Immortal Memory Address, 2010
By
Corey E. Andrews
It is a
pleasure and a privilege to address this group tonight gathered to
celebrate the life and works of Scotland’s national bard, Robert
Burns. The website Robert Burns Country offers the following advice
to those (such as myself) who find themselves in the position of
delivering the annual Immortal Memory address on Burns Night
celebrations:
This speech should be a rather serious and careful
consideration of the life and art of Robert
Burns. It may be a
general, biographical sort of speech, or may address a specific
aspect of the Bard's work that is relevant to the particular group
of assembled celebrants.
The website continues by remarking that the
speech “should be long-winded enough to remind the guests that this
isn't the office Christmas party, yet not so long as to induce
cramping, dry-mouth, or ringing in the ears (or about 25 minutes).”
At the request of our host, I will stick to around 20 minutes, and
I’ll be speaking about what Burns means to me and what I think might
be the source of his appeal to the world at large.
I have been
reading and writing about Robert Burns for the last fifteen years;
as I am now forty, this has composed a large chunk of my
professional life. As an English professor at Youngtown State, I
have taught classes on Robert Burns and regularly inflict my
students with readings of my favorite Burns poems and songs,
delivered in my inimitable Kentucky-flavored Scots accent. I have
attended conferences devoted to Burns, and I have just finished a
book on the poet which is looking for a home. My office brims with
Burns books and memorabilia, and I have even held a copy of Burns’s
Kilmarnock edition: an exceedingly rare and valuable book which
promptly went back into the vault at the Rare Books Collection of
Burnsiana at the University of South Carolina, where I spent a
summer as a research fellow. Though I have attended several Burns
Night celebrations, this is the first where I have been asked to
deliver the Immortal Memory speech. This opportunity gives me pause
to reflect on what exactly Burns means to me, as well as to reflect
upon how exactly an eighteenth-century Scottish poet became such an
international celebrity, whose fame seems in no danger of subsiding
any time soon.
In a recent “Immortal Memory” speech, Patrick Scott,
the curator of the Burnsiana Collection at the University of South
Carolina, opened by asking,
“Why does Burns have an ‘Immortal
Memory’? Why should we be here tonight like thousands of
others around the world once again be commemorating a poet nutured
in one of the poorer and smaller if prouder and more distinctive
countries of Europe – in what a self-critical Scotsman once
described (inaccurately) as “a little shabby scraggy corner of a
remote island, with a climate that cannot ripen an apple?”
(Edinburgh Review, 1824)
“Why,” Scott then asks, “did it ripen
Burns?” I’ll try to answer this question by describing what Burns
means to me not only as a scholar but as a fellow human, for the
story of Burns is a deeply human one, filled with dramatic
incidents, powerful desires, and a genuine empathy for the people of
Scotland and the world. To readers new to Burns, his poetry and
songs may seem forbiddingly difficult, peppered with Scots words and
phrases that require much footnoting and explanation. This of course
is a frequent complaint of my students, and it is an unfortunate
prejudice held against Burns.
Though his language may seem imposingly
obscure, Burns always wrote with the general reader in mind; even at
his most challenging, such as his poem “Halloween” (which is as
Scots as it gets), Burns is writing about the lives and customs of
the Scottish folk in the countryside. Burns came from that world;
born in 1759, he was raised in Ayrshire and worked the fields
alongside his father. He received a valuable education from his
tutor John Murdoch, a young man hired by Burns’s father John to
teach Robert and his brother Gilbert. Robert’s initiation into the
world of poetry came through his reading of English literature, such
as the writings of early eighteenth-century essayist Joseph Addison;
Burns wouldn’t discover Scottish poetry until he had first
encountered the works of his southern neighbors, the English. When
he did begin to read the works of Scottish poets like Allan Ramsay
and William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, Robert became inspired to
write and try, in his words, “my fate in guid black prent.” His
first volume of poems, the exceedingly rare and valuable Kilmarnock
edition of 1786, was printed for a local audience of readers who
were both friends and enemies of the poet. Within the Kilmarnock
edition were epistles that Burns wrote to friends and other Scottish
poets, as well as outrageous satires on local clergy like William
Fisher, the subject of one of Burns’s most scathing attacks. Burns’s
great fame within Scotland wouldn’t occur until he had traveled to
Edinburgh and published his poems there for a much different,
well-heeled audience. It was only after the publication of his
Edinburgh edition that Burns began to capture the attention of wider
audiences, eventually leading to the world-wide fame that he
continues to have today.
The point I’d like to make about this
process is that Burns wrote with everyone in mind; though his first
audiences were local and Scottish, he sought to express thoughts and
feelings that could be understood by any reader who encountered his
work, whether English, American, French, Italian, or Japanese, to
name just a few. Likewise, Burns didn’t just write to hear the
applause of his friends; he also wrote to expose hypocrisy, to
descry injustice, to challenge convention, and to express sympathy
with the poor and outcast. One of his most famous poems, “To a
Mouse,” offers an unforgettable instance of the last, for the poem
sympathizes with one of Nature’s most maligned creatures, the field
mouse. “To a Mouse” takes place in a Scottish field, and this
setting is the key cornerstone of the poem. Like the mouse, Burns is
working in an inhospitable environment, preparing for the
unremitting Scottish winter to come. The poem arises from an
accident; Burns’s plow has unearthed the mouse’s nest and the poet
pauses to witness (and reflect upon) the wanton destruction he has
just caused. He addresses the mouse directly, observing “what a
panic’s in thy breastie” and reassuring him that “I wad be laith to
rin and chase thee, / Wi’ murdering pattle!” This remarkable
expression of fellow-feeling for a simple mouse leads to equally
surprising sentiments expressed in the poem’s second stanza, where
the poet apologizes for the poor treatment that mice have received
from humans such as himself. He writes that
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.
Equating
the life of a mouse with a human life would be an unusual sentiment
even today, but it was virtually unheard of in the eighteenth
century. I suppose this might make some see Burns as a “green” poet,
but that label would only represent part of what this poem seems to
be about. The second to last stanza is the poem’s best-known, where
the poet offers a hard-won moral to the poor mouse of the title:
But
Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o mice an men
Gang aft agley,
An lea’e us nought but grief an pain,
For promis’d joy!
We have all heard these
lines, whether through the poem itself or in the many allusions that
have been inspired by them, such as John Steinbeck’s novella Of Mice
and Men. Nevertheless, this is not where the poem ends; Burns goes
on in the final stanza to contrast his life as a fellow mortal with
the mouse’s, finding that the mouse is actually better off than he
is, despite the loss of his nest: “Still,” he says, “thou art blest,
compar’d wi me! / The present only toucheth thee.” Humans suffer
more than mice because, as the speaker declares, “Och! I backward
cast my e’e, / On prospects drear! / An forward, tho I canna see, /
I guess and fear.” The distinctly human consciousness that allows us
to think “forward and backward” is not, as many eighteenth (and even
twenty-first) century philosophers have contended, a sign of the
superiority of our species over all others; in Burns’s eyes, such
consciousness makes us more prone to suffering and anxiety than
other “fellow-mortals” on the earth.
This capacity for extraordinary
sympathy made Burns’s poems stand out from many of his
contemporaries’ works. Along with this ability Burns also had a
decidedly rough bent for biting satire. This did not always win him
favor, and in several cases, he lost friends by expressing this
tendency too freely. For Burns, satire was a way of putting people
in their place; he was a principled man who believed that people
ought to be responsible and honest about themselves, even if their
honesty exposed their own faults. One of Burns’s best-known satires,
“Holy Willie’s Prayer,” exposes the hypocrite who doesn’t see his
own flaws (or perhaps just doesn’t want to admit them). As
previously mentioned, Burns had an actual target in his viewfinder
here; William Fisher was a local parish elder in Mauchline who had
instituted proceedings against Gavin Hamilton, one of Burns’s
friends, for failure to observe the Sabbath. Hamilton was known to
work in his garden on Sundays, an act which drew the ire of Fisher
and other church officials. Burns described Fisher with the
following words: he was “a rather oldish bachelor elder in the
parish of Mauchline, and much and justly famed for that polemical
chattering which ends in tipplin orthodoxy, and for that
spirtualised bawdry which refines to liquourish devotion.”
In this
poem, Fisher becomes “Holy Willie,” a figure of authority in his
community who certainly does not practice what he preaches. We
overhear Holy Willie’s prayer to God; as an adherent of Calvinism,
Holy Willie believes he is one of the elect and that everyone else
is a sinner damned to hell. Willie claims that “I am here a chosen
sample, / To show Thy grace is great and ample; / I’m here, a pillar
of Thy temple, / Strong as a rock.” The beauty of Burns’s satire is
seen in the process by which Willie disingenuously confesses his
sins, claiming that “At times I’m fash’d wi’ fleshly lust” when
“vile Self gets in”: he admits then to some sexual misconduct with
Meg, as well as fornication three times with Leezie when he was
drunk. As one of God’s elect, Willie assumes that such misbehavior
has no great consequence to him personally; in fact, as a “chosen
sample,” Willie thinks he can use God to punish his enemies: “For
Thy people’s sake,” Willie calls on God, “destroy them, / and dinna
spare.” By the end of his prayer, Willie has exposed himself more
fully than any of his enemies could have wished; he has unwittingly
testified to his own vanity, arrogance, and hatefulness.
Exposing
hypocrisy was near and dear to Burns; throughout his life,
particularly as a young man, he suffered at the hands of the
Scottish Kirk, a powerful presence of religious authority throughout
Scotland. The Kirk employed many techniques to shame sinners in
their congregations, none more despised by Burns than the “cutty
stool.” Sinners, especially young congregants who had committed the
sin of fornication, had to sit on the cutty stool in full view of
the congregation for the entire service, which could last several
hours. This punishment was not over after a single service, but
could extend for weeks on end. Burns personally suffered this public
humiliation numerous times, and it is no surprise that another of
his best-known satires, “To a Louse,” takes place within the church.
Subtitled “On Seeing one on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church,” “To a Louse”
records the progress of said louse onto the “vera topmost” brim of
Miss’s bonnet. The young Miss is decked out in full regalia, and her
bonnet is likened to the then-novel Lunardi hot-air balloons soaring
above Paris. This detail offers us some insight into Burns’s purpose
for writing about the louse; though in a country church, the Miss
(named Jenny) is acting like a “fine lady” from the city. In other
words, she is pretending to be something (or someone) she’s not.
Burn’s louse alerts us to this deception and provides the means for
a truly memorable insight offered by the poem: in the last stanza,
Burns’s speaker declares, “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us / To
see oursels as ithers see us!” In the same unwitting fashion as Holy
Willie, Jenny’s pretensions are punctured like a hot-air balloon by
the louse, a “crowlin ferlie” that is the agent of exposure and
oddly enough, social equality. Burns seems to be saying that no
matter how fine our Lunardi bonnets may be, we are all subject to
the unwanted attentions of a “crowlin ferlie” who puts us in our
place.
Anthems of social equality are also an important feature of
Burns’s poetry and songs, and none were more revolutionary than his
song entitled “Is There for Honest Poverty,” or more familiarly
known as “A Man’s a Man.” This song, written in 1795 and published
anonymously in The Glasgow Magazine, expresses an actual
revolutionary sentiment that could have gotten Burns into serious
trouble with the British government had he been known as its author.
The British were at war with the French, whose revolutionary
government was now six years old and had been heralded as an
enlightened democracy ruled by the spirit of “liberty, egality, and
fraternity.” Expressing such sentiments publicly in Britain during
this time could lead to sedition trials, for which punishment was
jail or deportation. Add to this that Burns was a government
official, working for the Excise, and you begin to understand the
risks involved in simply writing this song. It begins in the manner
of “To a Mouse” by inverting our expectations: “Is there, for Honest
Poverty, / That hings his head, an a’ that; / The coward-slave, we
pass him by, / We dare be poor for a’ that!” The equation of honesty
with poverty, again an unusual sentiment even today, becomes the
song’s principal refrain; Burns asserts that being poor does not
make a man less worthy than being rich. In fact, the song
deconstructs the typical association of wealth with virtue, claiming
that one’s rank (derived of course from wealth) is meaningless: “The
rank is but the guinea’s stamp, / The Man’s the gowd for a’ that.”
One of the memorable stanzas in the song offers a very rude portrait
of a titled lord: “Ye see yon birkie ca’d a lord,” the speaker says,
“Wha struts, an stares, an a’ that, / Tho’ hundreds worship at his
word, / He’s but a coof for a’ that.” The Scots word “coof” can be
glossed mildly as a “fool” or “lout,” though it also means “a
simpleton, a dull-witted fellow, A useless, incompetent fellow, a
spiritless, feckless person,” as well as “a coward.” The song closes
with a memorable stanza that has been described as the Scottish
Marseillase, an expression of revolutionary beliefs that generations
of readers world-wide have cherished:
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. [win
the victory]
For a'
that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be
for a' that.
These sentiments remain as powerful now as they were in
the 1790s, and Burns speaks to all of us in imagining a peaceful
future governed by “Sense” and “Worth” rather than zealotry and
fanaticism.
The last song I’d like to discuss is one you all know, at
least the chorus. “Auld Lang Syne” is truly Burns’s most well-known
work, sung worldwide every New Year’s Eve. It always puzzles me,
though, that so few people know the whole song or can even describe
what it means. We know the first stanza well-enough: “Should auld
acquaintance be forgot, / And never brought to mind? / Should auld
acquaintance be forgot, / And auld lang syne!” “Auld lang syne”
roughly translates as “a long time ago,” so as we sing, we are
asking ourselves if we should forget our old friends, friends from a
long time ago. This act of reminiscence is amplified in the song’s
chorus, where we sing “For auld lang syne, my dear, / For auld lang
syne. / We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet, / For auld lang syne.” As
the song proceeds, we go further and further back into the past,
back to our childhood where “we twa hae run about the braes, / And
pou'd the gowans fine; / But we've wander'd mony a weary fit, / Sin'
auld lang syne.” But, as in “To a Mouse,” this looking back is
painful, for the present reveals a chasm that estranges us not only
from our old friends, but also from our youth which is irretrievably
lost: “We twa hae paidl'd in the burn, / Frae morning
sun till dine; / But seas between us braid hae roar'd / Sin' auld
lang syne.” The end of the song is not as dark as this stanza might
suggest; though the past may be forever gone, we can always offer a
toast to those old times and celebrate them together, in spirit if
not in person: “And surely ye'll be your pint stowp! / And surely
I'll be mine! / And we'll tak a cup o' kindness yet, / For auld lang
syne.” This sentiment captures in my mind Burns’s appeal to the
world; these thoughts and feelings are about our common humanity,
our common griefs and pleasures. This simple song still speaks to
us, though it was written a long time ago.
The website Robert Burns
Country offers the following advice to those (such as myself) who
are about to conclude their Immortal Memory speech: “This speech
always ends with standing guests, raised glasses and an offered
toast to the immortal memory of the Bard of Ayr.” So in deference to
tradition, I ask you now to stand, and to raise your cups o
kindness, to Robert Burns, to poetry, to Scotland, to the world, and
to the IMMORTAL MEMORY.
