The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns

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Now Clinkumbell,3 wi’ rattlan tow, noisy pull

      Begins to jow an’ croon; swing, toll

      Some swagger hame the best they dow, home, can

      Some wait the afternoon.

      230 At slaps the billies halt a blink, a dyke gap, young lads

      Till lasses strip their shoon: take off, shoes

      Wi’ faith an’ hope, an’ love an’ drink,

      They’re a’ in famous tune

      For crack that day. talk

      235 How monie hearts this day converts many

      O’ Sinners and o’ Lasses!

      Their hearts o’ stane, gin night, are gane stone, come, gone

      As saft as onie flesh is: soft, any

      There’s some are fou o’ love divine; full

      240 There’s some are fou o’ brandy; full

      An’ monie jobs that day begin, many

      May end in Houghmagandie sexual intercourse

      Some ither day. other

      This celebration of the sensual capacity of the Scottish people to resist the worst rhetorical excesses of their clerical masters was written in 1785 and revised in early 1786 for the Kilmarnock edition. As McGuirk notes it is a direct descendent of Fergusson’s Leith Races which itself descends from Milton’s L’Allegro and the nine-line Scottish medieval ‘brawl’ poem:

      I dwall amang the caller springs

      That weet the Land o’ Cakes,

      And aften tune my canty strings

      At bridals and late-wakes.

      They ca’ me Mirth; I ne’er was kend

      To grumble or look sour,

      But blyth was be to lift a lend,

      Gif ye was sey my pow’r

      An’ pith this day.

      Fergusson’s poem is, of course, the celebration of a purely secular occasion; Burns is writing a more complex religious satire. Crawford (Burns, A Study of the Poems and Songs, p. 69) places the occasional poem accurately in the long Covenanter-originated Scottish tradition of open-air preaching. This specific event held in Mauchline in 1785 gathered together an audience of 2000 (four times the Mauchline population) of whom 1200 were communicants. Gilbert recorded that his brother was witness to this and had personal knowledge of the preachers he so incisively satirises.

      Burns takes his epigraph from Hypocrisy A-La-Mode, a play written in 1704 by Tom Brown. That gale of liberal, satirical, enlightened laughter that runs through eighteenth-century English literature, especially Henry Fielding, as it attempts to sweep away institutionalised religious hypocrisy also blows powerfully through Burns’s writings. He is the major Scottish variant on this anti-clerical Enlightenment project. His Scotland, however, was a darker, more theocratically-controlled state than almost anywhere else in Europe. In his early writing, as here, he senses victory over the savage forces of religious repression. Later, his mood was to darken as he despaired of the unbreakable grip Calvin’s damnation had on the Scottish psyche and, hence, body politic.

      This early poem has, however, the comic optimism of Fielding’s Tom Jones rather than the demonic repression of Blake’s The Songs of Experience. The roaring flames of hell here (ll. 190–8) are merely the snores of a fellow pew-member. Unlike Macbeth, who tragically meets three witches on the moor, our comic narrator meets only two, Superstition and Hypocrisy, but their gorgeous sister Fun is an immediately victorious Cinderella and her spirit drives the whole poem. If not promiscuous, Fun is a decidedly erotic young lady as are the young women running barefoot, to save their shoes, towards the thronging excitement and carrying gifts which might be for the satisfaction of appetites other than those of the stomach. Indeed, the whole poem is infused with the way in which the people convert the ‘Occasion’, so clerically defined, into an opportunity for their multiple, but especially sexual, appetites:

      O happy is that man an’ blest!

      Nae wonder that it pride him!

      Whase ain dear lass, that he likes best,

      Comes clinkan down beside him!

      This echo of Psalm 46 also alerts us to the fact that the rhetorical world of these preachers breeds sexual ills. For example, in 1.116, ‘cantharidian plaisters’ were poultices made from the aphrodisiac Spanish fly.

      Burns’s assault on the various masters of pulpit oratory names names in a way that ensured there would be a severe backlash against him. ‘Sawney’ Moodie, with his old-time, ‘Auld-Licht’ undiluted gospel of damnation, is first on stage (ll. 100–17). Moodie (1728–99) was minister of Riccarton near Kilmarnock. He is followed by the ‘New Licht’ George Smith (d. 1823), minister of Galston. McGuirk subtly argues that while Burns is criticising Smith’s rhetorical banality, he is more intent on satirising the congregation whose appetite for hell-fire preaching excludes the life of actual good-works. Smith’s position is then assaulted by William Peebles of Newton-upon-Ayr (1753–1826) who, further inflaming the malign passions of the congregation, drives Common Sense, a central value of the new, more liberal Christianity, from the field. He is succeeded by Alexander Miller (d. 1804) whose professional self-seeking rebounded against him when the parishioners of Kilmaurs subsequently attempted to stop him getting that charge due, he claimed, to the effects of ll. 145–54. The worst is saved to the last. ‘Black’ John Russel (c. 1740–1817) was then minister at Kilmarnock. Subsequently minister at Cromarty, Hugh Miller (My Schools and Schoolmasters) testified to his capacity to terrify, indeed, traumatise his congregation.

      Along with such manifestations of theocratic control Burns adds some more overt political commentary. ‘Racer Jess’ is Janet Gibson (d. 1813), who is the daughter of Poosie Nansie, mine hostess of Love and Liberty, is with her like-inclined companions strategically placed beside the laird’s tent. In the same stanza, the ‘Wabster lads/ Blackguarding from Kilmarnock’ probably belong to the weaving community which was deeply and dissidently radical.

      The poem moves from a celebration of alcohol (ll. 163–71) and the triumph of this earthy spirit over the one of false sanctimony to a triumphant assertion, implicit throughout the poem, of spontaneous eroticism. The experienced women may already be dealing out more than bread and cheese but, assignations made, loss of virginity happily looms at the poem’s end. As Edwin Muir wrote, regarding the ‘sordid and general tyranny’ of the kirk session: ‘it is only necessary to say that the time-honoured Scottish tradition of fornication triumphantly survived all its terrors’ (John Knox, 1930, pp. 306–7).

1 A street so called, which faces the tent in Mauchline. R.B.

2 Shakespeare’s Hamlet, R.B. [Act I, Sc. 5].

3 The Bell Ringer.

       Address to the Deil

      First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.

       O Prince! O Chief of many thronèd pow’rs!

       That led th’ embattl’d seraphim to war —

      Milton.

      O Thou! whatever title suit thee —

      Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie — old, cloven-hoofed