Edinburgh’s taverns. The farm failing, Burns took a post in the Excise, collecting
taxes for the Crown. Expanded Poems were published in Edinburgh in 1787, and
expanded again in 1794 to include Tam o’ Shanter.The Scots Musical Museum,a
collection of all extant Scottish songs, now took up most of Burns’s creative energy.
He contributed hundreds of poems to it, often amended or rewritten.
Burns wrote variously in English and Scots, and instant fame led to some myths.
Very rarely had he ‘walked in glory and in joy, / Following his plough along the
mountainside’, as Wordsworth was to imagine him, and he gave up farming with
relief. ‘A man’s a man, for a’ that’, the refrain of his song ‘Is there for honest poverty’
has made him a standard-bearer for liberty, equality and fraternity; there are many
statues to Burns in the former USSR. He wrote indeed against rank, kirk and state,
and for whisky, liberty and the French Revolution. Yet he also joined the Dumfries
Volunteers before his death in 1796 and set a drinking song to patriotic words: ‘Does
haughty Gaul invasion threat?’ His versatility is seen in his exceptionally gifted
songs. Not all are as beautiful and touching as ‘My love is like a red, red rose’, ‘Ye
banks and braes o’ bonny Doon’ or ‘Ae fond kiss’. With the songs of love, patriotism
and sentiment, there are erotic, comic, sardonic and bawdy songs. Burns embraced
folk bawdy with zest, as in his subversive The Jolly Beggars.
Burns found his voices in the vernacular, and his Scots poems eclipse those in
English. Yet he has a general debt to neo-classical tradition, and to the 18th century’s
reductive comic irony. He created for himself a social voice in which soliloquy
sounds natural, as for example in his justly famous ‘To a Mouse On Turning Her up
in Her Nest with the Plough, November 1785’, ending
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane alone
In proving foresightmay be vain:
The best-laid schemes o’Micean’Men
Gang aft agley, often go amiss
An’lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, leave
For promis’d joy!Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The presentonly toucheth thee:
But Och! I backwardcast my e’e, eye
On prospects drear!
An’forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guessan’fear!These and many other of his famous lines express sentiments to which every
bosom returns an echo. This is an Augustan quality. Contemporary readers would
have recognized his ‘Simple bard’ epigraph as from Pope, and ‘The Jolly Beggars’ as
a miniatureBeggar’s Opera; it was also published as ‘Love and Liberty. A Cantata’. He
wrote satirical verse letters, and in ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ joyfully converted heroi-
comical techniques to the mockery of hypocritical piety.Tam o’ Shanteritself is a
mock-heroic Augustan poem in the rogue-realism tradition. This 18th-century
irony plays below the surface of Sir Walter Scott, but bares its edge in later Anglo-
Scots such as Byron, Macaulay and J. S. Mill.
The energy of the wonderful Tam o’ Shanterallows its audience not to notice its
co mplexity. Burns knew it was his most finished piece, and, since it is ideal for
convivial social recitation, it is a suitable testament. According to Emerson, Burns
offers ‘the only example in history of a language made classic through the genius of
THE AGE OF JOHNSON 225