Robert Burns is a poet who calls into question periodicizing decisions made with respect to Romantic poetry. There is a strong case for regarding his collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), as inaugurating Romantic poetry proper. The volume uses devices such as personification familiar in eighteenth‐century poetry, but in its radical sympathies, subversive ironies, and pursuit of greater conversational naturalness it is a companion as well as forerunner of the poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Above all, it is written in a newly original style, at once skilfully artful and eloquently demotic, fusing formal skill with colloquial vigour, standard English and Scottish dialect. This section looks at a handful of his poems.
With the novels of Scott, Burns’s poetry represents the best of what Murray Pittock calls ‘Scottish Romanticism’, even as regionalism has living commerce with a wider universalism, evident in ‘Man Was Made to Mourn, A Dirge’. Unlike Wordsworth’s poems of encounter, this meeting between narrator and ‘rev’rend Sage’ (10) begins with questions from the person encountered, whose speech is less one of counsel than of saddened awareness that ‘Man was made to mourn’, words whose calculated ambiguity concludes stanzas 3 to 6 (24, 32, 40, 48): the speaker implies both that man is created in such a way that he will inevitably be forced to mourn and that man is treated in such a way by his fellow man that he will be compelled to mourn.1 ‘Mourn’ appears as the final word from the third stanza to the concluding eleventh stanza, and the monorhyming displays Burns’s virtuosic skills, as in the famous conclusion to stanza 7:
And Man, whose heav’n‐erected face,
The smiles of love adorn,
Man’s inhumanity to Man
Makes countless thousands mourn! (53–6)
The stanza captures the accents of incredulous speech, its opening two lines failing to resolve into a sentence, as they pass into the memorable aphorism that follows, obliging us to hold in suspension the fact that the same creature whose ‘face, / The smiles of love adorn’ can be relied upon to demonstrate, illogically but inexorably, ‘inhumanity’ to his fellows. Written in standard English, the poem is bitingly intelligent in its reflectiveness: if, asks the speaker, I was meant to be ‘yon lordling’s slave’ (65), ‘Why was an independent wish / E’er planted in my mind?’ (67–8). If such social subjugation is not an inherently intended part of the scheme of things, it goes on, ‘why am I subject to / His cruelty, or scorn? / Or why has Man the will and pow’r / To make his fellow mourn?’ (69–72). The cast of mind is one of Enlightenment universalism; the trenchant compassion and inquiring mind informing the sharply turned phrases is Burns’s own. The questions asked by the poem add up to a revisiting of the traditional unde malum: whence evil? Is it innate or conditioned? Can it be explained or eradicated? Burns’s phrasing is deftly turned across the line‐ending so that ‘will’ and ‘power’ each, with driven near‐sadistic intent, govern the imperative (grammatical and seemingly instinctual) ‘To make his fellow mourn’. The poem reminds us that Romantic poetry, for all its hopeful yearnings and affirmations, dwells on and is haunted by the problem of evil.
Shelley is likely to have remembered that stanza in The Triumph of Life, when the narrator laments that ‘power and will / In opposition rule our mortal day’ (228–9); his variation pits ineffectual idealistic ‘will’ against hegemonic ‘power’. Burns is an immediate forerunner of and a significant presence in the work of other Romantics. He features, with Chatterton, as an exemplar of the plunge from ‘gladness’ (48) to ‘despondency and madness’ (49) that Wordsworth fears in ‘Resolution and Independence’ is the virtually inevitable lot of the poet. When Wordsworth thinks of Burns as ‘Him who walk’d in glory and in joy / Behind his plough, upon the mountain‐side’ (45–6), he does more than celebrate Burns as a peasant or labouring‐class poet; his rhythms mime the steady tread of the ploughman and the poet’s steadfast capacity to walk ‘in glory and in joy’. (There is in the lines a possible half‐echo of Vaughan’s ‘I see them walking in an air of glory’.)2
Keats finds himself troubled with complicated feelings in his sonnet ‘On Visiting the Tomb of Burns’. Something interferes with the full expression of homage to the poet he names in the second‐to‐last line as ‘Great shadow’ (13), something projected by ‘Fickly imagination and sick pride’ (11). Yet he responds to greatness, as does Coleridge in his repeated singling out of the image of pleasure’s transience from Burns’s comic narrative masterpiece ‘Tam o’ Shanter’: ‘Like snow that falls upon a River / A moment white then gone for ever—’.3
The image’s poignancy derives from its proto‐Byronic refusal to be either wholly serious or merely playful. It follows the mock‐heroic yet democratically vigorous account of Tam as ‘glorious, / O’er a’ the ills o’ life victorious’ (57–8). ‘Kings may be blest’ (57), but Tam is in touch with the essence of happiness, as Burns wryly sees that elusive condition: good fellowship while drunk. The lines that follow move from Bruegel to Mozart, from the fuggy, illusory warmth of the alehouse to snow shivering into blank non‐being down a falling river. They move, too, for a moment into standard English, a supple shift that reveals how Burns can code‐switch to eloquent effect, as he offers images of vanishing pleasure that anticipate effects in Shelley, Byron, and Keats: pleasures are ‘like the borealis race, / That flit ere you can point their place’, where the flitting outruns the attempted pointing, ‘Or like the rainbow’s lovely form / Evanishing amid the storm’ (63–6), where the ‘form’ precedes the obliterating ‘storm’ and ‘Evanishing’, through its polysyllabic length, makes us see the process of fading.
There are aspects of Byron’s later practice in the poem’s deft handling of humorous rhyme, as when Burns’s narrator, prurient eyes on a stalk, imagines that, had the women Tam sees been ‘queans, / A’ plump and strapping in their teens’ (151–2), ‘I wad hae gi’en them off my hurdies, / For ae blink o’ the bonie burdies!’ (157–8). Again, the horrors of the scene were so ‘awefu’ (141) that ‘even to name’ them ‘wad be unlawfu” (142): a rhyme which in full English form occurs in Don Juan, canto 3, when the narrator teasingly mocks the prudish reader with a sidelong glance at where ‘unlawful’ reading led Dante’s ill‐fated lovers, Paolo and Francesca: ‘Then if you’d have them wedded, please to shut / The book which treats of this erroneous pair, / Before the consequences grow too awful; / ’Tis dangerous to read of loves unlawful’ (93–6).
For Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Keats, then, Burns is a ‘great’ poet who is associated with complexities of feeling. In Shelley he has a frank candour about the erotic that makes Wordsworth (or Peter Bell) seem ‘A solemn and unsexual man’ (551) in one of his developing and diminishing guises. At the heart of his greatness as a poet is his poetry’s ability to move between opposites, often embodied in the poetry’s diction. A remarkable feature of his work, as already suggested, is its linguistic code‐switching. Burns is the poet of Scottish dialect and a more elevated, standard English. ‘Duan Second’ of ‘The Vision’ opens in the second manner, with just a suspicion of mock‐heroic mimicry, as the Muse Coila appears reassuringly:
With musing‐deep, astonish’d stare,
I view’d the heavenly‐seeming Fair;
A whisp’ring throb did witness bear
Of kindred sweet,
When with an elder Sister’s art
She did me greet. (133–8)
Latinate, on its stilts, this adapts the standard ‘Habbie’ stanza favoured by Burns to the demands of a polished literary performance.4 Yet the fact that the Muse has a Gaelic name, Coila, suggests a wish to tweak the nose of London‐centred norms, and Burns has already set the stylistic cat among the pigeons with his vigorous, funny, and dialect‐packed self‐recrimination for wasting his time writing poetry:
I started, mutt’ring blockhead! coof!
And heav’d on high my wauket loof,
To swear by a’ yon starry roof,
Or some rash aith,
That I henceforth would be rhyme‐proof
Till my last breath—
When click! the string the snick did draw; (31–7)
The ‘wauket loof’ (thickened palm of the hand) speaks of hard toil; ‘coof’ has been glossed by ‘blockhead’ already (Burns sometimes yokes dialect and translation together). Bound together by rhyme, they zip with exhilarating exasperation off the page. Burns gives dramatic body to his ‘rash aith’, even as he is amused by the spectacle of his own self‐censure, neatly exposing its would‐be ‘rhyme‐proof’ condition as impossible by using the word as the fourth a‐rhyme in the stanza. One might pause, too, to admire the transition at the start of the next stanza: ‘When click!’ changes the mood and alerts the ear. Overall, the poem manages to blend expressive lyric, one indebted to the aisling mode in which a muse in the guise of a beautiful young woman appears to a poet, with an address on the state‐of‐the‐Scottish (and English) poetic nation.
Burns delights in splicing high and low cultural references. His ‘Address to the Deil’ is among the most memorable Romantic‐period responses to Milton, lines from whose Paradise Lost supply the poem with its epigraph: ‘O Prince, O chief of many throned pow’rs, / That led the embattl’d Seraphim to war’. What follows put solemn elevation to flight: ‘O Thou, whatever title suit thee! / Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie’ (1–2). The poem’s rhymes and diction have a zestful, high‐spirited inventiveness, raiding the lexicon of Scottish dialect to retell the old story with impish delight. Adam and Eve are ‘youthfu’ lovers’ ‘pair’d’ (86) ‘Lang syne in Eden’s bonie yard’ (85), a way of putting it that suggests the fall was into Calvinist castigation of ‘love’. Satan, the humorous villain of the piece, spoils the lovers’ pleasure: ‘Then you, ye auld, snick‐drawing dog! / Ye cam to Paradise incog, / An’ played on man a cursed brogue, / (Black be your fa’!)’ (93–6): suddenly Satan’s incursion into Paradise is brought down to earth and close to home, ‘a snick‐drawing dog’, a crafty, sneaky operator working mischief in disguise.
The poet’s commitment to an uncensorious mode of looking at life and love shows in his diction – the slangy casualness (that clinches a rhyme) of ‘incog’, for example. Burn’s retelling of Paradise Lost is done self‐mockingly. He imagines Satan ‘thinkan, / A certain Bardie’s rantin, drinkin’ (115–16). At the same time there is a quality of perfect balance between self‐assurance and humour as Burns, in effect, does what he says cannot be done, namely to speak of Satan’s doings in ‘Lallan tongue, or Erse, / In Prose or Rhyme’ (113–15), the last phrase an allusion to Milton’s Ariosto‐inspired claim to sing of ‘Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme’ (Paradise Lost 1.16). The poem’s ethics reside in its ‘devil‐may‐care’ verbal devilry, Burn capturing with unpatronizing glee and energy the stuff of popular superstition:
When twilight did my Graunie summon,
To say her pray’rs, douse, honest woman!
Aft ’yont the dyke she’s heard you bumman,
Wi’ eerie drone … (31–4)
The effect is not simply to mock ‘my Graunie’, partly because of the homespun diction: ‘heard you bumman’ has a downrightness that catches out Satan rather than ‘Graunie’.
‘To a Mountain‐Daisy, On Turning One Down, with the Plough, in April—1786’ spans close observation with semi‐humorous allegorizing. The poet has cut down a daisy with his ploughshare, and if he treats this incident with incomparable delicacy, it is because his delicacy is not self‐regarding in the ‘sentimental tradition’, even if that tradition sponsors his act of contrition. Burns’s tenderness towards the daisy, caught in the run of adjectives with which the poem opens, ‘Wee, modest, crimson‐tipped flow’r’ (1), is self‐aware, controlled, and wry. The line quoted humanizes the flower, in part through the address to it as a ‘thou’, and yet it brings a botanical accuracy to the description. Burns concedes the flower’s toughness, its ability to withstand the lark’s springy weight and ‘the bitter‐biting North’ (13), using the repeated rhymes of the ‘Habbie’ stanza to suggest the daisy’s resilience as it ‘Adorns the histie stibble‐field, / Unseen, alane’ (23–4).
The poem makes its way along a tightrope, managing not to fall into the clutches of sentimentality or jocoseness. Again, diction does much to convey Burns’s fresh perspective; ‘Adorns’, in the lines just quoted, could have been a tired poeticism, but in the context of ‘the histie stibble‐field’ it recovers a brave allure. Rhyme is a marker of modulating feeling and retained control at the moment describing how ‘now the share uptears thy bed, / And low thou lies!’ (29–30). The allegorizing moral – when the daisy’s plight is compared to ‘the fate of artless Maid’ (31), ‘simple Bard’ (37), and ‘suffering worth’ (43) – works easily and effectively, as Burns slides into standard English, maintaining his sympathy through an unshowy extension of compassion. And the poem’s conclusion is both prepared‐for and surprising, as the poet addresses, not the daisy, but himself as ‘thou’, probably recalling the close of Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ in which the elegist turns to elegize a version of himself, but also anticipating Romantic recognitions of the way in which the self is inextricable from any train of meditation:
Eve’n thou who mourn’st the Daisy’s fate,
That fate is thine—no distant date;
Stern Ruin’s plough‐share drives, elate,
Full on thy bloom,
Till crush’d beneath the furrow’s weight,
Shall be thy doom! (49–54)
Burns’s command of pathos and his artistic power, in evidence here, help to explain his importance for the Romantic period.
Comparable sympathies and skills are at play in ‘To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1783’. Burns addresses the mouse with heartfelt if serio‐comic tenderness as ‘Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie’ (1), the initial spondee slowing down the line and ensuring attention is paid to the ‘beastie’. The procession of adjectives moves from noticing the mouse’s tiny size and sleekness to empathizing with its fear. The poet rises to his subject; makes us see a small incident from a different perspective. His tone is genuine yet mock‐heroic as he apologiszs in the second stanza:
I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor earth‐born companion,
An’ fellow‐mortal! (7–12)
‘Nature’s social union’ is a phrase that bridges attitudes to nature in James Thomson and in Wordsworth, compacting a quasi‐metaphysical understanding and a deeply felt apprehension. The syntax spins round in a circle as the speaker, apologizer for and representative of ‘man’s dominion’, enacts recognition of the ‘startling’ fact that he is an ‘earth‐born companion / An’ fellow‐mortal’ of the mouse. What that rhyme between ‘startle’ and ‘mortal’ springs into being is the startling sense that man and mouse are fellow‐mortals. What follows builds on this recognition with witty dismay, until the poet is able to utter the aphoristic statement that ‘The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men / Gang aft agley’ (39–40) and to end with a final discovery of difference that centres the poem on its speaker’s anxiety about the past and the future:
Still thou art blest compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e
On prospects drear!
And forward, tho’ I cannot see,
I guess an’ fear! (43–8)
There’s wry humour here in the sharp, crisp wording; yet there’s an overt cry too, as Burns seems to speak from his and to the reader’s heart, as he – simply, memorably – encapsulates the human condition as it invests itself in him, unable to ‘see’ into the future, only too vulnerable to the impulse to ‘guess an’ fear’. The result of such rhetorical control is a body of work enlisted for many different causes, but clearly a current in the mainstream of Romantic poetry.