Never Gallop Alone
ROBERT BURNS (376 pp.)--David Daiches--Rmehart ($3.50).
Robert Burns "first committed the sin of rhyme," as he put it himself, at 15:
0 once I lov'd a bonny lass
Ay and I love her still
And whilst that virtue warms my breast
I'll love my handsome Nell.
It was a minor offense, for 15. Posterity was shortly to commit a greater one in typing Robert Burns's career as a rake's progress. An early prohibitionist named Curne gave the legend a head start 150 years ago; in a biography written shortly after Burns's death, he portrayed him as a kind of Paul Bunyan of literary bad boys: a convivial roisterer of unslakable thirst and insatiable lust.
Like most legends, Burns's is fact-resistant, but responsible scholars try to retouch it occasionally. Cornell University's David Daiches (rhymes with gracious) is the latest to try, and does one of the best jobs. Critic Daiches (Virginia Woolf, Robert Louis Stevenson) scans the poet's lines more closely than his life. Even so, he manages to clear away enough romantic rubble to expose a Burns who could say: "Even in the hour of social mirth, my gaiety is the madness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner." Burns came by his melancholy early and honestly.
He was born in 1759, in an Ayrshire clay cottage built by his tenant-farming father. Within a week, the roof blew in on little Rab (no one ever called him "Bobbie"). He was too young to interpret the omen, but father Burns had a flair for failure. At nine, Rab was taken out of the little parish school and put to work on the farm. When he died at 37, it was the rheumatic heart acquired in youth not drink, that killed him. He once described his life as "an uphill gallop from the cradle to the grave."
He rarely galloped alone. It was Nelly
Kilpatrick, he later recalled, who initiated
him in a certain delicious Passion, which
in spite of acid Disappointment, gin-horse
Prudence and bookworm Philosophy, I
hold to be the first of human joys, our
dearest pleasure here below." After Nelly
came Peggy Thomson, Alison Begbie, and
Elizabeth Paton, who bore him his first
illegitimate child. There were to be others.
When Jean Armour became pregnant in
1786, Burns was ready for marriage, but
her solid, respectable father would not
consider him as a son-in-law even "to
make an honest woman" of Jean. (They married eventually, in 1788.) Proud and sensitive, Burns was bitterly hurt by the rebuff, sought comfort in the arms of Mary ("Highland Mary") Campbell. He made plans to leave for Jamaica, but first he wanted to publish some of his poems as a valedictory to Scotland.
One of the warmest and liveliest of them had been written with Jean Armour and her unborn baby in mind (the baby turned out to be twins):
O wha my babie-clouts will buy? O wha will tent me when I cry? Wha will kiss me where I lie?
The rantin dog, the daddie o't. O wha will own he did the faut? O wha will buy the groanin maut?* 0 wha will tell me how to ca't?/-
The rantin dog, the daddie o't.
When I mount the creepie-chair,* Wha will sit beside me there? Gie me Rob, I'll seek nae mair, The rantin dog, the daddie o't.
Wha will crack to me my lane?/- Wha will make me fidgin fain?** Wha will kiss me o'er again?
The rantin dog, the daddie o't.
His first book was published in the summer of 1786 and was an immediate success. "Rab the rhymer" became "Caledonia's bard" and gave up his trip to Jamaica. The Edinburgh literati lionized him as the "Heaven-taught plowman." Critic Daiches thinks that Burns shrewdly anticipated the role, knew more about Scottish and English literary traditions than he ever let on.
As a poet, Burns never aspired to, or achieved, profundity. He spoke unashamedly from and to the heart. Someone once said that he celebrated "humanity caught in the act." At the center of the humanity he caught was Robert Burns himself.
*Ale for the nurse, /-Name it. *Repentance seat.
/-Talk to me in my loneliness
**Eager and excited.
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