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| The Twa Dogs | Burns and the Belle |
Here are two Burns Night essays. The Twa Dogs is about the spiritual kinship of Burns and Byron, written by my good friend Scott Slater. Burns and the Belle was penned by my drouthy crony, Paul Statt. They're the sort of original compositions - written with homespun scholarship - that make wonderful presentations at a Burns Supper. |
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The Twa Dogs by Scott Slater |
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I am invited here tonight by the good graces of our chairman Bennett Fischer, who asked me to put together something for this annual gathering celebrating the memory and achievement of the great Scottish poet Robert Burns, on what would have been his 240th birthday. My subject tonight concerns the connections between Burns and another poet of Scottish descent, George Gordon, the 6th Lord Byron. Byron's birthday is also in January, just three days before Burns, though of course they were born in different years, Burns in 1759, and Byron in 1788. I imagine that Byron would have been pleased to be included in any celebration of Burns's life and work, as he greatly admired Burns, and at one stage of his life used to gather together with some of his drouthy cronies and read Burns's bawdy letters out loud. ("...it grieves me that I cannot dine with you tomorrow," he wrote to a friend in 1813., "...as I leave town (for a day only)...Burns nauseousness shall be kept for our next after-dinner - or for you and I on the eve of Hodgson's happiness (as people call it delicately)..." I will begin with talking briefly about Byron's Scots ancestry and his early life in Aberdeen. Byron's mother was Catherine Gordon of Gight, daughter of the twelfth laird of Gight. Byron biographer Leslie Marchand tells us that "From their beginnings through the sixteenth century the Gight Gordons had a record of violence and banditry, of feuding and murder, which pales into insignificance the peccadilloes of the Byrons. With due allowance for the lawlessness of the time and place, the Gight Gordons were among the most notorious of the Scottish lairds for their defiance of law and order." There are several examples in the records of the time. On October 12, 1564, Sir George Gordon, the second laird, was arraigned before the Privy Council along with his son and eighteen clansmen. The charges concerned "the crewale invvassion of William Con of Auchry and hurting and wounding of him in divers parts of his body to the great effusion of his blude; and striking and draging with a brydill three of Con's cotters and otheris." From Marchand: "In 1581, the Mowats (a rival clan) having complained of the depredations and destructive raids of the Gordons, a messenger of the Privy Council was sent with letters against William Gordon (the fifth laird) charging him to answer for certain crimes. The messenger would have been shot had not the laird been restrained. Hurling him into the hall, William Gordon seized the letters, cast them into a dish of broth, and with a dagger at his heart forced the officer to 'sup and swallow thame'."Byron's mother was the sole surviving child of the twelfth laird, another George Gordon. She inherited a fortune worth about 30,000 pounds, and the dilapidated family castle in Gight. When she was twenty she was seduced by, and married to, Byron's ne'er-do-well father, John, (known as "Mad Jack") who had already run through his first wife's fortune (as well as outliving her), as he was soon to do with most of the fortune of Catherine Gordon. John Byron deserted Catherine and the 2 and a 1/2 year-old Byron, (also named George Gordon) in 1790. He lived a dissolute life in France, consorting with actresses and serving girls, until he died, penniless, in 1791. Catherine Gordon and her son, dependent upon the kindness of various relatives, moved to Aberdeen and rented an apartment on Broad Street in the new section of town. Byron attended the local grammar school, with 150 other boys. He later recalled some of his reading of the time, "The Arabian Nights, all travels, or histories...after these, I preferred the history of naval actions, Don Quixote and Smollet's novels, particularly Roderick Ransom, and I was passionate for Roman History. When a boy, I could never bear to read any poetry whatever without disgust and reluctance." In 1795-96 Byron contracted scarlet fever and was sent to the Highlands (to the valley of the Dee river about forty miles north of Aberdeen) to convalesce. Byron, dressed in the Gordon tartan, spent many happy days roaming the countryside ("My cap was the bonnet, my cloak was the plaid;"). Loch-na-Garr was visible from his lodgings, and Byron speaks of his boyhood wanderings and imaginings fondly in the poem of the same name. His Highland interlude was one he never forgot. In 1814, five days after his 34th birthday, Byron wrote (to Sir Walter Scott) "...But my 'heart warms to the Tartan,' or to anything of Scotland which reminds me of Aberdeen and other parts not so far from the Highlands as that town-(about Invercauld & Braemar where I was sent to drink Goat's Fey in 1795-96 [following a?] threatened decline after the scarlett fever)." Byron and his mother lived in Aberdeen until he was ten years-old, when as a result of his paternal great-uncle's (known as "The Wicked Lord") death in May of 1798, he became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale. Catherine Gordon was insufferable, bragging about her son the Lord to anyone who would listen, prompting her son to ask of her "whether she perceived any difference in him since he had been made a Lord, as he perceived none himself." There was worse to come. From Marchand: "But the greatest embarrassment came when his new title, 'Dominus de Byron' was pronounced without warning or previous explanation in the Grammar School. 'Unable to give utterance to the usual answer "adsum," Byron stood silent amid the general stare of his school fellows and burst into tears.' " In August Byron and his mother left Aberdeen for England. Byron was never to set foot in Scotland again.But the most famous thing Byron wrote about Burns is from a journal entry of December 13, 1813. "Allen...has leant me a quantity of Burns's unpublished, and never-to-be-published, Letters. They are full of oaths and obscene songs. What an antithetical mind! - tenderness, roughness - delicacy, coarseness - sentiment, sensuality - soaring and groveling, dirt and deity - all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!Thus the appeal of Burns to Byron becomes clear - it is the appeal of one like personality for another. Byron had not yet found his voice, and all his greatest work lay before him. Yet it is clear that what Byron calls antitheticism, (which was not unlike what Keats later called Double Negativity, the idea of holding opposing ideas in one's mind simultaneously ) held a powerful intellectual attraction for Byron. When Byron finally discovered a poetical meter perfect for his voice and personality, the Italian ottava rima (as Byron employed it, eight 10-syllabled lines, rhyming abababcc) in which he wrote his masterpiece, Don Juan, the experience was exhilarating to him. In a long letter to his publisher John Murray (another Scot - Murray's father had dropped the highland 'Mac' as unfashionable in the anti-Scottish climate of 1768 London; In Lowland Scotland and England the Highlander was, and had been for centuries "an object of hatred, fear, ridicule, and contempt.") Byron attacked the sort of critics who objected to the antitheticism of Don Juan. "I will answer your friend (Francis Cohen) who objects to the quick succession of fun and gravity....His metaphor is that 'we are never scorched and drenched at the same time!' - Blessings on his experience! - Ask him these questions about 'scorching and drenching'. - Did he never play at Cricket or walk a mile in hot weather? - did he never spill a dish of tea over his testicles in handing the cup to his charmer to the great shame of his nankeen breeches? - did he never swim in the sea at Noonday with the Sun in his eyes and on his head - which all the foam of ocean could not cool? did he never draw his foot out of a tub of too hot water damning his eyes and his valet's? did he never inject for a Gonorrhea? - or make water through an ulcerated Urethra? - was he ever in a Turkish bath - that marble paradise of sherbet and sodomy? - was he ever in a cauldron of boiling oil like St. John? - or in the sulphureous waves of hell? (where he ought to be for his 'scorching and drenching at the same time') did he never tumble into a river or lake fishing - and sit in his wet cloathes in the boat - or on the bank afterwards 'scorched and drenched' like a true sportsman?"Both Burns and Byron disliked anyone tinkering with their poetry, or wanting them to change the nature of it, though both wrote some bad poetry attempting to appease the literati. When a friend of Burn's asked him if any of the Edinburgh literati had "mended" his poems, Burns replied, "Sir, the gentlemen remind me of some spinsters in my country who spin their thread so fine that it is neither fit for weft nor woof." All of Burns's best work is in his unique mixture of vernacular Scots and English, rather than the popular neo- classical form of the day. A friend once bet Burns that he could not write an Ode to Spring "...on an original plan." (or in other words, something fresh and new of the same type) after they had read one written in the fasionable neo-classical English of the day. "I accepted" (the bet) Burns wrote, in a letter to George Thomson, "and pledged myself to bring in the verdant fields, -- the budding flowers, -- the chrystal streams, -- the melody of the groves, -- and a love story into the bargain, and yet be original. Here follows the piece, and wrote for music too!" Ode to SpringBurns's discovery of the "Standart Habbie", now known as "Burns's Stanza" (The standart habbie rhymes aaabab, To A Mouse being a good example of the form) allowed Burns the same improvisational exhilaration which was later to excite Byron when he discovered ottava rima. Burns scholar Donald Low confirms this. "Burns was lucky enough to discover the verse form which emancipated his Muse early in his poetic career, when his energies and intellectual ambition as a man and poet demanded self-expression. The discovery dramatically increased the range of what he could say in verse, allowing the natural man to speak...something similar took place when ...Byron began to experiment with ottava rima in 1808." For anyone who has read Don Juan, this is abundantly clear. (If you haven't, I highly recommend it - Don Juan is very fresh, very funny, very "modern" feeling). It was Byron's misfortune that Don Juan was published at the dawn of the Victorian Age rather than at the close of the much more licentious 18th century, for Byron was reviled by his critics. "Moral vomit, the gloating brutality of a wretched debaucee" wrote one of them. John G. Lockhart (yet another Scot, later to become both a biographer of Burns and Sir Walter Scott's son-in-law) in particular wrote about Byron and Don Juan (in the influential Blackwood's Magazine) using language that sounds like the language Byron used when he was admiring Burns's antithetical mind in his journal, except that Lockhart is using these traits to condemn Byron. "The moral strain of the whole poem is pitched in the lowest key - and if the genius of the author lifts him now and then out of his pollution, it seems as if he regretted the elevation, and made all haste to descend again," Lockhart wrote. He goes on to complain that Byron is prostituting his talents, wasting his genius, that his flippant and facetious tone only harm the poem, that everywhere are signs of greatness and beauty, but inevitably they are followed by sarcasm and mockery. Burns's critics in his day had similar, if milder, complaints. The influential literary critic Henry Mackenzie, who liked and promoted Burns, said of The Kilmarnock edition, Burns's first book of poems (and, incidentally, one of the most valuable rare books in the world) that Burns's "Muse had sometimes been a little unguarded in her ridicule of hypocrisy...When we reflect on his rank in life, the habits to which he must have been subject, and the society in which he must have mixed, we regret perhaps more than wonder, that delicacy should be so often offended in perusing a volume in which there is so much to interest and please us." Neither Burns nor Byron would have any of this. "I have the advice of some very judicious friends among the literati here," Burns wrote in March of 1787, "but with them I sometimes find it necessary to claim the privilege of thinking for myself." Burns, at the height of his lionization in Edinburgh, was gentle. Byron, chafing with impatience at the cautious reception to Don Juan, was less so. From a letter to Douglas Kinnaird from Venice, October 26, 1818; "As to Don Juan, confess, confess -- you dog and be candid -- that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing -- it may be bawdy but is it not good English? It may be profligate but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? -- and tooled in a post-chaise?--in a hackney coach?--in a gondola?--against a wall?-- in a court carriage?--in a vis a vis--?on a table?--and under it? I have written about a hundred stanzas of a third Canto, but it is damned modest-- the outcry has frightened me.-- I had such projects for the Don--but the Cant is so much stronger than Cunt -- now a days, -- that the benefit of experience in a man who had well weighed the worth of both monosyllables--must be lost to despairing posterity."Burns, late in his life, wrote a similarly exasperated letter to George Thomson, to whom he was contributing his songs without payment. "Do you think that the sober, gin-horse routine of existence could inspire a man with life, and love, and joy -- could fire him with enthusiasm, or melt him with pathos, equal to the genius of your Book? -- No! No!! -- Whenever I want to be more than ordinary in song; to be in some degree equal to your diviner airs; do you imagine I fast and pray for the celestial emanation? -- Tout au contraire ! I have a glorious recipie, the very one that for his own use was invented by the Divinity of Healing and Poesy when erst he piped to the flocks of Admetus. -- I put myself on a regimen of admiring a fine woman; and in proportion to the adorability of her charms, in proportion you are delighted with my verses."It took a third great genius of Scottish literature, Sir Walter Scott (who incidentally met both Burns and Byron, and outlived them both), to make the most astute connection between the two poets. "Burns, in depth of poetical feeling, in strong shrewd sense to balance and regulate this, in the tact to make his poetry tell by connecting it with the stream of public thought and the sentiment of the age...was much more like Lord Byron than any other person to whom Lord B. says he has been compared....they were both great poets...the most genuine poetical geniuses of my time and half a century before me."Incidentally, and I realize digressively, Byron loved Scott's work, especially his novels. From Byron's Ravenna Journal, January 5, 1821; "Read the conclusion, for the fiftieth time (I have read all W. Scott's novels at least fifty times) of the third series of 'Tales of my Landlord',- grand work - (the) Scotch Fielding, as well as great English poet -- wonderful man! I long to get drunk with him."There is much more that could be said about Byron and Scott, (or for that matter Scott and Burns) but they are subjects for another Burns Night. The last comments Byron ever made about Scotland are in Don Juan, in the tenth of the sixteen Cantos he completed before he died in Missolonghi, Greece, in 1824. Byron was thirty-six years-old. Robert Burns was thirty-seven when he died, in Dumfries, Scotland, in 1796. I will end with a brief reading, two stanzas, from Canto Ten of Don Juan. Byron is addressing Francis Jeffry, co-founder and editor of the Edinburgh Review; And when I use the phrase of 'Auld Lang Syne!' |
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Burns and the Belle by Paul Statt Only an Old Amherst Boy could have made this curious connection. |
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Thank you Connie and Patrick, our hosts, and Bennett, our Burns Supper chairman. Honored friends of Robert Burns, I rise tonight because "to be great is to be misunderstood." And Robert Burns is a great poet. Other speakers, erudite and learned, have praised Robert Burns tonight as a Scot and as a man. But I come to laud Robert Burns as a poet qua poet. A fact both curious and strange is at the root of my talk this evening, an odd paragraph I read recently: "Burns, and the sentimental folk-songs he made popular, became at one time almost a second language to her, so that she phrased a few passages of tender feeling in the Scottish dialect."The curious poet is Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson and Robert Burns never met. If they had, it does seem that it would be something like the bad blind date from hell: surely Dickinson and Burns represent a chasm not to be bridged. The virgin and "rantin rovin Robbie." The muse of "guid Scotch drink" and she who "tastes a liquor never brewed." "The Recluse of Amherst" and "The Ploughman Poet." But both suffer quotation marks at the hands of the mythologists. Robbie was not merely the rake, nor Emily the spinster. Dickinson, as a poet, actually had much in common with Burns: an intense passionate love for the home land, a rebellious awe at a stern and unforgiving church, the King James Bible, a sharp satiric wit, images drawn from the simple home life and nature, and not least a poetic form that was lyrical in the true sense: both wrote songs that we now know as poems. These are the posts and beams of which great poetry is constructed. And yet there is also such a thing as genius. Dickinson, herself an untutored poetic genius, said she knew it was poetry when it made the hair stand up on the back of her neck. She recognized Burns' genius and imitated him: in poetry as in all else the greatest compliment. Burns inspired her, as he still must inspire every true poet. A very early poem of hers-number 2 in her ouevre, and one of only a handful she ever published, includes this clear imitation: Good bye Sir, I am goingNote that "e'e" and "Bonnie Doon." These passages of tender feeling are fascinating to the Dickinson scholar; but their charms may be too slight for a Burns Supper. I will not trouble you with her morbidly self-conscious Puritan response to Tam O' Shanter. But here is a shorter Dickinson verse and part of the slightly longer Burns original that inspired it: Poor little heart!"Then dinna care! Then dinna care." Here's to thy healt,h, my bonie lass!So here's to your health, you bonnie belle of Amherst, and yours, you birkie bletherin' Bard of Caledonia: "Guid night and joy be wi thee." Paul Statt January 30, 2000 |
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