The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns

An’ now, auld Cloots, I ken ye’re thinkan, old, know

      A certain Bardie’s rantin, drinkin,

      Some luckless hour will send him linkan, hurrying

      To your black pit; Hell

      But, faith! he’ll turn a corner jinkin, dodging

      120 An’ cheat you yet.

      But fare-you-weel, auld Nickie-ben! old

      O wad ye tak a thought an’ men’! would, mend

      Ye aiblins might — I dinna ken — perhaps, do not know

      Still hae a stake: have

      125 I’m wae to think upo’ yon den, sad

      Ev’n for your sake.

      Burns mentions to John Richmond on 17th February 1786 that he had recently completed this poem. It is normally dated to the winter of 1785–6. A poem of this length Burns might have turned out quickly, so it is probably one of the fruits of his intense writing campaign leading to publication of the Kilmarnock edition.

      This poem is now generally accepted as a relatively light-weight piece of near comic knockabout as Burns mocks the allegedly fast-fading figure of the Devil from his hitherto central role in Scottish theology and folk-lore. In his essay ‘Robert Burns, Master of Scottish Poetry’ (Uncollected Scottish Criticism, ed. Noble (London), pp. 199–200), Edwin Muir analyses this poem as the centre-piece of his persuasive argument that during the eighteenth century enlightened, improving, secularising Scotland had lost both its theological passion and its sense of supernatural mystery integral to its older poetry:

      … two centuries of religious terrors had faded under the touch of reason and enlightenment, and the mysterious problems of election and damnation, had turned into amusing doggerel:

      O Thou wha in the Heavens dost dwell,

      Wha, as it pleases best thysel’;

      Sends ane to heaven and ten to hell,

      A’ for thy glory,

      And no for any guid or ill

      They’ve done afore thee!

      Calvinism, once feared as a power or hated as a superstition, became absurd under the attack of common reason. The growing powers of the Enlightenment encouraged the change in the universities, the churches, in popular debate, and among the people. The ideas of liberty and equality did their part; Scotland became a place where a man was a man for a’ that; the new humanistic attitude to religion led people to believe that ‘The hert’s aye the pairt aye that mak’s us richt or wrang.’ The story of the Fall became a simple story of human misfortune to two young people whose intentions had been so good, ‘Lang syne in Eden’s bonnie yard’.

      Then you, ye auld sneck-drawing dog!

      Ye cam to Paradise incog.

      And played on a man a curse brogue

      (Black be your fa!)

      An’ gled the infant world a shog

      Maist ruined a’.

      Muir further thinks that this new enlightened poetry is, with ‘something of Voltaire’s contes and Bernard Shaw’s plays’, witty but lightweight, even, relative to the old poetry, superficial. There are two related fundamental miscomprehensions in Muir’s account. First, the power of folklore is present in the poem though not, say, as we find its direct intrusion as in the great Scottish Ballad tradition, so beloved by Muir, but in Burns’s ambivalent treatment of it. As he wrote to Dr Moore:

      I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more sceptical in these matters than I, yet it often takes an effort of Philosophy to shake of these idle terrors (Letter 125).

      What we see in this particular poem from ll. 5–84 is no simple send-up of foolishly atavistic folk-superstition. Not only is Burns intent on anthropologically recording, as in Halloween, the customs and beliefs of his rural community but, as in Tam o’Shanter, conveying the still ‘eerie’ potency of that world. (See Edward J. Cowan, ‘Burns and Superstition’, Love and Liberty, pp. 229–37.) He is also, as usual, making salacious jokes inspired by the bottomless well of sexual metaphor supplied to him by folk-tradition. Hugh Blair wanted ll. 61–6 deleted as ‘indecent’ because they depend on the identification of lume/loom with the penis. (See BC, 1932, p. 95.)

      Muir, however, is absolutely wrong in thinking that it is the diminished power of Calvinism on the Scottish psyche that leads to the poem’s, to him, lightweight tone. This is a particularly weird error in Muir, who more than any other figure in a profoundly anti-Calvinist, Scottish Renaissance group believed that Knox (of whom he actually wrote a biography) had not lost his sadistic, disintegrating grip on the Scottish soul. Further, that Scottish reintegration meant a return to catholic, European humanism.

      Burns is certainly partly laughing at the Devil in the poem’s opening sequences (ll. 1–24) by the reductive ridicule of reducing the devil’s energies to being devoted to the poet’s petty transgressions. The Devil, however, is not for his own sake being laughed out of court. Burns’s poetic wit is in direct proportion to his most potent enemies. The enemy here is not the devil but those who seek demonically to control mankind in his name. For their power structure to remain intact the Devil could not be allowed to become a laughing matter. This is why, even more than the more personally abusive clerical satires, this poem caused such an outcry. As Carol McGuirk finely writes:

      A ringing blow in Burns’s quarrel with the Auld Licht, this satire caused a major local scandal. Several of the anonymous contributors to Animadversions, James Maxwell’s compilation of evangelical attacks on Burns (Paisley, 1788), saw this poem as final proof of Burns’s evil values. Alexander (‘Saunders’) Tait of Tarbolton, a mantua-maker and tailor who considered himself Burns’s equal as a satirist, also seized upon this as Burns’s most shocking poem, publishing his attack in 1790.

      Burns intended it to shock, and so structures the poem round what any Auld Licht partisan would see as a heretical statement of Arminianism: the deil’s long-ago invasion of Eden only ‘almost’ ‘ruined all’ for Adam and Eve (l. 96): the stain of sin is not ineradicable and even Satan (if he wished) could ‘tak a thought’ and mend=change and receive forgiveness. Burns’s ‘deil’ is neither the sadistic demon of Auld Licht sermons nor the tragic hero Milton’s Satan considered himself to be. A rather forlorn and unsuccessful mischief-maker, his smudged (‘smoutie’) face ashy from brimstone and his plots against humanity invariably thwarted, the deil is addressed more or less as just another ‘poor, damned body’. The poet is dramatising his rejection of predestination. The Arminians had challenged Calvinist ‘election’ (salvation through grace alone, not human effort) but Burns focuses on its corollary—repudiation, a doctrine that insisted that the reprobated are eternally cast away from grace, whatever their benighted individual efforts to be (and do) good. Burns, by contrast, announces that he considers himself salvageable (ll. 119–20) –andif ‘a certain Bardie’ can besaved, then there must be hope for a mere devil. The poet is paying a backhanded compliment to his own sinfulness as he mocks the Auld Licht. No one – not even the deil – is all bad and forever incapable of change, the poem argues with a cheerful perversity that enraged the Auld Licht. A more orthodox point is also made: hope of heaven is more likely to convert sinners than fear of damnation. (pp. 233–4)

       The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie,

      The Author’s Only Pet Yowe: An Unco Mournfu’ Tale

      First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.

      As MAILIE, an’ her lambs thegither, together

      Was ae day nibblin on the tether, one day, chewing

      Upon her cloot she coost a hitch, hoof, looped

      An’ owre she warsl’d in the ditch: over, floundered

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