Poems and Songs of Robert Burns | Page 7

was unexpectedly successful, so that, instead of
sailing for the West Indies, he went up to Edinburgh, and during that
winter he was the chief literary celebrity of the season. An enlarged
edition of his poems was published there in 1787, and the money
derived from this enabled him to aid his brother in Mossgiel, and to
take and stock for himself the farm of Ellisland in Dumfriesshire. His
fame as poet had reconciled the Armours to the connection, and having
now regularly married Jean, he brought her to Ellisland, and once more
tried farming for three years. Continued ill-success, however, led him,
in 1791, to abandon Ellisland, and he moved to Dumfries, where he had
obtained a position in the Excise. But he was now thoroughly
discouraged; his work was mere drudgery; his tendency to take his
relaxation in debauchery increased the weakness of a constitution early
undermined; and he died at Dumfries in his thirty-eighth year.
[See Burns' Birthplace: The living room in the Burns birthplace

cottage.]
It is not necessary here to attempt to disentangle or explain away the
numerous amours in which he was engaged through the greater part of
his life. It is evident that Burns was a man of extremely passionate
nature and fond of conviviality; and the misfortunes of his lot
combined with his natural tendencies to drive him to frequent excesses
of self-indulgence. He was often remorseful, and he strove painfully, if
intermittently, after better things. But the story of his life must be
admitted to be in its externals a painful and somewhat sordid chronicle.
That it contained, however, many moments of joy and exaltation is
proved by the poems here printed.
Burns' poetry falls into two main groups: English and Scottish. His
English poems are, for the most part, inferior specimens of
conventional eighteenth-century verse. But in Scottish poetry he
achieved triumphs of a quite extraordinary kind. Since the time of the
Reformation and the union of the crowns of England and Scotland, the
Scots dialect had largely fallen into disuse as a medium for dignified
writing. Shortly before Burns' time, however, Allan Ramsay and Robert
Fergusson had been the leading figures in a revival of the vernacular,
and Burns received from them a national tradition which he succeeded
in carrying to its highest pitch, becoming thereby, to an almost unique
degree, the poet of his people.
He first showed complete mastery of verse in the field of satire. In "The
Twa Herds," "Holy Willie's Prayer," "Address to the Unco Guid," "The
Holy Fair," and others, he manifested sympathy with the protest of the
so-called "New Light" party, which had sprung up in opposition to the
extreme Calvinism and intolerance of the dominant "Auld Lichts." The
fact that Burns had personally suffered from the discipline of the Kirk
probably added fire to his attacks, but the satires show more than
personal animus. The force of the invective, the keenness of the wit,
and the fervor of the imagination which they displayed, rendered them
an important force in the theological liberation of Scotland.
The Kilmarnock volume contained, besides satire, a number of poems
like "The Twa Dogs" and "The Cotter's Saturday Night," which are

vividly descriptive of the Scots peasant life with which he was most
familiar; and a group like "Puir Mailie" and "To a Mouse," which, in
the tenderness of their treatment of animals, revealed one of the most
attractive sides of Burns' personality. Many of his poems were never
printed during his lifetime, the most remarkable of these being "The
Jolly Beggars," a piece in which, by the intensity of his imaginative
sympathy and the brilliance of his technique, he renders a picture of the
lowest dregs of society in such a way as to raise it into the realm of
great poetry.
But the real national importance of Burns is due chiefly to his songs.
The Puritan austerity of the centuries following the Reformation had
discouraged secular music, like other forms of art, in Scotland; and as a
result Scottish song had become hopelessly degraded in point both of
decency and literary quality. From youth Burns had been interested in
collecting the fragments he had heard sung or found printed, and he
came to regard the rescuing of this almost lost national inheritance in
the light of a vocation. About his song-making, two points are
especially noteworthy: first, that the greater number of his lyrics sprang
from actual emotional experiences; second, that almost all were
composed to old melodies. While in Edinburgh he undertook to supply
material for Johnson's "Musical Museum," and as few of the traditional
songs could appear in a respectable collection, Burns found it necessary
to make them over. Sometimes he kept a stanza or two; sometimes only
a line or chorus; sometimes merely the name