The Canongate Burns (35 page)

In August 1785, the first 8 lines were copied into the poet's
First
Commonplace Book
. That version is not the final polished work. It reads:

This early version is included in the printed Sales Catalogue of the London auction house, Puttock & Simpson, 1862, printed by R. Bigmore, Mitchell Library Collection.

It appears in SMM, no. 351, 1792 and later in SC, with a minor textual ammendment by Thomson, who characteristically softens the opening line from ‘slaught'ring guns' to ‘sportsmen's guns'. An early manuscript copy was sold in London, May, 1862, with different text from the final published song, suggesting that the poet improved the lyric considerably prior to the 1786 edition. Although begun around
1775, the song bears the mark of the mature poet during the winter of 1785–6. The Peggy referred to is Margaret Thompson of Kirkoswald. Burns told Dr Moore of his rapture with her, ‘… stepping out to the garden one charming noon, to take the sun's altitude, I met with my Angel “Like Prosperine gathering flowers, / Herself a fairer flower”. [Milton's
Paradise Lost
, Book IV, line 269.] It was vain to think of doing any more good at school … I did nothing but craze the faculties of my soul about her, or steal out to meet her …' (Letter 125). The modern folk singer Dick Gaughan enhances the old music with a haunting re-tuned guitar (DAGDAD) pick style. Gaughan does not miss the dark, forceful condemnation, ‘tyrannic man's dominion' whose ‘murdering, gory pinion' claims to be sport being interwoven amid a song of love and nature.

This song appears to have been composed just prior to publication in 1786, when the poet considered a plan of emigration to Jamaica. However, possible exile may have occurred to Burns at an earlier stage in his life, given that he informs Dr Moore that the song was already written by the time he was twenty-three years old (Letter 125). The heroine, ‘my quondam Eliza' (Letter 113) may be Elizabeth
Miller of Mauchline, although Mackay (1993) suggests an earlier acquaintance, Elizabeth Gebbie (1762–1823), as an alternative.

The poet became an ordinary member of the Freemason movement in October 1781. He became Depute Master of the St James's lodge on 27th July 1784, where his oratorial skills in debate and discussion were clearly acknowledged. This song was written for his brother masons of the St James's lodge as the Kilmarnock edition was going to press. Burns used his influential contacts within the Ayrshire masonic movement to further his poetic career, particularly in selling the Kilmarnock and Edinburgh editions. Moreover, many of the leading Whigs and radicals of this period who were sympathetic to the poet's outspoken values, were brother masons.

This was aimed at William Campbell and his wife, Lilias Campbell, of Netherplace who lived near Mauchline. This and the following two epigrams were dropped from the Edinburgh edition. Scott Douglas's comment on this is typical of reactionary conservativism, devoid of humour: ‘Burns had a strong aptitude for producing these smart and often very biting things' (Vol. 1, p. 128).

This also relates to William Campbell of Netherplace.

When first printed, it was not possible for general readers to identify the satirical target of this epigram; the name ‘Netherplace' was merely a line of asterisks beginning with the letter ‘N'. For notes on William Campbell of Netherplace and his wife,
see Epitaph on a
Henpecked Squire
. This was omitted from the Edinburgh edition.

Composed during the poet's Tarbolton period, on William Hood, whose surname was marked by asterisks in the 1786 publication. Dated in the
First Commonplace Book
for April, 1784, under the title
Epitaph for William Hood, senr., in Tarbolton
. Hood was a shoemaker.

It is believed this was written on James Humphrey (1755–1844) who, in the Scots idiom, was a blether – he talked too much and with little intelligence. It is alleged from folklore, perhaps garnished by Cromek and later Cunningham, that Humphrey's claim to fame in his old age was that Burns targeted him with these lines.

This is thought to be on John Wilson (d. 1839) who was a schoolmaster and session clerk in Tarbolton, although Mackay asserts that the object was the Reverend John Kennedy of Ochiltree.

William Burn [es] s died, 13th February, 1784, at Lochlie. He is clearly the role model of manly worth and virtue which permeates the poetry and letters of Burns, an honest, hard working, honourable and noble provider who struggled against poverty, ill health and in his final year, the harshness of winter. In eight lines Burns describes his father as tender, generous, compassionate, dauntless – a man who did not defer to the ‘pride' of the landed Gentry – a friend to manly virtue, a religious opponent to immoral behaviour and a person whose ‘failings' were probably due to his religious beliefs. L. 8 is from Goldsmith's
The Deserted Village
, l. 164.

It is remarkable that the extent of denigratory politically motivated malice expended on Burns for two decades after his death extended to examine even his father's misfortunes and consider them as symptomatic of a hidden moral flaw. Outraged by the
character assassination of the poet ‘under the dagger of literary patriots', Alexander Peterkin in his 1816 re-edition of Currie's edition (see Introduction) bitterly wrote of a particularly mendacious life by an alleged friend of the poet, Mr Walker of Perth:

If Burns's father had Jacobite leanings, he gave his son through Murdoch an education in the key-texts, especially Addison, of the English Real Whigs which, though deliberately anti-Auld Licht Calvinism, stressed austere independence in thought and behaviour. In this sense, Gilbert, chaste and conformist, was much more his father's son than Robert. What this elegy does not, understandably, reveal is the tension and conflict between father and son. Thus in Letter 125, Burns records his attendance at a country dancing school against his father's wishes: ‘from that instance of rebellion he took a kind of dislike to me, which I believe was one cause of that dissipation which marked my future years!' All Romantic literature, familial and political, pulses with oedipal conflict.

For an innovative study of Burns's father's educational influence on him, see Liam McIlvanney's
Burns the Radical: Poetry and
Politics in Late Eighteenth-century Scotland
(Tuckwell Press, 2001).