FCB, ‘A Prayer when fainting fits and other alarming symptoms of a pleurisy or some other dangerous disorder, which indeed still threatens me, first put Nature on the alarm’. Writing to his father, 27th December, 1781, Burns revealed his gloomy illness: ‘The weakness of my nerves has so debilitated my mind that I dare not, either review past events, or look forward into futurity; for the least anxiety, or perturbation in my breast, produces most unhappy effects on my whole frame … I am quite transported at the thought that ere long, perhaps very soon, I shall bid an eternal adieu to all the pains, & uneasiness & disquietudes of this weary life; for I assure you I am heartily tired of it’ (Letter 4). The poem is partly derived from the content of Pope’s Universal Prayer, although the form is that of the Scottish metrical psalms.
To a Mountain Daisy
On Turning One Down, with the Plough, in April, 1786
First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow’r, small
Thou’s met me in an evil hour;
For I maun crush amang the stoure must, among, dust
Thy slender stem:
5 To spare thee now is past my pow’r,
Thou bonie gem. pretty
Alas! it’s no thy neebor sweet, not, neighbour
The bonie Lark, companion meet! handsome
Bending thee ’mang the dewy weet! wet
10 Wi’ spreckl’d breast,
When upward-springing, blythe, to greet
The purpling East.
Cauld blew the bitter-biting North cold
Upon thy early, humble birth;
15 Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth
Amid the storm,
Scarce rear’d above the Parent-earth
Thy tender form.
The flaunting flow’rs our Gardens yield,
20 High shelt’ring woods and wa’s maun shield; walls shall
But thou, beneath the random bield shelter
O’ clod or stane, turf, stone
Adorns the histie stibble-field, dry, stubble
Unseen, alane. alone
25 There, in thy scanty mantle clad,
Thy snawie bosom sun-ward spread, snow white
Thou lifts thy unassuming head
In humble guise;
But now the share uptears thy bed, ploughshare/blade
30 And low thou lies!
Such is the fate of artless Maid,
Sweet flow’ret of the rural shade!
By love’s simplicity betray’d,
And guileless trust;
35 Till she, like thee, all soil’d, is laid
Low i’ the dust.
Such is the fate of simple Bard,
On Life’s rough ocean luckless starr’d!
Unskilful he to note the card chart
40 Of prudent Lore, wisdom
Till billows rage, and gales blow hard,
And whelm him o’er!
Such fate to suffering Worth is giv’n,
Who long with wants and woes has striv’n,
45 By human pride or cunning driv’n
To Mis’ry’s brink;
Till, wrench’d of ev’ry stay but HEAV’N,
He, ruin’d, sink!
Ev’n thou who mourn’st the Daisy’s fate,
50 That fate is thine — no distant date;
Stern Ruin’s plough-share drives elate,
Full on thy bloom,
Till crush’d beneath the furrow’s weight
Shall be thy doom!
Henry Mackenzie, a frequent kiss of death for twentieth-century critical taste, waxed as eloquently about this poem as ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’:
I have seldom met with an image more truly pastoral than that of the lark in the second stanza. Such strokes as these mark the pencil of the poet, which delineates Nature with the precision, yet with the delicate colouring of beauty and taste. (Low, Critical Heritage, p. 69).
Burns’s own account of the poem in a letter to John Kennedy in April 1786 seems to suggest that he had produced a mawkish poem compatible with Mackenzie’s cloying response:
I have here … inclosed a small piece, the very latest of my productions. I am a good deal pleased with some sentiments in it myself, as they are just the native querulous feelings of a heart which, as the elegantly melting Gray says, “Melancholy has marked for her own” (Letter 27).
Certainly this is what Daiches (pp. 154–6) believes and he is also correct in saying that the inherent danger of sentimentality in animal poetry is even more extreme when dealing with plant life. Burns (Letter 56) could certainly descend to terrible bathos in this branch of his endeavours as he not infrequently set out his sentimentally-baited traps for socially superior women: ‘Even the hoary Hawthorn twig that shot across the way, what heart at such a time, must have been interested in its welfare, and wished it to be preserved from the rudely browsing cattle, or the withering eastern Blast?’
This poem, however, is not self-promotingly narcissistic. Nor is it a mere piece of lyric natural description as Mackenzie, probably deliberately, certainly imperceptively, remarked. It is as political as its ‘Mouse’ and ‘Louse’ companion pieces. Like the mass of men, the daisy has to eke out its dangerously exposed existence outwith the walled security of the aristocratic garden flowers. The specific analogies of the daisy with the human world are all recurrent archetypes of suffering in Burns’s imagination: the sexually violated woman; the imprudently overwhelmed poet; the Job-like, ruined but honest farmer. The poem has a dark, even apocalyptic tone partly derived from Young’s Night Thoughts, IX, ll. 167–8: ‘Stars rush; and final ruin fiercely drives/her ploughshare o’er creation!’ which Burns amends
