Hence, the poverty and hardship of his early years, described so eloquently and bluntly to Dr John Moore, ‘the clouterly appearance of my ploughboy carcase, the two extremes of which were often exposed to all the inclements of all the seasons’, was still with Burns after his temporary fame and even more temporary riches beyond his Edinburgh edition of 1787.
Nor, leaving aside the problem of his vowed fidelity to a Pittite regime he loathed, were his Excise duties any escape from devouring physical drudgery: ‘I am jaded to death with fatigue. For these two months or three months, on an average, I have not ridden less than two hundred miles per week.’ The paper work of the Excise also ate into not only his time but his spirit:3
Sunday closes the period of our cursed revenue business, & may probably keep me employed with my pen until noon. —Fine employment for a poet’s pen! There is a species of the Human genius that I call, the Ginhorse Class: what enviable dogs they are! —round, & round, & round they go— Mundell’s ox that drives his cotton mill, their exact prototype— without an idea or wish beyond their circle; fat sleek, stupid, patient, quiet & contented:— while here I sit, altogether Novemberish, a damned melange of Fretfulness & melancholy; not enough of the one to rouse me to passion; nor of the other to repose me in torpor; my soul flouncing & fluttering round her tenement, like a wild Finch caught amid the horrors of winter & newly thrust into a cage.
Burns’s case as medical study, symptomatically discernible in the letters and, indeed, in much of the poetry, is a grim one. If he was atypical in the extreme mood swings that seem integral to his creativity (it was specifically with Burns in mind that Wordsworth wrote in Resolution and Independence: ‘We poets in our youth begin in gladness:/ But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.’), he was wholly typical of the age, its life expectancy and its exposure to poverty related illness.
His life, as read in his letters, is a catalogue of fractures and worsening fevers: in temporary lodgings while the farmhouse at Ellisland by Dumfries was under construction, he complained
… but for some nights preceding I had slept in an apartment where the force of the wind and the rains was only mitigated by being sifted thro’ numberless apertures in the windows, walls, &c. In consequence I was on Sunday, Monday, & part of Tuesday unable to stir out of bed with all the miserable effects of a violent cold.
Since medicine had so little ability to intervene, ‘suffering’, as Roy Porter has pertinently remarked, ‘was everyone’s lot sooner or later, low or high born’. Yet it was worse for the poor. As so often in Burns’s poetry, Death and Dr Hornbook is a comic caricature with a savage edge to it: cholera in the clachan is not an oxymoron and crude, often lethal abortion is part of the women’s lot. Further, as Porter has again remarked, the physical discrepancy between the rich and poor had deep political implications:
The wealthier were healthier and lived longer; sexually they probably matured earlier; being taller, they literally looked down on the poor. Their lives were lived by a different clock —for example, the poor rose, ate and slept early (lighting was costly), the rich late. The show of superiority and deference was emphasised by the encrusted rituals of bowing and scraping, head-baring, standing, curtseying, and knuckling foreheads.4
In Burns’s poetry, then, the repressed resentment of the common people towards their propertied masters becomes articulate. His letters are also obsessively, often more overtly, preoccupied with the multiple slights he feels inflicted on his assertively independent spirit as a consequence of the social gulf between rich and poor.
This is made deeply ambivalent by the fact that as a poet it was the people of property who formed his audience and to whom he not infrequently looked for creative support. His letters, consequently, are saturated with a sort of baffled rage. This over-wrought letter to Robert Graham, Commissioner of the Scottish Board of Excise, to whom Burns’s looked in vain to be a replacement patron for the deceased Earl of Glencairn, is typical of the agonies he endured concerning the imposed, impoverished inferiority of his rank:
As I had an eye to getting on in the examiners list, if attainable by me, I was going to ask you if it would be of any service to try the service of some Great, and some very Great folks to whom I have the honour to be known; I mean in the way of a Treasury Warrant. —But much as early impressions have [impression (deleted)] given me the honour of Spectres, &c. still, I would [rather (deleted)] face the Arch-fiend, in Miltonic pomp, at the head of all his legions; and hear that infernal shout which blind John says: ‘Tore hell’s concave;’ rather than crawl in, a dust-licking petitioner, before the presence of a Mighty Man, & bear [the (deleted)], amid all the mortifying pangs of Self-annihilation, the swelling consequence of his d-mn’d State, & the cold monosyllables of his hollow heart!
Worse, if he was to be the spokesman for the common people he had, certainly after his Ayrshire days, diminished faith that they had any sympathetic understandings of what he was writing. As he wrote in Epistle to Hugh Parker:
In this strange land, this uncouth clime,
A land unknown to prose or rhyme:
Where words ne’er cros’t the Muse’s heckles,
Nor limpit in poetic shackles:
A land that Prose did never view it,
Except when drunk he stacher’t thro’ it:
Here, ambushed by the chimla cheek,
Hid in an atmosphere of reek,
I hear a wheel thrum i’ the neuk,
I hear it— for in vain I leuk:
The red peat gleams, a fiery kernel
Enhusked by a fog infernal.
Here, for my wonted rhyming raptures,
I sit and count my sins by chapters;
For life and spunk like other Christians,
I’m dwindled down to mere existence:
Wi’ nae converse but Gallowa’ bodies,
Wi’ nae kind face but Jenny Geddes.
Such absence of stimulation and response increasingly led to severe depression. Little wonder that Coleridge was so sensitive to this dark side of Burns. This Burns letter of 1789 to David Blair could be confused with the prose of the English poet:
Know you of anything worse than Gallery Bondage, a slavery where the soul with all her powers is laden with weary fetters of ever increasing weight: a Slavery which involves the mind in dreary darkness and almost total eclipse of every ray of God’s image: and all this the work, the baneful doings of the arch-fiend known among worlds by the name of Indolence.
His initial childhood experience had led him to hope for better; like his English Romantic peers, Burns, anti-Calvinistically, profoundly believed that the child entered the world as uncorrupted spirit. His own childhood anticipations of an unrestricted, public social life were, however, soon to be disabused. The Romantic poets, of course, long pre-date Freud in grounding the nature of the adult self on childhood experience. Burns’s self-analysis, while hardly Wordsworthian in its outcome, is extraordinarily keen in its awareness of the forces that shaped him as man and poet:
My
