Robert Burns, or as Wikipedia insists on noting "Rabbie Burns" in some cute Wiki geneflection to those with pretensions of speaking a country Scots dialect, was born on a January 25th day. It's a day which traffic police in all Anglo communities dread because it will bring on such a preponderance of befuddled drunks slurring bits of the poem "To a Mouse" in something they imagine is authentic Scots while trying to locate their drivers' licences and spitting all over the place with gutteral "r" noises.
I know. I know. I should be kinder to the man's memory. And I really do admire him; it's what's become of the celebration of his birth date that distresses me. I mean there is a lot to love about the chap. For one thing, he fathered a host of children, some of them actually legitimate and attempted to father a lot more. And if that isn't the sort of statistic that wins your applause (ladies?) well there's the fact of his hard childhood work as farm labourer and later arduous travels as exciseman while supporting all those children. Along the way, he acquired a very good education in French, Latin and mathematics from local schoolmasters and tutors. Betcha didn't know about that Latin and French didja? It shows in his writing, if not in mine.
His dad may have been a tenant farmer, meaning he ran the farm for some absentee owner, but he wasn't some ignorant bumpkin. Even then, animal husbandry and agriculture were demanding (and honourable) undertakings. You didn't get the job of caretaking a 130 acre farm if you weren't capable. Old William Burnes gave his kids a sound home schooling and even wrote a textbook for them called A Manual of Christian Belief, and then saw to it they were educated at parish schools and with tutors. Although the tenant farming business wasn't profitable and probably ruined the health of the old man and young Burns, it kept them from outright poverty. Back to the writing.
A lot of the credit for Burns' knowledge of the Scottish folk songs on which he based many of his own compositions and which gave him the metrical rhythms of his poems goes to his mum, Agnes Broun. It's almost always the mother who sings to the little ones, and it's not for naught that we have the term "mother tongue". In Robbie's work there is often a switching from folk Scots to Latinate English. Here's one of his better known poems, "To A Mouse" with the folk language highlighted in red in the first verse and the Latin derivatives highlighted in blue in the second.
To A Mouse
On Turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough,
November 1785.
Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
Och, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickerin brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!
I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!
And red white or blue, even the psychopaths in the big white building in Washington, DC should be able to understand his penultimate conclusion:
The best laid schemes o' Mice and Men
Gang aft agley,
And lea'e us nought but grief an' pain
For promis'd joy."
I said I was proud of the guy because of his romantic activities, but 'taint really so. True, a lot of the gals declined his advances and left him with just the inspiration for bits of doggerel, and I can certainly identify with that, but he was also an early member of the NDP. He openly expressed his favourable views of the American and the French Revolutions although he wouldn't live to see the outcome of the latter. He also spoke and wrote in favour of parliamentary reform and Thomas Paine's "The Rights of Man" even penning his own "Rights of Woman" but you wouldn't (Beverly, for sure, wouldn't) give him points for the points he made in that piece. One critic who examined its assertions found that:
The poem identifies three "Rights of Woman": protection, decorum, and admiration. The first, protection, frames women as delicate and vulnerable, needing men to shield them from "the blasts of Fate". This reinforces a traditional view of women as needing male guardianship. The second, decorum, focuses on the expectation that men treat women with respect and propriety. Burns suggests this is already "the fashion" among "men of sense," implying progress, yet also potentially mocking the superficiality of social conventions. The third, and arguably most significant, "right" is admiration. Burns elevates admiration to the highest right, linking it to "immortal love" and suggesting that women's power lies in their ability to inspire adoration through beauty, flirtation, and charm. The poem presents these “rights” as a hierarchy, culminating in the power of female charm and beauty, a potentially limiting and arguably satirical portrayal of women's aspirations. It reduces women to their physical attributes and reinforces the idea that their power lies in their ability to attract and manipulate male attention.
So, Robert Burns, perceptive, satiric, linguistically versatile, and a trifle patronizing toward women (with whom he fell in love at the drop of any bit of clothing) has been voted "the Greatest Scot" in a poll run by Scottish TV, and he continues to be read today. I'm particularly fond of his "To A Louse". You only really need the last two verses, but sputter your way through the whole thing as practice for a recitation if you get invited to a Burns dinner.
To a Louse
On Seeing One On A Lady’s Bonnet, At Church (1786)
Ha! whaur ye gaun, ye crowlin ferlie?
Your impudence protects you sairly;
I canna say but ye strunt rarely,
Owre gauze and lace;
Tho’, faith! I fear ye dine but sparely
On sic a place.
Ye ugly, creepin, blastit wonner,
Detested, shunn’d by saunt an’ sinner,
How daur ye set your fit upon her-
Sae fine a lady?
Gae somewhere else and seek your dinner
On some poor body.
Swith! in some beggar’s haffet squattle;
There ye may creep, and sprawl, and sprattle,
Wi’ ither kindred, jumping cattle,
In shoals and nations;
Whaur horn nor bane ne’er daur unsettle
Your thick plantations.
Now haud you there, ye’re out o’ sight,
Below the fatt’rels, snug and tight;
Na, faith ye yet! ye’ll no be right,
Till ye’ve got on it-
The verra tapmost, tow’rin height
O’ Miss’ bonnet.
My sooth! right bauld ye set your nose out,
As plump an’ grey as ony groset:
O for some rank, mercurial rozet,
Or fell, red smeddum,
I’d gie you sic a hearty dose o’t,
Wad dress your droddum.
I wad na been surpris’d to spy
You on an auld wife’s flainen toy;
Or aiblins some bit dubbie boy,
On’s wyliecoat;
But Miss’ fine Lunardi! fye!
How daur ye do’t?
O Jeany, dinna toss your head,
An’ set your beauties a’ abread!
Ye little ken what cursed speed
The blastie’s makin:
Thae winks an’ finger-ends, I dread,
Are notice takin.
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
An’ ev’n devotion!
There's Jenny, all dressed up in her Sunday finery, thinking she's so hot and holy but unbeknownst to her, there's a flea crawling along her bonnet for anyone else to see. The implication is that even if we don't see our imperfections, others do and it would be a blessing "to see oursels as ithers see us" because for sure "It wad frae mony a blunder free us". It should be required reading for every politician, certainly any who aspire to national leadership anywhere on our planet today.
But that's all too serious, and you folk steering your way into a roadside sobriety checkpoint after a "Dinner" on Jan 25th deserve a bit of levity. Here's my take on a favoured menu item at those celebratory dinners, right after the customary toast to your good health: “Slàinte Mhath” (pronounced Slanj-a-va so I'm told).
Horrible Haggis
Happy haggis, all you Scots
– And wannabes – you drunken sots.
You taste that sheep’s gut in your pots
You’ll need a drink
To tie your senses into knots
To stand the stink.
Come January twenty-five
These Burns aficionados thrive
On single malts, and then contrive
Through snot and drool
A speech, in proof that they deprive
Some town its fool.
Linguistic rules they disregard
In trying to imitate the bard.
The highland dialect is marred;
The lines won’t parse.
All modesty they will discard
To roll their rrr’s.
Nor do I think, the truth be told,
Old Robbie would be quite so bold
The haggis in esteem to hold.
It’s not a meal –
Served up with scotch, one hot one cold,
There’s scant appeal.
Burns Dinners have become extreme,
A cruel, insidious, highland scheme
To force the English vocal stream
Itself to choke –
And barbarous Scots, the world blaspheme
Wi’ their haggis joke.
Don't give any of your Scottish friends my address; some of them might be easily offended. But, you can show them this little article which I wrote about an experience illustrative of my own overly frugal (cheapskate) tendencies. I lifted it from my little volume of travel vignettes that I published a few years ago – Footloose & Shouldless. (Check my "books" page) It took place in Edinburgh.
Organ Agony
There were all sorts of great musicians associated with church pipe organs. There were the Bach kids for a couple, pounding away on keyboard and pedals, with Daddy off somewhere composing hymns or other great posterity pieces. What I want to know is how did any of them survive Sunday mornings. They all lived in an age noted for its nasty execution devices (a straight-out battle-axe to the forehead being the first that comes to mind) and congregations must have felt a stirring of the blood-lust when the little tykes were shouldered up to the instrument. I know I did.
Well, I didn’t attend a performance by one of the “great masters” as they are called, but I did sit through a forty-five minute recital that took just short of an eternity to complete, and even with hearing aids disabled it was an excruciating experience. It was diabolic in its organization too so that no one suspected the true nature of the auditory assault to come until it was too late. And escape was sealed.
St. Giles is a lovely church on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. We spent a very educational afternoon poking around, gawking at the architecture, marvelling at the stained glass windows, buying trinkets for the stay-at-homes — all those nice touristy things you do to justify slogging back a few at the nearest pub. And then we saw the notice about a free organ recital. Well, to the jaded, over-spent traveller’s eye, any brochure that begins with the word “free” is like nectar to a bee. We noted the time and showed up early to get seats up close, before all those other cheap tourists nabbed them. First mistake.
But who would have suspected the frail little tyke who shuffled in from offstage somewhere and climbed the circular staircase to the command position on the bench in front of a great curving rack of a keyboard? Not I, for sure. I wondered that her feet could reach the pedals, and I thought she had gone into some sort of stage-fright shock as she sat with arms raised above the keys. Then down they came and it started.
If we had been anywhere near a zoo, the RSPCA would have been there in a trice to nab whoever was eviscerating the elephant without anaesthetic. For a more local image, think bagpipes. Now think a lot of bagpipes. Think of them all playing full blast all different tunes (and I don’t know why they call what bagpipers do “tuneful” either). And it went on and on. I thought she’d get the hang of the thing pretty soon and settle down to just making noise, but no, she wound it up even more. And we were in the front row. And we’re Canadians. You see the problem, don’t you. No relief.
To top it all off, we were in the company of fools. After some years of the most egregious (love that word) bludgeoning of our ears, this waif popped up from her seat of pain and traipsed down her little circular staircase to receive our praise. Well, a few claps of the old callouses before making one’s escape was all that was really called for; but no, these idiots went on at some length, and the upshot of course was that the evil little spawn levitated back to her keyboard to favour us with an encore.
I was for hoofing it out down the aisle as soon as I saw what she was up to, but my Dear One, being endowed with a far sweeter disposition than I, had already sat back down and fixed a patient smile on her face. Her years as a primary school teacher had inured her to much that in lesser souls would cause such auditory distress as to require years of post-traumatic counselling. We suffered on.
We made it out at the end of the next set. I don’t know if that tiny tyrant punished the air with more encores or not. By the time she was coming down the last few steps and my company of dolts were rising in their masochistic mania, I was “excuse-me-please-ing” my way into the centre aisle and hot-footing it for the exit. B was close behind, even she having cast dignity to the winds.
It was a lesson of course, and a conundrum. How, we were left to ponder, had all those “great masters" ever survived their first recitals?
Now, do raise a glass to honour the legacy of "the greatest Scot" but do it in some location where you don't have to drive afterwards. His perceptive poetry isn't the only intoxicating quality his homeland has to offer, as I insist on relearning as often as I'm allowed. I'll close with the grace Burns wrote that you'll say before that dinner in his honour. Let your thoughts dwell on some of the folk that really need this blessing in our world today.
Some hae meat, and canna eat, And some wad eat that want it; But we hae meat, and we can eat And sae the Lord be thankit.