Robert Burns is a radical poet, a rare one actually born in the laboring classes rather than just writing about them, a man sympathetic to the aims of the French revolution, a keen observer of national life from angles both sweet and sharp, one of the greatest poets in the UK and at the same time, a permanent outsider. Contradictions galore, in short.
This being the twenty-first of the coldest month (your correspondent currently shivering not far from the slopes of Mont Blanc), evenings of poetry and song are being held all over Scotland tonight and in France, too, to celebrate Burns’ birthday, widely considered Scotland’s national poet, one known well beyond the borders of that ruddy, whiskey-ageing, kilt wearing, Gael and Norse-inflected speaking, troublesome annex to the dilapidated UK, if only for those lines sung everywhere on New Years Eve, Lest auld acquaintances be forgot, which even if the auld lang syne loses a few along the way, people get the sense of it. (The actual date is usually given as the twenty-fifth of the month for which error this writer hangs his head in shame but since the French are still holding Burns-fêtes in early February, go easy, eh.)
So prick up your ears and listen to two wildly different poems, the first, To A Mouse, read in fine fettle by Billy Connelly, Glasgow’s biggest industry after petty crime. It too is insanely quotable (John Steinbeck stole a phrase for one) and shows one direction the humble-born Burns travelled in the age of the Enlightenment and that not-so-far away French Revolution.
Even now it’s hard if not impossible, even on our shameless, open to every kind of outrage internet, to find an unexpurgated version that sings the original lyrics to Coming Through. The version above, by Geordeanna McCulloch, merely hints at the secrets of Jenny whose petticoaties are always wet, something Nice Folk probably appreciate, as opposed to having the Wild Thing itself thrust in their face. The original is below, a page pulled from an old text, and even it dashes out the English language’s most adaptable, anywhere you like it up and down the social register, single-syllable exhortation, lamentation and everything-in between. You’re familiar with it. Presidents shout it loudly in the shower while the delivery man whispers it freezing on the White House porch.
So… there’s another side to Robert Burns, who compiled the first European book of popular song. Son of a self-educated tenant farmer, Burns is a Romantic who saved some of his bluntest political commentary for poems in what we might call straight English. His love songs are well-known and recited (you could start at Ae Fond Kiss), he’s quoted ceaselessly (Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, Dylan, it’s a long list). But there’s another life, or as the song has it, the other side of this life, and that too was all around Burns. It was sung in bars, variations made up on the spot, it was boastful,
took old airs and made them raunchy. Burns, unlike many a Good Folk then and now, didn’t pretend he didn’t enjoy it. He wrote them all down and made his own versions, too - I count six for Coming Through the Rye, so far. Yes, it’s very insurgent working class, no, it’s not so noble, but yeah, it was a different world before those mean Victorians and their successors got their hands around our necks and dimly lit erogenous zones. What strikes me, reading them again now, is the liberty of living in a rural country full of open spaces, where the ideals of the Enlightenment (Scots version and French) fused with classes asserting their differences from lairds and lords. By 1790, political repression intensified, culminating in the Edinburgh treason trials of 1795. Burns found himself dunned for outrageous sums and watching every phrase. As Alan Woods writes on socialist.net, “A single word out of place could lead to denunciation, arrest, and deportation to the notorious Botany Bay convict settlement in Australia.” Burns risked it, and died in poverty after great fame.
Lay the proud usurper low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty’s in every blow!
Let us do or die!
(‘Scots Wha Hae,’ invoking the famous Tennis Court Oath of Versailles.)
Or a little later, in a different mood:
When Princes and Prelates and het-headed zealots
All Europe hae set in a lowe,
The poor man lies down, nor envies a crown,
And comforts himsel with a mowe.
(‘When Princes and Prelates’, see above). He never went further than his 1792 poem, The Rights of Women, which ends with the French revolutionary chant :
But truce with kings, and truce with constitutions,
With bloody armaments and revolutions;
Let Majesty your first attention summon,
Ah! ça ira! The Majesty Of Woman!
In Conclusion as professors like to say, to become a National Poet, there may be a set of unwritten, eternally fluctuating rules, a few of which might be: one should come from among the nameless, the unknown, the unwritten, the self-educated laborers; upper classes already have the poetry of old furniture, mansions and long family lineages; one should engage in heavy physical toil at some point early in life because it teaches solidarity while feeding your desire to escape, and because poems need to brood before they hatch; a definite, indeed participative interest in the politics and sex of one’s country is a plus, even if the poems sometimes date badly and leave you open to charges of not being perfect; one should be fond of love and sex even if one usually loses the game, because you get poems out of that, too; one should leave economics to the professors, who are very good at theories; one can take risky political positions, if one is willing to be pursued for them; men charging after you in the street demanding large sums of money are all part of the show; one should debate the role of women, because everyone else does but not so much that it becomes a parlor game; one should always be listening both for the poems unspooling in your mind and to the songs people are singing around you — they may be of use; one must sometimes hide out, write in code and employ pseudonyms; one must resist all temptations to emigrate — it’s a jinx; one shouldn’t dream of becoming a professor; one can die in disgrace, secretly loved and recited.
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