The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns

– You can be pretty good company to yourself, & you cannot be too shy of letting any body know you farther than to know you as a Sadler. – Another caution; I give you great credit for you [sic] sobriety with respect to that universal vice, Bad Women … – Whoring is a most ruinous expensive species of dissipation; is spending a poor fellow’s money with which he ought clothe and support himself nothing? Whoring has ninety-nine chances in a hundred to bring on a man the most nauseous & excruciating diseases to which Human nature is liable; are disease & an impaired constitution trifling considerations? All this is independent of the criminality of it (Letter 391).

      This, from a man so addicted to women, should not be seen simply as massive hypocrisy. From as yet unpublished sources, Burns does seem to have suffered the venereal self-disgust of the so infected. More importantly, as in such Romantic libertine figures centrally present in the life and work of Mozart, Boswell, Byron and Pushkin, there exists, as a result of such serial fornication, a sense of self-punitive, guilty emptiness. Or, as it is brilliantly, vernacularly, put here:

      I wave the quantum o’ the sin,

      The hazard of concealing;

      But Och! It hardens a’ within,

      And petrifies the feeling.

      R.L. Stevenson diagnosed this element in Burns and wrote him off because of it (Familiar Studies of Men and Books). G. K. Chesterton, more perceptively objective about the Scottish context, wrote in a brilliant foreword to A.A. Thomson’s profoundly bad The Burns We Love (London: 1931):

      Nor is it true to say, as some have said, that this self-reproach was merely of the morbid or mawkish sort. So far from being mawkish and morbid, it could sometimes be both acrid and coarse. He really had a sense of something grotesque and even grovelling in his own orgies; of something of farce and bathos about the bad ending of so many of his love stories; a sense of being hooted from heaven with a sort of harsh laughter. In a word, he had a realistic as well as a romantic strain in him; and it is not altogether his fault that the national legend of his has become almost entirely romantic, to the extent of often forgetting how far his own view of himself was realistic (p. 5–6).

      As well as the dangers, physical and moral, of sexual excess, Burns, in both the letter to William and in this poem, defines prudence as a necessary form of self-preservation in a world so variedly hostile. In a deeply perceptive essay, ‘The Dialectics of Morality’, Steven R. McKenna defines the question of necessary prudence as being a core problem in Burns’s writings. In support of this thesis he identifies ll. 33–40 as a vernacular paraphrase of Polonius’s cautionary speech to his son, Laertes in Hamlet, Act I, Scene iii. In extending these Hamlet parallels he finally reads the epistle as reaching for a kind of middle way of individual conscience, which avoids the one extreme of sadistically repressive conformity and the other of anarchic self-destruction. Burns himself appears to have understood how his repressed early life was partly responsible for his potentially self-destructive response to rigidly imposed order. As McKenna comments:

      Honour and self-protection are the issues here, and they form essential elements of this scene in the play, for Laertes in his long-winded, cautionary advice to his sister Ophelia regarding her relationship with Hamlet tells her she ‘must fear’ Hamlet, his greatness and his will. Says he, ‘Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister …/ Be wary then; best safety lies in fear’ (I. 3.33, 42). A similar sentiment pervades Polonius’s advice to her later in the scene: Hamlet’s vows are to be held suspect that her honour is at stake. When taken together, these issues are a call to trust no one but oneself and to fear the power of others. And these are fundamental themes in Burns’s ‘Epistle to a Young Friend’. As in the case of Shakespeare’s play, Burns’s advice preaches an essential mistrust of the world, hence leads to a stultifying and isolating philosophy of life. Leaving aside the very possibility that Burns may be engaging in a bit of tongue-in-cheek irony with the epistle, the philosophy upon which it is premised is a matter of crime and punishment, and this takes two forms. First, insofar as religion and, broadly speaking, morality are concerned, fear particularly as something that can be manipulated by institutions and powers beyond the individual’s control, is that which key ‘To haud the wretch in order’ as Burns says (l. 58). The second fear, and for Burns apparently the more important of the two, is the fear of self-punishment. In other words, one’s sense of honour and integrity appears to be paramount, superseding potentially the ‘fear o’ hell’ (l. 57). This is not to say Burns thumbs his nose at God, for stanzas nine and ten he sees the natural necessity of ‘the Creature’ revering the ‘Creator’. Rather, this aspect of his epistle centres squarely on pitting the individual and conscience in opposition to formalised, institutionalised dogma. As he says, ‘… still the preaching cant forbear, / And ev’n the rigid feature’ (67–8). Thus, in this case, organised religion is not the solution but rather the problem. Another case of churches built to please the priest, to bestow upon the ecclesiastical class the power to control people’s lives. In the face of this, Burns posits the apparently radical notion that one’s conscience should be one’s guide (See Love and Liberty, p. 159).

       On a Scotch Bard

      Gone to the West Indies

      First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.

      A’ Ye wha live by sowps o’ drink, who, mouthfuls

      A’ ye wha live by crambo-clink, who, doggerel verse

      A’ ye wha live and never think, who

      Come, mourn wi’ me

      5 Our billie’s gien us a’ a jink, friend, given, the slip

      An’ owre the Sea. over

      Lament him a’ ye rantan core, merry crowd

      Wha dearly like a random-splore; who, frolic

      Nae mair he’ll join the merry roar, no more

      10 In social key;

      For now he’s taen anither shore, taken another

      An’ owre the Sea! over

      The bonie lasses weel may wiss him, handsome, well, wish

      And in their dear petitions place him:

      15 The widows, wives, an’ a’ may bless him

      Wi’ tearfu’ e’e; eye

      For weel I wat they’ll sairly miss him well I trust/know, sorely

      That’s owre the Sea! over

      O Fortune, they hae room to grumble! have

      20 Hadst thou taen aff some drowsy bummle, taken off, bungler

      Wha can do nought but fyke an’ fumble, who, fuss

      ’Twad been nae plea; it would have, no

      But he was gleg as onie wumble, keen-eyed, gimlet (phallus)

      That’s owre the Sea! over

      25 Auld, cantie KYLE may weepers wear, old, cheerful, mourning cuffs

      An’ stain them wi’ the saut, saut tear: salt, salt

      ’Twill mak her poor auld heart, I fear, old

      In flinders flee: splinters fly

      He was her Laureat monie a year, poetic champion, many

      30 That’s owre the Sea! over

      He saw Misfortune’s cauld Nor-west cold, north-

      Lang-mustering up a bitter blast; long-

      A Jillet brak his heart at last, broke

      Ill may she be!

      35 So, took a berth afore the mast,

      An’ owre the Sea! over

      To tremble under Fortune’s cummock, rod

      On scarce a bellyfu’ o’ drummock, stomachful, meal