The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

Because of its use of Scots dialect, the language spoken by most eighteenth-century Scottish people (lower and upper class alike), and because, in addition, of its lyricism and engagement with folk culture, Burns's verse is often said to anticipate William Wordsworth's idea of a poetry founded on "a selection of language really used by men." This account is based primarily on his songs. By far the major portion of the poems that he published under his own name are concerned with men and manners and are written in the literary forms that had been favored by earlier eighteenth- century poets. They include brilliant satire in a variety of modes, a number of fine verse epistles to friends and fellow poets, and one masterpiece of mock-heroic (or at any rate seriocomic) narrative, "Tarn o' Shanter." It can be argued that, next to Pope, Burns is the greatest eighteenth-century master of these literary types. (Byron would later claim those forms for his own generation.) Yet Burns's writings in satire, epistle, and mock-heroic are remote from Pope's in their heartiness and verve, no less than in their dialect and intricate stanza forms. The reason for the difference is that Burns turned for his models not to Horace and the English neoclassic tradition but to the native tradition that had been established in the golden age of Scottish poetry by Bobert Henryson, William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and other Scottish Chaucerians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He knew this literature through his eighteenth-century Scottish predecessors, especially Allan Bamsay and Bobert Fergusson, who had collected some of the old poems and written new ones based on the old models. Burns improved greatly on these predecessors, but he derived from them much that is characteristic in his literary forms, subjects, diction, and stanzas.

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GREEN GROW THE RASHES / 131

Burns's songs, which number more than three hundred, have, however, in themselves been enough to sustain his poetic reputation. They made him, for a start, a central figure for his contemporaries' discussions of how music, valued by them for awakening sympathies that reason could not rouse, might serve as the foundation of a national identity. (William Wordsworth would explore this new notion of "national music"�of ethnically marked melody�in his 1805 poem "The Solitary Reaper.") But beyond being the bard of Scots nationalism, Burns is a songwriter for all English- speaking people. Evidence of that standing is supplied each New Year's Eve, when, moved once again to acknowledge their common bondage to time, men and women join hands and sing "Auld Lang Syne," to an old tune that Burns refitted with his new words.

The texts printed here are based on The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, ed. James Kinsley, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1968).

Green grow the rashes1

Chorus

Green grow the rashes,0 O; rushes Green grow the rashes, O; The sweetest hours that e'er I spend,

Are spent among the lasses, O.

i There's nought but care on ev'ry han', In ev'ry hour that passes, O: What signifies the life o' man, An' 'twere na for the lasses, O.

Chorus

The warly� race may riches chase, worldly An' riches still may fly them, O; An' tho' at last they catch them fast, Their hearts can ne'er enjoy them, O.

Chorus

3 But gie me a canny" hour at e'en, quiet My arms about my Dearie, O; An' warly cares, an' warly men, May a' gae tapsalteerie,0 O! topsy-turvy Chorus

4 For you sae douse,0 ye sneer at this, sober Ye're nought but senseless asses, O: The wisest Man2 the warl' saw, He dearly lov'd the lasses, O.

Chorus

1. Bums's revision of a song long current in a Online, number of versions, most of them bawdy . A record- 2. King Solomon, ing of this song may be found at Norton Literature

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132 / ROBERT BURNS

5 Auld Nature swears, the lovely Dears Her noblest work she classes, O: Her prentice0 han' she try'd on man, apprentice An' then she made the lasses, O.

Chorus

1784 1787

Holy Willie's Prayer1

And send the Godly in a pet to pray�

Pope

Argument

Holy Willie was a rather oldish batchelor Elder in the parish of Mauchline, and much and justly famed for that polemical chattering which ends in tippling Orthodoxy, and for that Spiritualized Bawdry which refines to Liquorish Devotion.� In a Sessional process with a gentleman in Mauchline, a Mr. Gavin Hamilton, Holy Willie, and his priest, Father Auld, after full hearing in the Presbytry of Ayr, came off but second best; owing partly to the oratorical powers of Mr. Robt. Aiken, Mr. Hamilton's Counsel; but chiefly to Mr. Ham- ilton's being one of the most irreproachable and truly respectable characters in the country.�On losing his Process, the Muse overheard him at his devotions as follows�

0 thou that in the heavens does dwell! Wha, as it pleases best thysel, Sends ane to heaven and ten to h-11,

A' for thy glory! 5 And no for ony gude or ill They've done before thee.2

1 bless and praise thy matchless might, When thousands thou has left in night, That I am here before thy sight,