What is not in doubt is the degree of tormented uncertainty underlying the poetry of that period. He did want to be the rooted, celebrated Bard of Kyle. The bitter fracas with Jean Armour’s family had, however, thrown him into the merciless path of his Auld Licht enemies. He wrote to Dr Moore that:
I had for some time been skulking from covert under all the terrors of a Jail; as some ill-advised, ungrateful people had uncoupled the merciless legal Pack at my heels (Letter 125).
The writ was taken out by Mr Armour, Jean’s father (Letter 254). Even in October 1786, after the Kilmarnock edition, he could still write:
… the consequences of my follies, which may perhaps make it impracticable to stay at home … I have some time been pining under secret wretchedness … the pang of disappointment, the sting of pride, with some wandering stabs of remorse, which never fail to settle on my vitals like vultures … My gaiety is the madness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner (Letter 53).
Despite the moment of deeply ill-judged self-pity with the denigration of Jean (ll. 34–5) as mere jilt, the poem is fuelled, if not quite by the ‘madness of an intoxicated criminal’ then certainly by the wild energy of a partly comic revenge fantasy on his often betraying fellow countrymen and women who, in his absence, will certainly bitterly discover what they have lost. Exile and cunning but not silence are part of this national poet’s repertoire.
It should also be noted that this is, deliberately, not straight biography. The poem’s tone and content are wittily distanced by being the monologue of an unnamed but sympathetic poet narrator. This poet, addressing his impoverished fellow poets, turns Burns’s particular case into a general view, as in Goldsmith, of the penurious state of the poetic career in the late eighteenth century. Wordsworth’s perceptive admiration for its linguistic and metrical virtues probably extended to a mutual sympathy for this theme.
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