foe to sorrow, care, and prose,
150 I rhyme away.
O ye douce folk that live by rule, serious/sober
Grave, tideless-blooded, calm an’ cool, no rise & fall of passions
Compar’d wi’ you — O fool! fool! fool!
How much unlike!
155 Your hearts are just a standing pool,
Your lives, a dyke! stone wall
Nae hair-brained, sentimental traces no
In your unletter’d, nameless faces!
In arioso trills and graces
160 Ye never stray;
But gravissímo, solemn basses
Ye hum away.
Ye are sae grave, nae doubt ye’re wise; so, no
Nae ferly tho’ ye do despise no wonder
165 The hairum-scairum, ram-stam boys, wild, headlong
The rattling squad:
I see ye upward cast your eyes —
Ye ken the road! know
Whilst I — but I shall haud me there, hold
170 Wi’ you I’ll scarce gang ony where — go any
Then, Jamie, I shall say nae mair, no more
But quat my sang, quit, song
Content wi’ YOU to mak a pair, make
Whare’er I gang. go
James Smith (1765–1823) was initially a linen-draper in Mauchline who eventually emigrated to Jamaica after his business partnership in printing near Linlithgow collapsed. He was younger brother to one of the ‘Mauchline Belles’. Smith is the recipient of several letters from Burns.
This is the first of a series of epistles written by Burns to either Ayrshire intimates or intended intimates. This phase of his life, energised by Masonic membership, is intensely social and, as we will see in The Vision, a central aspiration, despite so many influences to the contrary, was to put creative tap-roots into Ayrshire soil and anoint himself the Bard of its fertile but, as yet, poetically fallow terrain. Historically this meant, beginning with Wallace, a resurrection of Ayrshire heroes. In terms of his own life he looked to surround himself with fraternal like-minded spirits. Hence this sequence of significant poetic epistles to James Smith, David Sillar, Gavin Hamilton, John Lapraik, William Simpson and John Rankin.
The epistolary form derives, of course, from classical poetry and was heavily used in Augustan verse, most happily by Pope. The genre had been domesticated, however, by an exchange of epistles between Alan Ramsay and William Hamilton of Gilbertfield which were instrumental in reactiving Scottish vernacular poetry in the eighteenth century. As McGuirk has noted, these epistles were ‘a means of interchange between patriotic Scots poets’ which ‘also incorporated Horatian themes: country pleasure, disdain of ‘greatness’, praise of friendship, discussion of current issues and (especially) the state of Scottish poetry’. The proper use of the genre entails a degree of creative, technical parity between the correspondents. This was denied Burns, but his desire for the comforts of a poetic coterie was so strong that he often seriously overemphasised the talents of his correspondents. Sillars, for example, was a fine fiddler but a less than mediocre poet. Lapraik very likely plagiarised the song for which he achieved local fame. Later in life Burns was to show absolutely no patience with poetic inferiors who clung to his coat-tail in terms of social identity but not creative ability. He was as creatively hierarchical as Swift or Pope.
While the surface and formal, linguistic energy of these early Ayrshire epistles is cheerful and, even, boisterous, almost all of them are marked with a degree of black anxiety about not only the external social, economic and political forces acting on his achieving identity and recognition as a true poet but the often anarchic, even chaotic, internal forces which, while creatively necessary, were incompatible with the prudence and self-restraint necessary for a secure existence. Or, as he brilliantly defined it, in The Vision:
Had I to guid advice but harket,
I might, by this, hae led a market,
Or strutted in a Bank and clarket
My Cash-Account;
While here, half-mad, half-fed, half-sarket,
Is a’ th’ amount.
This epistle was written in the winter of 1785–6. Smith was (ll. 163–74) a key member of the ‘ram-stam boys’. This testosterone charged group, especially Gavin Hamilton, were in constant conflict with the ministry. Burns’s comment on Smith being small but perfectly formed (ll. 13–18) may be partly a response to clerical condemnation of his friend. The extent of Smith’s friendship also extended to Jean Armour. Burns was to order from Smith, then a partner in a Calico works, his first present for Jean: ‘ ’tis my first present to her since I have irrevocably called her mine, and I have a kind of whimsical wish to get it from an old and much valued friend of hers and mine, a Trusty Trojan, on whose friendship I count myself possessed on a life-rent lease’ (Letter 237). The ‘Trusty Trojan’ was his sole Mauchline friend as the dispute with the Armour family deepened.
McGuirk (‘Loose Canons: Milton and Burns, Artsong and Folk-song’, Love and Liberty, pp. 317–20) has drawn attention to parallels between this poem and Milton’s Lycidas as a poem which not only ‘addresses issues of friendship and bereavement, fame and obscurity, poetic immortality and premature death’ but also includes a harsher satire on corrupt religiosity (ll. 151–68) and on the capricious, lethal intrusions of blind fate into human life.
The central dialectic of the poem is based on Burns’s chronic anxiety, equally pervasive in his letters, about the problematic nature of forging a poetic identity for himself. At this particular point in his life he was considering trying ‘fate in guid, black prent’ and the poem charts his disbelief that even the printed page will grant him the laurel bow of poetic immortality so that the poem celebrates the compensatory, rural, russet-coated anonymous rhyming funster (ll. 31–6). The black star of ill-luck, his sense of being under a Job-like curse, is, however, not so easily dismissed. The pervasive melancholy of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard alluded to in ll. 59–60, ‘I’ll lay me with th’ inglorious dead,/Forgot and gone!’ suggests also Gray’s line ‘Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest’ as his own fate. Also, as in contemporary English sentimental poetry, Burns makes the equation between the inability of the poet to become socially visible with the similar fate of the mass of the common people not to appear as individually identifiable in the stream of history. Thus the poem links Burns the invisible poet, with not only Burns the impoverished, unknown farmer but the mass of the people who are neither to be identified nor rewarded by history. Life is appallingly ill-divided between the poor and the over-rewarded rich (ll. 127–38). Dempster (l. 133) known as ‘Honest George’ Dempster was a Whig M.P. for Forfar Burghs 1761–90 and an agricultural improver. Pitt, at this stage in his prime-ministerial career, was the object of Burns’s approval; it was he in the darkening 1790s, not Burns, who was to change political identity. As well as this fatalistic sense in the poem of political
