Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect by Robert Burns

First published: 1786

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Since the first publication of Robert Burns’s verse in the famous Kilmarnock edition entitled Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, the poet’s fame has increased and spread. Other editions of his work, containing later poems, only enhanced his reputation. Unlike many writers who achieve early fame only to see it fade, Burns is still widely read and appreciated.

At least part of the reason for this continuing appreciation is that Burns was essentially a transitional figure between the eighteenth century neoclassicists and the Romantics who were soon to follow. Possessing some of the qualities of each school, he exhibits few of the excesses of either. He occasionally used the couplet that had been made a skillful tool by Alexander Pope and his followers, but his spirit was closer to the Romantics in his attitude toward life and his art.

Although Burns occasionally displayed a mild conservatism, as in the early “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” he was fundamentally a rebel, and rebellion is a basic trait of the Romantics. It would have been hard for Burns to be a true neoclassicist because his background, which figures constantly in his poems, simply did not suit him for this role. He had a hard early life and a close acquaintanceship with the common people and the common circumstances of life. He was certainly not the uneducated, “natural” genius that he is sometimes pictured as—having had good instruction from his father and a tutor and having done considerable reading on his own—but he lacked the classical education that earlier poets thought necessary for the writing of true poetry.

Like the neoclassicists, however, Burns was skillful in taking the ideas and forms of earlier poets—in Burns’s case, the Scottish poets Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, as well as the anonymous composers of ballads and folk songs—and treating them in his own individual way. Thus, his verse has a wide variety of stanza forms and styles. Despite the variety of his techniques, his basic outlook in his poems is remarkably consistent. This outlook also may have a great deal to do with his popularity. Perhaps more than any other poet since Geoffrey Chaucer, Burns possessed the genial personal insight and the instinct for human feelings that can make a poem speak to everyone. Burns always saw the human aspect of things. His nature poetry, for instance, marks a departure from the intellectualizing of the eighteenth century poets; Burns’s lines about nature treat it primarily as a setting in which people live.

The warmth of Burns’s verse arises from this humane attitude combined with the experience he had of being in close personal contact with the people about whom he wrote. His writing never deals with subjects that he did not know intimately. Burns loved several women and claimed that they each served as great poetic inspiration. The reader may well believe this statement when he or she encounters the simple and lucidly sincere poems “Highland Mary,” “Mary Morison,” and the well-known song “Sweet Afton.” It was this quality of sincerity that another great Scot, Thomas Carlyle, found to be Burns’s greatest poetic value.

Burns was not an original thinker, but he had a few strong convictions about religion, human freedom, and morality. His condemnation of Calvinism and the hypocrisy it bred is accomplished with humor and yet with sharpness in two of his best poems, “The Holy Fair” and the posthumously published “Holy Willie’s Prayer.” In these and several other poems, Burns pokes occasionally none-too-gentle fun at the professional religionists of his time. Burns’s intensely personal viewpoint saved him from preaching, as was the style of earlier versifiers. It is to be expected that the few poems that contain examples of his rare attempts to be lofty are unsuccessful.

Having grown up in a humble environment, Burns was especially sensitive to social relations and the value of human freedom and equality. On this subject, too, he is never didactic, but few readers have remained unmoved by the lines of probably his most famous poem, “A Man’s a Man for A’ That,” in defense of the lower classes:

Is there, for honest povertyThat hings his head, an’ a’ that?The coward slave, we pass him by—We dare be poor for a’ that!For a’ that and a’ that,Our toil’s obscure and a’ that;The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,The man’s the gowd for a’ that. . . . . . . . . . . . . .Then let us pray that come it may,As come it will for a’ that,That sense and worth, o’er a’ the earth,Shall bear the gree, an’ a’ that.For a’ that, an’ a’ that,It’s coming yet for a’ that,That man to man, the warld o’er,Shall brithers be for a’ that.

It was this powerful feeling for democracy that led Burns, in his later years, to a tactless advocation of the principles of the French Revolution, a crusade that did his career as a minor government official no good. It is questionable whether Burns’s heated protest against Calvinism and the strict morality it proclaimed was simply a rationalization of his own loose behavior. However many the romances he had, and however many the illegitimate children he fathered, there can be little doubt of Burns’s sincere devotion, at least at the time, to the woman of his choice. In a larger sense, too, the poet’s warm sympathy for others is evidence of a sort of ethical pattern in his life and work that is quite laudable.

The poetic techniques in Burns’s poems are unquestionably a chief reason for his popularity. Few poets have so well suited the style to the subject, and his use of earlier stanza forms and several kinds of poetic diction has a sureness and an authority that are certain to charm even the learned student of poetry. There are three types of diction in his poetry: Scottish dialect, pure English, and a combination of the two. In “Tam O’ Shanter,” a later work that is perhaps his masterpiece, Burns uses dialect to tell an old legend of the supernatural with great effect. The modern reader who takes the trouble to master the dialectal terminology will be highly rewarded. In this, as in most of Burns’s poems, the pace and rhythm of the lines are admirably well suited to the subject.

Burns’s use of the English idiom, as in “The Vision,” was seldom so successful. Usually Burns wrote in standard English when he had some lofty purpose in mind, and with the exception of “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” this combination was often fatal to the poetic quality of these poems. For the general reader, probably the most enjoyable and rewarding reading consists of the poems and songs that Burns did in English, with occasional Scottish touches here and there in the lines. Most happy is this joining of language and dialect in such a poem as the famous little love lyric, “A Red, Red Rose.” These three kinds of poetic diction can be found side by side in one of Burns’s best poems, the highly patriotic “The Jolly Beggars,” which gives as fine a picture of the Scottish lower classes as can be found anywhere.

Naturally, Burns was most at home when he wrote in his native dialect; and, since one of the most striking characteristics of his verse is the effortless flow of conversational rhythms, it is not surprising that his better poems developed as natural effusions in his most familiar diction.

The total achievement of Burns is obviously great, but it should not be misunderstood. Burns lacked the precision and clarity of his predecessors in the eighteenth century, and he never reached the exalted heights of poetic expression attained by Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats not long after him. For vigor and the little touches that breathe life into lines of poetry, however, he was unexcelled by earlier or later poets.

The claim that Burns wrote careless verse has been perhaps too much emphasized. His poems and songs are surely not carefully carved jewels, but neither are they haphazard groupings of images and rhymes. The verses seem unlabored, but Burns worked patiently at them, and with considerable effort. That they seem to have been casual utterances is only further tribute to his ability. It may be that the highest praise of all was paid to Burns, both as man and poet, by Keats, who said that one can see in Burns’s poems his whole life; and, though the life reflected was not an altogether happy one, the poet’s love of freedom, of people, and of life itself appears in nearly every line.

Bibliography

Burns, Robert. The Canongate Burns. 2 vols. Edited by Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2001. This two-volume collection contains all of Burns’s poetry, including previously unpublished works and poems newly attributed to him. The annotations include translations for the Scottish dialect terms, as well as background on Burns’s life, poetry, and political beliefs.

Carruthers, Gerard. Robert Burns. Tavistock, England: Northcote House/British Council, 2006. Comprehensive overview of Burns’s poetic career, treating his works in their chronological order of publication. Discusses Burns’s social and religious satires, the political commentary in his work, and his representation of love and gender.

Crawford, Robert. The Bard: Robert Burns—A Biography. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009. A sympathetic biography of Burns, depicting him as a rebel and radical who imagined himself a poet to become one.

McGuirk, Carol. Robert Burns and the Sentimental Era. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Critical look at Burns’s sentimental approach to poetry, including his passion for his nation.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Critical Essays on Robert Burns. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Collection of essays about Burns’s life and work, including a comparison of his poetry to that of William Wordsworth, his lyrical and satirical verse, his use of Scottish diction, and Burns and the “imagined community” of Scotland.

McIlvanney, Liam. Burns the Radical: Poetry and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland. East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell, 2002. Depicts Burns as a sophisticated political poet whose work was influenced by Scottish Presbyterian ideology, the political theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, and English and Irish political traditions.

McIntyre, Ian. Dirt and Deity: A Life of Robert Burns. London: HarperCollins, 1995. Comprehensive biography that recounts the events of Burns’s life and offers an extensive evaluation of his songs and poetry. The final chapter examines the legendary reputation that Burns acquired after his death—a legend that bears little resemblance to the reality of his life.