January 25 is Robert Burns Day, a.k.a Robbie Burns Day a.k.a. Rabbie Burns Day, obviously in celebration of the birth of the Scottish National Poet (1759-1796). Apparently Burns Day has edged out St. Andrew’s Day as the Scottish National Holiday in recent decades, and who can blame them for wanting an excuse in January as well as one in November for warming the body with Scotch whiskey? (This year in particular with Storm Eowyn hitting that country today with 100 mile an hour winds?) Between those two holidays, add a third, New Year’s Eve, when we sing those famous Burns lyrics to “Auld Lang Syne” (1788).
I’ve been getting more serious about my Scotsmanship of late, being at the time of life when you get obsessed with your roots and want to maybe recover some of the tradition you’ve neglected so that you can pass it on, I guess, though I’ve always been interested in my family past. I’m a Stewart, though only 25% Scots, plus or minus, by blood. My dad’s ancestors came to the U.S. in the late 17th century and intermarried across the generations with the English majority (the other 75%, to oversimplify). But my family tree indicates descent from Wallace and Robert the Bruce. On the other side, my mom’s step-dad was a Burns — a Robert Burns, in fact, though I haven’t managed to connect his lineage to the poet.
Through most of my life I’m afraid I’ve made the grave mistake of not taking Burns very seriously, and I’ll wager I’m not alone. It has to do I imagine with the jocose manner in which my high school English class reacted to whatever poems of his we were introduced to at the time. Surely one was “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye” (1784), as it’s a no-brainer when young people are reading Catcher in the Rye, which we were indeed assigned. (One of our English teachers astutely used Salinger’s novel as a way of connecting with young people. Another of our English instructors dismissed the book as “crap”. That teacher was universally detested). But of course Holden Caulfield remembers Burns’ poem wrong. Our own adolescent renderings of the burred speech of the verses weren’t deeper or more astute, and were mostly productive of hilarity.
Later, the fact that Burns is a People’s Poet, widely embraced by the masses led to a suspicion that his writing was kitsch, that it couldn’t possibly be good. This was reinforced by the dialect voice he typically composed in, which we are conditioned to regard as “light”. Which connects us very much to vaudeville, doesn’t it? America has such a rich tradition of comedy (and sometimes sentimental mush) written in stereotyped patois, across nearly every art form. Not just vaudeville sketches, stand-up monologues, songs, humor pieces, comic strips, Hollywood movies and radio shows, but even our theoretical “high culture” such as fiction and stage plays. From “Mother Machree” to how Jim talks in Huckleberry Finn to Eugene O’Neill’s Sea Plays. Mostly, dialect writing feels like POP culture, and where it’s part of something more ambitious it feels like OUTMODED culture. In America, the use of dialect writing in more ambitious works tends to generate controversy, even when it is written “authentically” by a member of the represented group. Usually other members of the same group will criticize the author for making their people sound “country” or basic. But prior to the advent of the recording arts, it was the only way artists had of capturing local color thereby preserving a culture they loved.
By the way. there were even vaudeville SCOTS, such as Sir Harry Lauder and Will Fyffe, and I’m afraid I’ve been guilty of associating Burns with such stuff.
At any rate, I never heard of any Scot having a problem with how Burns rendered their version of the English language. It should also be noted here that Burns didn’t only write in Scots dialect. He also wrote in the King’s English as well as Scots Gaelic, an entirely different language altogether. And sometimes he merged the languages in sophisticated ways. When you assemble the pieces you begin to perceive the scope of what the man accomplished. He was not only a poet and a songwriter, but also a folklorist and a political thinker. He was a figure of the Scottish Enlightenment along with Hume, Boswell, Adam Smith, and others. In politics he was Whiggish and sympathetic to the Revolutions in America and France. His poem “A Man’s a Man for A’ That” (1795) was influenced by Thomas Paine. Burns was a catalyst for Scottish nationalism, and his writing indicates a sympathy with the Jacobite uprising of a generation before. Fans of the Original Star Trek know “Charlie, He’s My Darling” (1796) sung by Uhura to Charlie X! It was adapted by Burns from a traditional source, about Bonnie Prince Charlie. Though this would technically make him a monarchist, his nationalism was larded with democratic sentiments. He was from modest circumstances, a farmer. He was of his people, and seemed to be expressing their collective voice. His patriotic poems include the well-known “My Heart’s in the Highlands” (1789). “Scots Wha Hae” (1793), with its references to William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, was used as an informal Scottish national anthem for many years
In religion Burns was Calvinist. A gloomy metaphysics informs a lot of his writing, as in “To a Mouse” (1785), which gave Steinbeck his title for Of Mice and Men. This is connected to his interest in superstition and the folk-beliefs of his native country, which he gathered in the prototypical spirit of what we would call anthropology. What Burns did here is not all unlike what later figures such as Zora Neal Hurston did in the U.S. Inspired by this stuff, he wrote the wonderfully atmospheric poem “Halloween” (1785), and one of his best known works, the longer narrative poem “Tam O’Shanter” (1790) which features an encounter with witches, not to mention the immortal phrase “Cutty Sark”, nowadays most famous as a brand of booze.
Burns was also very funny. Many of his poems are satirical in the spirit of Pope. In fact, he’s a kind of pivot between the ridiculous spirit of Pope’s “Rape of the Lock” and the sublime intentions of Shelley’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn”, in that he often seems to wind up genuinely elevating the simple, silly thing, the original subject he seemed to be teasing. “Address to a Haggis” (1786) is the best example of that.
Burns also wrote terrific love poetry. He’s the guy who wrote “My love is like a red, red rose, that’s newly sprung in June…” (1794). From descriptions of the man himself you get a sense of a dashing but rough country boy, a mix of Tom Jones, Byron, and folkloric heroes. He alienated his father by taking dancing classes (considered wicked by Presbyterians), he had numerous girlfriends, and knocked more than one of them up out of wedlock. In total, he fathered a dozen children.
Burns was a fast worker! Perhaps he suspected that he wasn’t long for this world. Not only did he boink all those country lasses, but even his storied literary career was crammed into just a little over a decade. By age 37 Burns has expired, and no one is quite sure what killed him, although it seems likely that hard farm work from a very young age played some kind of a role.
Burns was widely emulated by the next generation, the English Romantic poets. And, yes the likes of cartoon Scotsmen like Harry Lauder. But the point is, he was big enough to encompass those ideas, and several others besides. In 2009, he won a national poll in Scotland for “Greatest Scot”. And you know what that makes me say? That’s right — GREAT SCOTT!