‘There was a lad was born in Kyle’

In the 250^th year of Robert Burns’ birth, Liz Walker takes a fresh look at Burns the man and his international, radical voice

Ayrshire is a county made up of three districts, Cunningham in the north, Kyle in the middle, and Carrick in the south. Robert Burns (1759-96) was born in Kyle, in Alloway, and I was born in Carrick, in Girvan.

In the distant days when I was at school we were given Burns’ poems and songs aplenty and as I remember we enjoyed them. We needed the aid of a glossary because English was the language we were expected to speak and many of the Scots words that Burns used were no longer commonly spoken, even in Ayrshire. In fact, in Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (published by subscription in Kilmarnock and also known as The Kilmarnock Poems, 1786), the volume which was to make his name, Burns provided a glossary (later enlarged in the 1787 Edinburgh edition).

Even in his time the Scots language was fragmenting. English was the language of the schoolroom, and that of religious usage. The union of the crowns (1603) and the union of parliaments (1707) dealt a death blow to the use of Scots as a literary and widely spoken national language. (Latin was used in the universities until quite late on in the Scottish Enlightenment).

None the less, the poems and songs that I was taught at school were touching, funny and tender – and best of all it seemed that Burns was ours, that we had some special claim to him, just by virtue of him being born in Ayrshire. I was once even the proud recipient of a Burns Federation Society certificate (a body, I think, little known outside of Ayrshire and the central belt of Scotland) for my – I’m sure, affecting – performance of Ca’ the Yowes and The De’ils awa’ wi’ the Exciseman. But I learned little about the man. ‘A son of the soil’, ‘the ploughman poet’ were the appellations that defined him for me then. I also didn’t know how universally read and loved he was.

Forty odd years on, am I any clearer in knowing or understanding who he was or what drove him? A little, perhaps.

So much has been written about Burns; the lover, the patriot, the dissenter, the man of feeling for humanity and nature, especially in this two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth, that in some way he himself seems to have disappeared like a trick of the light.

This from ‘Epistle to a Young Friend’ (to Andrew Aiken, May 1786) may give some idea of how he felt himself.

Wi’ sharpen’d, sly inspection. (crony – friend, yourself – yourself,

His life is well documented and seems the stuff of a great operatic tragedy worthy of Verdi (apparently Gene Kelly wanted to make a musical of his life but it never came to fruition).

He fathered thirteen children, struggled through poverty and illness, and was briefly adored by ‘society’ before dying at the age of thirty seven, without a penny and with his heart in tatters, while Jean Armour, his wife, gave birth in the next room.

The short time he was taken up by society is succinctly summed up by Andrew O’ Hagan (author, and a native of Kilwinning in Ayrshire)

"The well-to-do of Edinburgh had lionised him for a season then dropped him like a sack of Ayrshire potatoes. One of his friends said that for every smart remark that came out of Burns’ mouth he made a hundred enemies."

A small but significant mark of this hatred is shown when Burns’ brother, Gilbert, recounted that the poet’s dog, Luath, a great favourite, had been ‘killed by the wanton cruelty of some person’ the night before their father died. This dog is immortalised in The Twa Dogs, a tale, the first poem in the Kilmarnock Edition. Two dogs, Caesar, a pet Newfoundland owned by a rich man, meets up with his friend, Luath, the ploughman’s collie, and fall to discussing the lifestyle of the well-to-do compared to that of the poor. Caesar, despite his easy life and fancy collar, is no snob but just a dog like any other and wryly observes and wonders at the antics of the rich.

By placing this poem first in the volume Burns sets out his stall, as it were, demonstrating not just his masterly use of the language and ability to paint a convincing and incisive picture, but also his concerns about the divisions in society. This is how he describes Luath;

Hung ower his hurdies wi’ a swirl. (gash – wise, tyke – cur, lap – leapt

He called his dog Luath after Cuchullin’s dog in Ossian’s Fingal. This work by James MacPherson who claimed it was a translation of ‘an ancient epic’ had caused controversy for twenty years and David Hume made the comment that he would not believe the authenticity of Fingal ‘though fifty bare arsed Highlanders should swear to it’.

But there is no doubt that ‘Ossian’ stirred the Romantic feeling and sensibility that was sweeping Europe at the time – a romanticism that Burns surely felt a part of. Henry Mackenzie, a reviewer of the time, hailed Burns as ‘this heaven taught ploughman’ and Burns appears to have liked the title, which catered to the notion of an Enlightenment taste for so-called primitive genius. But he was far from being an unschooled primitive. He wrote Now westlin winds in 1775 when he was sixteen and described in a letter not only something of his education of the time but also of his weakness for a pretty face.

"I spent my seventeenth summer on a smuggling coast (Kirkoswald) a good distance from my home, to learn Mensuration, Surveying, Dialling, &…I went on with a high hand in my Geometry; till the sun entered Virgo, a month which is always a carnival in my bosom, a charming Fillete (Peggy Thomson) who lived next door to my school overset my Trigonomertry (sic), and set me off in a tangent from the sphere of my studies."

If he struggled with his ‘Trigonomertry’ he was certainly no slouch when it came to his literary influences. Shakespeare, Alexander Pope and Milton were very important for him. In fact he carried a pocket sized copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost with him everywhere. But his poetic predecessors of the earlier eighteenth century, Allan Ramsay and his beloved Robert Fergusson, had, arguably, the greatest impact on him, not only in the form of a lot of his poetry, but also in his desire to portray those around him with a painter’s skill.

However, Burns ability was not only that of a painter of scenes but also that of a surgeon who used his lance and scalpel to puncture and dissect hypocrisy. He suffered much from the Kirk Session and was often made to sit on the fornicator’s (or Cutty) stool in church as a result of his philandering. Several of his poems reflect his hatred of the religious powers of the time, Address to the Unco Guid, or the Rigidly Righteous, Reply to a Trimming Epistle received from A Taylor but especially Holy Willie’s Prayer, in which Burns satirises a local pillar of the Kirk Session speaking to his God.

O Thou that in the Heavens does dwell,

Wha’ as it pleases best Thysel,

Sends ane to Heaven, an ten to Hell,

A’ for Thy glory,

And no for onie guid or ill.

They’ve done before Thee!

I bless and praise Thy matchless might,

When thousands thou hast left in night,

That I am here before Thy sight,

For gifts an grace

A burning and a shining light

To a’ this place

But, surely, magnificent as most of his work in song and poem is, the crowning glory is in his thoughts about humanity and the social order. Although sentimental about the Jacobite cause, he was a despiser of religious tyranny. He was a supporter of the American and French revolutions but became very circumspect when he was an exciseman and was disillusioned by the later stages of the revolution in France. None the less, his reflections on the social order of the time are as fresh now as they ever were.

Changing conditions in agriculture affected his father and him very deeply as landlords increasingly pursued profit from farming and their tenants were forced to take larger, less certain eases to try to increase productivity. It was a precarious life and he describes it thus in The Twa Dogs

(brock – badger, court-day – rent day, wae – sad, thole – endure, snash – insolence)

Burns expressed his anger at how the world was ‘ill divided’ in many poems such as To a Louse and To a Mountain Daisy, but it is, I think, in To a Mouse that he sums up desperation in the face of poverty and unremitting hardship

Long ago I gave up thinking of Burns in a narrow sense as ‘ours’, as an Ayrshire poet, or even as a possession of Scotland. His work, of course, has universal meaning and appeal. His poetry has been translated into more than twenty languages and is popular all over the world.

Arguably the most anthemic and internationally appealing of all his works A man’s a man for a’ that was sung to great effect by Sheena Wellington at the opening of the first Scottish Parliament since before Burns’ own time (though – and I’m sure Burns would have approved - many of us have since agitated on Calton Hill and elsewhere for a full independent republic).

This song is a rallying cry for all those who fight injustice and oppression, in which Burns doesn’t align himself to a party or a faction but to what he always sought to express and tried to know – the human spirit which seeks equality, liberty and justice.