’s the raucle carlin, the female vagabond in her unlugubrious elegy for her Highland lover:
A HIGHLAND LAD MY LOVE WAS BORN (Song)
On one of the two tours to the Highlands he made while he waited in Edinburgh for publisher, Willie Creech, to disgorge the miserly £100 paid for the copyright of the Edinburgh edition of his poems, Burns collected another rebellious and defiant ditty which he made into a lively song:
MACPHERSON’S FAREWELL (Song)
In 1788 he gave up the gilded – and gelded – life of being a poet in Edinburgh, regularised his marriage with Jean Armour and her now-fawning family, who had originally torn up his marriage lines, and took the lease of a farm at Ellisland, near Dumfries. Later, he became an excise officer to give his family the stability that neither poetry nor farming ever offered. There were more poems – a few great ones like the immortal Tam o Shanter, probably the finest narrative poem ever written in our tongue – and many songs in the labour of love to which he devoted the last few years of his tragically short life, until the endocarditis contracted in his youth and the bad advice of the medical profession, finally killed him in July 1796.
The novelist, George Eliot, (Mary Ann Evans) said:
It is an easy task to write severe things about the transgressions of men of genius by making ourselves over-zealous agents of Heaven and demanding that our brother should bring usurious interest for his Five Talents, forgetting that it is less easy to manage five talents than two.
No lyric poet has been so much talked about and so often misunderstood and vilified as Robert Burns. His early biographers made him a pious example of their own narrow-minded philosophies of temperance and social probity but even they could not entirely evade the impact of his genius.
And the world at large has shrugged off their hypocritical judgements, to take him to their hearts as the poet who got closer to the lives and feelings of ordinary people than any other. The world o’er remembers him in many languages and meetings and partings, with the wonderful legacy of songs which he left us, in particular in friendship’s international anthem Auld Lang Syne.
AULD LANG SYNE (Song)
And having said his piece, Iain, no doubt resumed his place, took up his dram and winked to the world over the rim of his glass.
In 1990, to everyone’s surprise (except Glaswegians), Glasgow was named European Capital of Culture. To mark the honour, President Bryan McKirgan and his fellow-members of the Glasgow and District Association of Burns Clubs asked me to prepare and present Burnsiana 90 – A Celebration of Burns in Glasgow. Thanks to subsidies from the Glasgow District Council under their Lord Provost, Susan Baird, and a hefty donation from Marks and Spencer Ltd, whose store now occupied the site of the Black Bull Hotel (where Burns himself once stayed) a company was assembled and rehearsed for the three day run at the City Hall in the Candleriggs.
For the opening on 22 November, the Glasgow clubs produced a flashy brochure which contained details of everything that was ever to do with Burns and Glasgow and notes on the tripartite programming which consisted of Burnsang with Anne Lorne Gillies on the Thursday, dramatisations of The Cotter’s Saturday Night and Tam o Shanter on the Friday and a concert performance of the Burns Musical. There Was A Lad on the Saturday. Something, one would have thought for every Burnsian. People did come, and a good time was had by all, but once again, the Burns Clubs were notable for their absence. ‘It was too near Christmas,’ some said. Others, that they were getting ready for their own Burns Suppers in January. Even more incongruous, given the publicity it got among the clubs, some said they hadn’t known it was on. Whatever the reason, they stayed away in droves.
Or was it that they were saving their resources for the next big Burns milestone – the 1996 Bicentenary?
For the future be prepared,
Guard whatever thou can’st guard;
But, thy utmost duty done,
Welcome, what thou canst not shun.
(Lines written at Friar’s Carse)