O Life! Thou art a galling load,
5 Along a rough, a weary road,
To wretches such as I!
Dim-backward, as I cast my view,
What sick’ning Scenes appear!
What Sorrows yet may pierce me thro’,
10 Too justly I may fear!
Still caring, despairing,
Must be my bitter doom;
My woes here shall close ne’er
But with the closing tomb!
15 Happy ye sons of Busy-life,
Who, equal to the bustling strife,
No other view regard!
Ev’n when the wishèd end’s denied,
Yet while the busy means are plied,
20 They bring their own reward:
Whilst I, a hope-abandoned wight,
Unfitted with an aim,
Meet ev’ry sad returning night
And joyless morn the same.
25 You, bustling and justling,
Forget each grief and pain;
I, listless yet restless,
Find ev’ry prospect vain.
How blest the Solitary’s lot,
30 Who, all-forgetting, all-forgot,
Within his humble cell —
The cavern, wild with tangling roots —
Sits o’er his newly-gather’d fruits,
Beside his crystal well!
35 Or haply to his ev’ning thought,
By unfrequented stream,
The ways of men are distant brought,
A faint-collected dream:
While praising, and raising
40 His thoughts to Heav’n on high,
As wand’ring, meand’ring,
He views the solemn sky.
Than I, no lonely Hermit plac’d
Where never human footstep trac’d,
45 Less fit to play the part;
The lucky moment to improve,
And just to stop, and just to move,
With self-respecting art:
But ah! those pleasures, Loves, and Joys,
50 Which I too keenly taste,
The Solitary can despise,
Can want and yet be blest!
He needs not, he heeds not
Or human love or hate;
55 Whilst I here, must cry here
At perfidy ingrate!
O enviable early days,
When dancing thoughtless Pleasure’s maze,
To Care, to Guilt unknown!
60 How ill exchang’d for riper times,
To feel the follies or the crimes
Of others, or my own!
Ye tiny elves that guiltless sport,
Like linnets in the bush,
65 Ye little know the ills ye court,
When Manhood is your wish!
The losses, the crosses
That active man engage;
The fears all, the tears all
70 Of dim declining Age!
While this poem can be dated to the time of his estrangement from Jean Armour (see The Lament), it is also symptomatic of the bouts of depression, which, as their external causes increased, plagued his adult life. With masochistic logic he defines himself as a chronically displaced person with neither the opposing talents of the material man of business nor the spiritual hermit to locate himself appropriately in the world. The biographical letter of August 1787 to Dr Moore is another example of Burns turning prose, this time his marvellous own, into poetry:
– The great misfortune of my life was never to have an aim –. I had felt early some stirrings of Ambition, but they were the blind gropins [sic] of Homer’s Cyclops round the walls of his cave: I saw my father’s situation entailed on me perpetual labor. – The only two doors by which I could enter the fields of fortune were, the most niggardly economy, or the little chicaning art of bargain-making: the first is so contracted an aperture, I never could squeeze myself into it; the last, I always hated the contamination of the threshold. – Thus, abandoned of [every (deleted)] aim or view in life; with a strong appetite for sociability, as well from native hilarity as from a pride of observation and remark; a constitutional hypochondriac taint which made me fly solitude; add to all these incentives to social life, my reputation for bookish knowledge, a certain wild, logical talent, and a strength of thought something like the rudiments of good sense, made me generally a welcome guest; so ’tis no great wonder that always “where two or three were met together, there was I in the midst of them” (Letter 125).
The semi-vacuous self of this poem is further pervaded by chronic guilt and, in the last stanza, a sense of childhood uncomprehending of the losses and crosses that await the adult. If this sounds more the agonised Coleridge than Burns, this is not accidental. An admirer of Burns’s innovative prosody: ‘Bowles, the most tender and, with the exception of Burns, the only always-natural poet in our Language’ (Low, Critical Heritage, p. 108), Coleridge also identified profoundly with this dark side of the Scottish poet.
As George Dekker makes clear in Coleridge and the Literature of Sensibility (London, 1978), Burns’s Despondency: An Ode was a seminal tonal and thematic influence on Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode. It is perhaps a case of it taking one to know one. Equally the manically protean self-mocking, self-making tone is a common factor in both poets’ letters. Presumably it was not this quality which caused that inspired Scottish talent spotter, James Perry (Pirie) (1756 – 1821) to attempt to lure
