The Canongate Burns (46 page)
Read The Canongate Burns Online
Authors: Robert Burns
on the Approach of Spring
First printed in the Edinburgh edition, 1793.
Now Nature hangs her mantle green
      On every blooming tree,
And spreads her sheets o' daisies white
      Out o'er the grassy lea:
5
Now Phoebus cheers the crystal streams,
      And glads the azure skies;
But nought can glad the weary wight
      That fast in durance lies.
Now laverocks wake the merry morn,
larks
10
      Aloft on dewy wing;
The merle, in his noontide bow'r,
blackbird
      Makes woodland echoes ring;
The mavis wild wi' monie a note,
thrush, many
      Sings drowsy day to rest:
15
In love and freedom they rejoice,
      Wi' care nor thrall opprest.
Now blooms the lily by the bank,
      The primrose down the brae;
hillside
The hawthorn's budding in the glen,
20
      And milk-white is the slae:
sloe
The meanest hind in fair Scotland
      May rove their sweets amang;
among
But I, the Queen of a' Scotland,
all
      Maun lie in prison strang!
must, strong
25
I was the Queen o' bonie France,
beautiful
      Where happy I hae been;
have
Fu' lightly rase I in the morn,
rose
      As blythe lay down at e'en:
evening
And I'm the sovereign of Scotland,
30
      And mony a traitor there;
many
Yet here I lie in foreign bands,
      And never-ending care.
But as for thee, thou false woman!
      My sister and my fae,
foe
35
Grim vengeance yet shall whet a sword
wet
      That thro' thy soul shall gae!
go
The weeping blood in woman's breast
      Was never known to thee;
Nor th' balm that draps on wounds of woe
drops
40
      Frae woman's pitying e'e.
from, eye
My son! my son! my kinder stars
      Upon thy fortune shine!
And may those pleasures gild thy reign,
      That ne'er wad blink on mine!
would
45
God keep thee frae thy mother's faes,
from, foes
      Or turn their hearts to thee:
And where thou meet'st thy mother's friend,
      Remember him for me!
O soon, to me, may Summer suns
50
      Nae mair light up the morn!
no more
Nae mair, to me, the Autumn winds
no more
      Wave o'er the yellow corn!
And in the narrow house o' death
      Let Winter round me rave;
55
And the next flowers, that deck the Spring,
      Bloom on my peaceful grave.
Composed in the early summer of 1790, the poem was sent to several correspondents of Burns, including Mrs Graham of Fintry, who was addressed as follows: âWhether it is that the story of our Mary Queen of Scots has a peculiar effect on the feelings of a Poet, or whether in the enclosed ballad I have succeeded beyond my usual poetic success, I know not; but it has pleased me beyond any late effort of the Muse' (Letter 402). It is a ballad that mixes Scots and English with a dash of simple antiquated phraseology, particularly the use of âglads', then âglad' in the first stanza, and the rare description for a blackbird, a âmerle' in the second stanza. Set as spoken by Queen Mary, the highly descriptive narrative perfectly complements the mournful despair of Mary.
First printed in the Edinburgh edition, 1793.
Late crippled of an arm, and now a leg,
About to beg a
pass
for leave to beg;
Dull, listless, teas'd, dejected, and deprest,
(Nature is adverse to a cripple's rest);
5
Will generous Graham list to his Poet's wail?
listen
(It soothes poor Misery, hearkening to her tale),
And hear him curse the light he first surveyed,
And doubly curse the luckless rhyming trade?
Thou, Nature, partial Nature! I arraign;
10
Of thy caprice maternal I complain:
The lion and the bull thy care have found,
One shakes the forests, and one spurns the ground:
Thou giv'st the ass his hide, the snail his shell,
Th' envenomed wasp, victorious, guards his cell;
15
Thy minions, kings defend, control, devour,
In all th' omnipotence of rule and power;
Foxes and statesmen, subtile wiles ensure;
The cit and polecat stink, and are secure;
Toads with their poison, doctors with their drug,
20
The priest and hedgehog in their robes, are snug;
Ev'n silly woman has her warlike arts,
Her tongue and eyes, her dreaded spear and darts.
But, Oh! thou bitter step-mother and hard,
1
To thy poor, fenceless, naked child â the Bard!
25
A thing unteachable in world's skill,
And half an idiot too, more helpless still;
No heels to bear him from the opening dun;
No claws to dig, his hated sight to shun;
No horns, but those by luckless Hymen worn,
30
And those, alas! not Amalthea's horn:
No nerves olfact'ry, Mammon's trusty cur,
Clad in rich Dulness' comfortable fur; â
In naked feeling, and in aching pride,
He bears th' unbroken blast from ev'ry side:
35
Vampyre booksellers drain him to the heart,
And scorpion critics cureless venom dart: â
Critics! â appalled, I venture on the name â
Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame:
Bloody dissectors, worse than ten Monroes!
40
He hacks to teach, they mangle to expose: â
His heart by causeless wanton malice wrung,
By blockheads' daring into madness stung;
His well-won bays, than life itself more dear,
By miscreants torn, who ne'er one sprig must wear;
45
Foiled, bleeding, tortur'd in th' unequal strife,
The hapless Poet flounders on thro' life;
Till fled each hope that once his bosom fired,
And fled each Muse that glorious once inspired,
Low-sunk in squalid, unprotected age,
50
Dead even resentment for his injured page,
He heeds or feels no more the ruthless Critic's rage!
So, by some hedge, the generous steed deceased,
For half-starv'd snarling curs a dainty feast;
By toil and famine wore to skin and bone,
55
Lies, senseless of each tugging bitch's son.
O Dulness! portion of the truly blest!
Calm sheltered haven of eternal rest!
Thy sons ne'er madden in the fierce extremes
Of Fortune's polar frost, or torrid beams.
60
If mantling high she fills the golden cup,
With sober selfish ease they sip it up:
Conscious the bounteous meed they well deserve,
They only wonder âsome folks' do not starve.
The grave sage hern thus easy picks his frog,
65
And thinks the mallard a sad worthless dog.
When Disappointment snaps the clue of hope,
And thro' disastrous night they darkling grope,
With deaf endurance sluggishly they bear,
And just conclude that âfools are fortune's care.'
70
So, heavy, passive to the tempest's shocks,
Strong on the sign-post stands the stupid ox.
Not so the idle Muses' mad-cap train,
Nor such the workings of their moon-struck brain;
In equanimity they never dwell,
75
By turns in soaring heaven, or vaulted hell.
I dread thee, Fate, relentless and severe,
With all a Poet's, husband's, father's fear!
Already one strong hold of hope is lost,
Glencairn
, the truly noble, lies in dust;
80
(Fled, like the sun eclips'd as noon appears,
And left us darkling in a world of tears:)
O hear my ardent, grateful, selfish pray'r! â
Fintry, my other stay, long bless and spare!
Thro' a long life his hopes and wishes crown,
85
And bright in cloudless skies his sun go down!
May
bliss domestic
smooth his private path;
Give energy to life; and soothe his latest breath,
With many a filial tear circling the bed of death!
Robert Graham (1749â1815) was the 12th Laird of Fintry, although he was forced to sell most of his estate in 1780. Burns met him during his Highland tour at Athole House, August 31st, 1787. In the same year, Fintry was made a Commissioner on the Board of Excise in Scotland. In terms of poetry, the consequence of this relationship was four poems over a three-year period:
To Robert Graham of
Fintry Esq., with a request for an Excise Division
(1788);
To Mr
Graham of Fintry, On being appointed to my Excise Division
(1789);
Epistle to Robert Graham of Fintry on the Election for the Dumfries
string of Boroughs
(1790) and
To Robert Graham of Fintry, Esq.
(1791). The third poem, as we shall see, is a somewhat risky political satire. The other three all are preoccupied with patronage. The second is deeply sycophantic; a sort of inversion of all Burns's many assertions in his prose and poetry of creative independence at all costs. The other two are fragments of a bigger, incomplete project on the nature of the poet and poetry arising from a mixture of personal observation as found in his earlier vernacular epistles and his reading of, ironically, the dark
Tory
pessimistic prescriptions of the fate of the poet in society found in Dr Johnson's
Lives of the
Poets
, Pope's
Moral Epistles
and, not least, Swift's great poem
On
Poetry: A Rapsody
. The mixture is further leavened by his awareness, from the latter part of the eighteenth century, of the degree of psychological and economic incompatibility of the poetic personality (Fergusson, Gray, Cowper, Churchill, for example) with the world. Burns chose to publish only this, the last and best of the four âFintry' poems. Prior to the poetry, Burns wrote to Fintry within a few months of meeting him at Athole House regarding an entry to the Excise:
When I had the honour of being introduced to you at Athole House, I did not think so soon of asking a favour from you. When Lear, in Shakespeare asked old Kent why he wished to be in his service, he answered âBecause you have that in your face that I would fain call master!' For, some such reason, sir, do I now solicit your patronage (Letter 172).
Given Burns's use of
King Lear
in
A Winter's Night
, this might seem the most sycophantic betrayal of his normal attitude to social dependency. On the other hand, Burns's soul did yearn, as with Glencairn and Lord Daer, for aristocrats of benevolent integrity. It is possible, too, traumatised by the loss of Glencairn that, on the rebound, he partly subconsciously projected onto Fintry's personality what he had experienced with the former patron. He was also in
severe fiscal straits, with all the consequent anxieties of that situation.
As well as his direct approaches to Fintry regarding the limited security an Excise post would offer him, the first and fourth poems are a method of educating Fintry in the difficult, perhaps impossible, task of poetic existence. Obliquely, therefore, the poems insinuate the necessity of Fintry's support. Also, the money worries ran unstoppably on. This poem was written at a time of particular pecuniary stress. As well as his own family, he had another illegitimate child to provide for. The
£
400 for the Edinburgh edition had been swallowed up in a loan to Gilbert for Mossgiel where the older brother maintained their mother and sisters. The rest had gone into the bottomless pit of stocking Ellisland. His simultaneously injured leg must have been the last straw. Thus he wrote to Fintry on October 6th, 1791:
â Along with two other Pieces, I inclose you a sheetful of groans, wrung from me in my elbow chair, with one unlucky leg on a stool before me.â I will make no apology for addressing it to
you
: I have no longer a
choice
of Patrons: the noble Glencairn is no more!
⦠I thought to have mentioned some Excise ideas that your late goodness has put in my head, but it so like the sorning impudence of a sturdy beggar, that I cannot do it.â It was something in the way of an Officiating job.âWith the most ardent wish that you may be rewarded by HIM who can do it, for your generous patronage to a man, who, tho' feelingly sensible of it, is quite unable to repay it â¦
Victorian commentators tended to accept Fintry's benevolence at the value Burns here places on it. Thus Scott Douglas (p. 342) quoting Professor Wilson (âChristopher North'):
Of all Burns's friends the most efficient was Graham of Fintry. To him he owed exciseman's diplomaâsettlement as a gauger in a district of ten parishes, when he was a gudeman at Ellisland âtranslation as a gauger to Dumfriesâsupport against insidious foes, despicable, yet not to be despised, with rumour at their headâvindication at the Excise Boardâa temporary supervisorshipâand, though he knew not of it, security from dreaded degradation on his death bed.
Wilson, because he was so aware of the savage social discontents of the nineteenth century, was only too eager to represent the Burns/
Fintry relationship in the most positive light. Despite his fiscal needs and functional abilities as an Exciseman, Burns was never promoted. Nor, as Wilson suggests, was it unfounded political rumour that Fintry was benevolently dealing with. Fintry was no neutral. From our recent archival research Fintry did, in fact, receive payments from the government's secret service fund for activities against individuals in the radical movement from 1793 to 1796. (See Laing Ms. collection, II, folio 500, pp. 404â5, Edinburgh University Library.) For example, the payment of
£
26.6 shillings is dated April, 1793, itemised for Graham of Fintry and paid out of the âaccount of Secret Service': payments were made initially to John Pringle, Sherriff Depute of the County of Edinburgh, from the administrator of spies in London, Mr John Spottiswood, a Scot with a Scottish estate, who worked directly for Henry Dundas. There are also in the archive several letters from Fintry, to inter-alia, Robert Dundas on curbing radical activity and placing these loyal to the government in public posts and sinecures. From this it is possible to speculate that, rather than looking after Burns, Fintry was keeping him dependent and cornered in Dumfries. Burns himself, of course, was desperate to have the Excise move him to the more radically sympathetic West of Scotland.
Nor does Wilson's meliorism begin to explain the known course of events. The general tenor of the fifteen extant letters of Burns to Fintry is friendly, sometimes even frank. However, the pattern is totally disrupted in December, 1792 in Burns's near hysterical response to reports that he was about to be investigated for alleged sedition/treason due to both his writing and public behaviour. On the very last day of that year, he wrote to Fintry thus:
I have been surprised, confounded & distracted by Mr Mitchel, the Collector, telling me just now, that he has received an order from your Honble Board to enquire into my political conduct, & blaming me as a person disaffected to Government.âSir, you are a Husbandâ& a fatherâyou know what you would feel, to see the much-loved wife of your bosom, & your helpless, prattling little ones, turned adrift into the word, degraded & disgraced from a situation in which they had been respectable and respected, & left [without (
deleted
)] almost without the necessary support of a miserable existence.âAlas, Sir! must I think that such, soon, will be my lot! And from the damned, dark insinuations of hellish, groundless Envy too!âI believe, Sir, I may aver it, & in the sight of Omnipotence, that I would not tell a deliberate Falsehood, no, not though even worse
horrors, if worse can be, than those I have mentioned, hung over my head; & I say, that the allegation, whatever villain has made it, is a LIE! To the British Constitution, on Revolution principles, next after my God, I am most devoutly attached!â
You, Sir, have been much & generously my FriendâHeaven knows how warmly I have felt the obligation, how gratefully I have thanked you.âFortune, Sir, has made you powerful, & me impotent; has given you patronage, & me dependance.âI would not for my
single Self
call on your Humanity; were such my insular, unconnected situation, I would despise the tear that now swells in my eyeâI could brave Misfortune, I could face Ruin: for at the worst, âDeath's thousand doors stand open;' but, Good God! the tender concerns that I have mentioned, the claims & ties that I, at this moment, see & feel around me, how they ennerve Courage, & wither Resolution! To your patronage, as a man of some genius, you have allowed me a claim; & your esteem, as an honest Man, I know is my due: to these, Sir, permit me to appeal; & by these may I adjure you to save me from that misery which threatens to overwhelm me, & which, with my latest breath I will say it, I have not deserved.â
Pardon this confused scrawl.âIndeed I know not well what I have written.â (Letter 528)