The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns

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      An’ cheat like onie unhang’d blackguard. any, villain

      There’s some exceptions, man an’ woman;

      230 But this is Gentry’s life in common.

      By this, the sun was out o’ sight,

      An’ darker gloamin brought the night; fading twilight

      The bum-clock humm’d wi’ lazy drone; beetle

      The kye stood rowtin i’ the loan; cattle, lowing, field

      235 When up they gat, an’ shook their lugs, got, ears

      Rejoic’d they were na men, but dogs; not

      An’ each took aff his several way, went his different

      Resolv’d to meet some ither day. other

      Burns lived with animals, wild and domestic, in conditions of intimacy which few of us in this twenty-first century can easily appreciate. This poem, as much of his poetry, is filled with an empathetic, hence, detailed knowledge of them. The collie and the Newfoundland are sportively present to us. Throughout his writing there are also frequent, often obliquely political analogies, made between the lots of animals and men.

      The genesis of this poem was his own collie, Luath, who, his brother tells us, was ‘killed by some wanton cruelty of some person the night before my father’s death’. This extraordinary witty, seminal poem is the result of his original intention to write, for the sinisterly murdered Luath, Stanzas to the Memory of a Quad- ruped Friend (Currie, Vol. 3, p. 386).

      His wholly deliberate choice of opening The Kilmarnock edition with this particular poem is mockingly ironic. In that volume, he had no sooner come on stage with his highly successful self- promoting prose remarks about his poetic ploughman’s pastoral naïvety, than he immediately delivers a poetic performance of not only formidable linguistic and double-voiced dramatic subtlety but one which is eruditely allusive to earlier Scottish and English poetry. Indeed, it would be, as in ll. 26–28, an extremely odd ploughman who would not only name his dog from a character in Macpherson’s Ossian but also allude to that simmering controversy. Also both the octosyllabic verse and the dialogue form are derived from his beloved predecessor, Robert Fergusson’s The Mutual Complaint of Plainstanes and Causey, in their Mother Tongue.

      While the poem formally and linguistically is not indebted to English poetry, the content certainly is. As William Empson (Some Versions of Pastoral, 1935) and Raymond Williams (The City and Country, 1975) have revealed, English poetry from the sixteenth century had been preoccupied with the nature and representation of country life as a reflection of the quarrel between largely conservative poets and their aristocratic patrons due to the disruptive evolution in the life of the common people caused by the accelerating participation by the aristocratic master class in agrarian capitalism. The greatest statement of this theme, as we shall see Burns demonstrably knew in his own A Winter’s Night, is Shakespeare’s King Lear. The consistently cogent McGuirk in discussing this poem locates its tap-roots in Augustan convention, especially Pope’s Moral Epistles. Burns also had, of course, the endorsement of his views from contemporary sources such as Goldsmith, particularly The Deserted Village. Although they diverged totally about the role of the monarchy, Burns and Goldsmith were also part of that rising late eighteenth-century tide of patriotic feeling about the ‘Frenchified’ degeneration of the British aristocracy as increasingly they squandered their ill-gotten agrarian rents in European fleshpots. (See Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism, London, 1987.) Hence that quite wonderfully sophisticated section, comparable to anything in Augustan satire, from ll. 149–170 where Caesar describes into what The Grand Tour has degenerated. This brilliantly echoes Fergusson’s pronouncedly anti-aristocratic lines from Hame Content:

      Some daft chiel reads, and takes advice

      The chaise is yokit in a trice;

      Awa drives he like huntit deil,

      And scarce tholes time to cool his wheel,

      Till he’s Lord ken how far awa,

      At Italy, or Well o’ Spaw,

      Or to Montpelier’s safer air;

      For far off fowls hae feathers fair.

      There rest him weel; for eith can we

      Spare mony glakit gouks like he;

      They’ll tell whare Tibur’s water’s rise;

      What sea receives the drumly prize,

      That never wi’ their feet hae mett

      The marches o’ their ain estate.

      Stimulated by Fergusson, then, this dramatic dialogue, domesti- cates in the Scottish vernacular this great English poetic quarrel with a rapacious land-owning class. What further intensified this in Burns is that from childhood he had been exposed to both brutal- ising toil and chronic economic anxiety. Ll. 95–100 do, in fact, seem to refer to actual events on the family farm at Lochlea of which he wrote: ‘my indignation yet boils at the recollection of the scoundrel tyrant’s insolent threatening epistles which he used to set us all in tears’ (Letter 137). As Burns’s subsequent poetry reveals, this early trauma about debt, bankruptcy and possible homelessness was to be a subject of inflammatory repetition. Also, as much of his later poetry, the poem is filled with telling detail about the harsh, exposed, exhausting nature of farm work in the late eighteenth century as opposed to the pampered sloth of the aristocracy. Indeed, as in ll. 89–90, such brutal work leads to a Swiftian vision of the bestialisation of the common people: ‘Lord man, our gentry care as little/For delvers, ditchers and sic cattle’.

      Burns’s strategy in the poem of course is to create through the dogs a kind of comic brio, which, at a primary level, disguises the poem’s incisive documentation and its anti-establishment values. Further, he does not do the ideologically obvious thing by creating an oppositional dialogue between the people’s collie and the master’s newly fashionable Newfoundland. Caesar is not so much a traitor to his class as a natural democrat who will put his nose anywhere as a possible prelude to even more intimate entangle- ments. It is he who really spills the beans about the condition of the working people and the lifestyle of their masters. In Luath’s speeches, especially ll. 103–38, we find the roots of Burns’s vision of the nobility of the common people which is to recur throughout his poetry though, at times, especially in ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, somewhat questionably.

1 Cuchullin’s dog in Ossian’s Fingal, R.B.

2 The quarterly Circuit Court that travelled around the towns and counties of Scotland.

3 The title of Factor is that of an Estate manager, who, in the West of Scotland, cleared many ‘cottars’ from large estates during the late 18th century.

       Scotch Drink

      First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.

       Gie him strong drink until he wink,

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