On Thursday the 25th of January 1759, an Alloway midwife delivered Agnes, wife ofWilliam Burnes, farmer, of a son who was christened Robert after his paternal grandfather. He would die just 37 years later, of chronic rheumatic fever in Dumfries, leaving a desolate widow, six children under the age of ten - and a body of song and poetry which will ever be treasured as one of the jewels in the crown of our literature.
This, then, is the story of a man who was not only a poet, a song writer and collector, but also a ruthless opponent of hypocrisy and intolerance - and a brave advocate of social and parliamentary reform. It is the story of the young farmer whose writings, first laid before his friends and neighbours in the farmlands of Ayrshire, were to become the property and the patrimony - of Mankind.
The family left the Alloway cottage when Burns was just 7 years old and the poet grew to maturity on his father’s Ayrshire farms of Mount Oliphant and Lochlie. A deeply intelligent boy, he was bilingual in Scots and English, familiar with the classics of Greece and Rome in translation - and with the new empirical philosophy of Locke and Hume which were to guide his thought ever after.
When William Burnes died of tuberculosis in the spring of 1784, Robert and his brother Gilbert took their widowed mother and their sisters to the farm of Mossgiel which lies between the village of Mauchline and the town of Kilmarnock. And here, the poetry began to come.
This was also the time of the development of his championship of the dignity and the worth of the common man. His poetry sings of the freedoms which must be conceded by society and state in order to preserve that dignity and reflect that worth. He wrote in the great Epistle to Davie, his friend David Sillar, a minor poet:
Nothing was too small to be beneath his notice. Ploughing for his spring barley in the parks of Mossgiel, he drove the ploughshare, the coulter, through the nest of a fieldmouse. The famous poem ends with a sudden switch from the particular to the general - a note of philosophic induction;
However, Burns was in trouble. Jean Armour, daughter of a Mauchline master mason, was pregnant. Her father, a pillar of the Kirk, was not aware of the liaison between his daughter and Burns whom he regarded as a dangerous, irreligious, freethinking rakehell. Told of his daughter’s condition, James Armour fainted clean away. He was revived with a “stiff cordial” and got up demanding to know the name of the father. He was told - and down he went again.
Burns seriously considered emigration to theWest Indies at this time - but was strongly advised against it by his neighbour Prof. Dugald Stewart who held the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He was told that his way ahead lay not on the Atlantic, but on the high road to the Capital.
In Edinburgh he was lionised. He was the star of the social season in the winter of 1786 - 7, introduced to high society by his Ayrshire patrons. He knelt and kissed the unmarked grave of his mentor Robert Fergusson in the Canongate kirkyard, over whom he was to erect a handsome inscribed stone. Alison Cockburn, author of “The Flowers of the Forest” wrote to a friend; “The town is agog with the ploughman poet… And Prof. Stewart remarked that the adulation he received …would have turned any head but his own.”
Burns had been invited by James Johnson to collaborate in the collection and publication of the large - and largely neglected - corpus of Scottish vernacular folksong. Johnson was about to bring out the first of six volumes of The Scots Musical Museum of which Burns was to become literary editor. And so, in May 1787, armed with the proceeds of the Edinburgh edition of his works, the new national bard set off from Edinburgh to discover the songs of his homeland.
Burns undertook three song-collecting tours in the spring summer and autumn of 1787; first to the Borders then to the West Highlands and finally there came his 600 mile great northern tour with William Nicol, Classics Master of the High School of Edinburgh.
Throughout these tours the poet took down, from the singing of men and women of all conditions and backgrounds, the traditional folk songs of his country. From then to the end of his life he saw published, some 370 of our songs in the Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum and in Thompson’s Select Scottish Airs. The life of Scotland is in these songs. There are songs of farming, songs of fighting, songs of meeting, songs of loving, songs of parting. Just as Raeburn was to capture the images of that remarkable generation of Enlightenment Scotland so Burns captured their music, their songs, their aspirations - and their history.
But the poet could not tour the country and collect songs for a living. He returned to farming at Ellisland in Nithsdale, seven miles above the city of Dumfries. His tenancy of the farm lasted but three years, for although the riverside scenery was outstanding - it was stony ground. A verse, missing from the Book of Genesis was, said Burns…“And the Lord riddled all creation - and the riddlings he threw on Ellisland ! ”
Here Burns began his career as an Excise Officer - and also made the contact which was to produce his most famous narrative poem. At the home of his neighbour and friend Robert Riddell of Glenriddell, he was introduced to the famous English antiquary Captain Francis Grose, who came originally from Surrey.
Grose, going to Ayrshire to collect materials for a forthcoming book commissioned a poem on witchcraft to accompany the article on Alloway Kirk in his book. And that is how the splendid Tam O’ Shanter rode out into literary history from the pages of Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland.
In 1791 Robert and Jean Burns moved their young family to Dumfries where his last 5 years were to be spent. His health began materially to fail. He was subject to repeated attacks of what we suspect to have been chronic rheumatic fever, a disease for which there was then no treatment.
He was also in trouble for the radical political opinions which he never cared to hide. The poet was not a revolutionary but he was a radical and a reformer, a hazardous position in the Britain of 1792 where the Government of William Pitt was extremely edgy in the light of the French revolution now in full swing across the Channel.
Burns was carpeted by his Excise superiors and formally reminded that he was paid to act, not think. But by this time he had begun to die - and death came for him slowly. Chronic rheumatic fever was the diagnosis first advanced by the physician Sir James Crichton-Brown and is generally agreed today.
His own physician, Dr. Maxwell, sent him to sea bathing at Brow Well on the Solway. He knew that death was close, for it is near Brow that the great river Nith, having flowed past his old farm of Ellisland and then past his house in Dumfries town, finally reaches the Solway - and its journey’s end.
His own end came on Thursday 21st July 1796. Four days later, to the strains of Handel’s Dead March from Saul, his coffin was taken on a gun carriage from the Town House of Dumfries before thousands of silent mourners. Jean Armour was not among them. She was in labour with her last child, Maxwell, who was being born even as his father was being borne to his burying in St Michael’s Kirkyard.
The crowds dispersed and there then followed the short midsummer night. The day after the funeral was a glorious cloudless day of High Summer and on that day began the poet’s last journey - to immortality.
Professor David Purdie, Edinburgh