Читать книгу The Canongate Burns - Robert Burns - Страница 11

First published on the front page of the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.

The Simple Bard, unbroke by rules of Art,

He pours the wild effusions of the heart:

And if inspir’d, ’tis Nature’s pow’rs inspire;

Her’s all the melting thrill, and her’s the kindling fire.

Anonymous.

The Kilmarnock edition begins with four lines supposedly from an anonymous poet, wholly appropriate to the image Burns wished to project to his readers. They are, in all probability, his own composition. In his Preface, Burns coyly suggests that he does not have ‘all the advantages of learned art’ in poetry – when, in fact, he is a master craftsman in poetic form and metre. He goes on to explain that his poetry is the product of Nature’s influence on him. This projected persona is captured perfectly in the quatrain. The possibility that Burns wrote these lines was first suggested by the highly distinguished American scholar, Professor Carol McGuirk, in her excellent Robert Burns: Selected Poems (Penguin, 1993). A search of known anonymous poetry for the 18th century did not trace a potential author other than Burns. The lines are a hand-in-glove portrayal of Burns’s self-projection of himself as a poet.