Burns, Robert

Robert (1759-1796), a Scottish poet. He was born January 5, 1759, in an "auld clay biggin," or cottage, about two miles south of Ayr. His father was a tenant farmer of intelligence and small means, but desirous that his children should have an educated understanding. The father's portrait is drawn for us in the Cotter's Saturday Night. Burns's school education consisted of reading, writing, grammar, and arithmetic, and later of a little geometry and less Latin and French. The Burns family was neither poorer nor richer than thousands of other families.

As soon as Robert was old enough he was needed to help with the work. The father was unfortunate in the management of a small farm, lost what little he had, and became unable to labor. Robert was the oldest boy and it fell on him to support the family. He got away for a short time now and then, once with a view to learn a trade; but settled down to ditch, plow, sow, reap, and flail. He was a strong, active fellow. He was not afraid of work, yet he longed to be a scholar. He felt at times that he was working like a galley slave. Seeing other young men with, as it seemed to him, a better chance, he felt

He did not realize that the education of the schools and the good things of life would have cut him off from writing the poems of the people which have made him famous. In fact, his best writing was done in the years when he was working hard all day. His brother tells us that Robert climbed to a garret at night where he kept his writing material to write the thoughts that had occurred to him as he followed the plow. His lines To a Mountain Daisy beginning,

were written in this way. Only one himself in hard circumstances, and who had himself turned up a mouse's nest with a plow, could have written:

We may add only such can appreciate the poem to the full. Burns's very power lies in the fact that he is a plowman speaking to plowmen. Scotland is a great country for folk songs. Burns was intensely fond of repeating them. To become a poet was his ambition. Writing of his youth to a friend of his maturer years, he says:

As to his style of writing we can say only that the songs of the countryside were at his tongue's end. He repeated them and sang them until the thoughts in his own mind ran into them like molds. He followed the old meters and rhymes, and not infrequently he used many of the words. One who is familiar with Scottish songs can recognize their influence readily.

After a number of his poems had been circulated in a small way among friends, Burns decided to print them, which he did in a small volume known from the place of publication as the Kilmarnock edition of 1786. The paper was poor and the binding worse; but the volume brought the author fame and a few guineas. Copies are now among the treasures of libraries and book collectors. The original price was three shillings. A copy sold recently for $2,860 at an auction of rare books.

Burns had had thoughts of going to Jamaica where a living could be made more easily, but the sale of his little book put that out of his mind. He visited Edinburgh, where his personality and appearance, wit and independence of speech, as well as the character of his poems, made him the lion of the hour. His conversation was as refreshing in the conventional society of the drawing room as a whiff of air from the mountains. A subscription to a new edition was taken up by an association known as the Caledonian Hunt, and Burns returned home feeling that he had won a place in the world's notice.

It would seem that one who had risen thus far would rise higher, but Burns had weaknesses in his character. For one thing he was enamored of many women. Some he treated well; others he treated ill. He was handsome, vain, and weak, but appears to have had a high ideal. The woman of Burns's songs is superior. We give two quotations. The first was inspired by Handsome Nell, a boyhood friend. It was written when he was seventeen; the second is from his Address to Mary in Heaven, a poem inspired by the death of Highland Mary to whom he appears to have been sincerely attached.

From the edition for which arrangements were made in Edinburgh, Burns realized $2,500. With this sum in hand he rented and stocked a farm and married Jean Armour, one of the young women with whom he was entangled. It would be pleasant to record a life of industry and respectability, but the truth is otherwise. His farming Burns never made pay. He spent much time at the public house. The drink habit grew upon him. He was fond of convivial gatherings and tavern cronies that did him no good. Some of his carousing songs are otherwise among his best efforts. The quotation is from O, Willie Brew'd a Peck o' Maut:

Burns was in a tilt every now and again with the elders of the parish, that is to say, the Presbyterian church. He accused them of hypocrisy, and wrote several poems that were far from complimentary. His real attitude toward religious matters may be known from the Cotter's Saturday Night, and are well expressed in the following lines from his Epistle to a Young Friend:

Failing in farming, Burns secured a petty appointment from the London government as a collector of excise. In his Essay on Burns Carlyle, one of the few writers who understood the Scottish poet, grows indignant that mankind should permit a genius to go sizing up the brew of housewives and collecting the few pennies due the government on every making of ale. Burns himself writes a humorous poem on the duties of the exciseman.

To the poems already mentioned we must add Tam o' Shanter, The Jolly Beggars, Bonnie Doon, Auld Lang Syne, A Man's a Man for a' That, Address to the Deil, Hallowe'en, The Farmer's Salutation to his Auld Mare, The Brigs of Ayr, To a Louse, To the Toothache, etc.

In the later and inglorious part of his life Burns did some excellent writing; but his habits were such that he was shunned by reputable society, even in the small town of Dumfries where he lived. He became so reduced in circumstances that he was by no means free from danger of imprisonment for debt. His constitution was undermined by work, worry, drink, and despair. He died, July 21, 1796, at the early age of thirty-seven. He was no sooner dead than Scotland realized its loss. A memorial was erected in the churchyard of Dumfries. A subscription edition of his life and works placed the family above want. As the years go by, his faults have been overlooked more and more, as if his Advice to the Unco Guid were an appeal to posterity:

Burns was rarely gifted. He struggled to make something of himself, but was after all as nature made him. Because he could not write the verse of Pope and Milton, he feared he was a failure. Burns sang not of warlike deeds, nor of far away subjects, but of the homely topics that appeal to all. No other ever interpreted the feelings of the people more truly. No other writer of his century has so-strong a hold on the affections of the world.

Burns is termed variously "the ploughman poet," "the Ayrshire ploughman," "the Bard of Ayrshire," and "the Peasant." No one would think of saying Harry Longfellow or Jack Whittier, but to the Scotch, Burns is just Bobbie Burns, and that tells the whole story.

See Ayr; Dumfries

He owes no honor to the subjects, which his muse selected, for they are ordinary, and such as would have tempted no poet, save himself, to sing about.--Allan Cunningham.

Burns is by far the greatest poet that ever sprung from the bosom of the people and lived and died in an humble condition.--Professor Wilson.

O he was a good-looking fine fellow!--he was that; rather black an' ill-colored; but he couldna help that; ye ken. He was a strong, manly-looking chap; nane o' your skilpit milk-and-water dandies: but a sterling, substantial fellow, who, wadna hae feared the deil suppose he had met him. An' then siccan an ee he had!--Memoir of Burns.

His person was strong and robust, his manners rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity which received part of its effect perhaps from one's knowledge of his extraordinary talents.... I think his countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits. . . . There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical temperament. It was large and of a dark cast, and glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men in my time. His conversation expressed perfect self-confidence without the slightest presumption.--Sir Walter Scott.

None but the most narrow-minded bigots think of his errors and frailties but with sympathy and indulgence; none but the blindest enthusiasts can deny their existence.--James Hogg.

It needs no effort of the imagination to conceive what the sensations of an isolated set of scholars (almost all either clergymen or professors) must have been in the presence of this big-boned, black-browed, brawny stranger, with his great flashing eyes, who, having forced his way among them from the plough-tail, at a single stride, manifested in the whole strain of his bearing and conversation, a most thorough conviction that in the society of the most emineat men of his nation, he was exactly where he was entitled to be; hardly deigned to flatter them by exhibiting even an occasional symptom of being flattered by their notice; by turns calmly measured himself against the most cultivated understandings of his time, in discussion; overpowered the bon mots of the most celebrated convivialists by broad floods of merriment, impregnated with all the burning life of genius; astounded bosoms habitually enveloped in the thrice-piled folds of social reserve, by compelling them to tremble--nay, to tremble visibly--beneath the fearless touch of natural pathos.--Lockhart.