Читать книгу The Canongate Burns - Robert Burns - Страница 18

First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.

Lament in rhyme, lament in prose,

Wi’ saut tears tricklin down your nose; salt

Our Bardie’s fate is at a close,

Past a’ remead! remedy

5 The last, sad cape-stane of his woes; coping stone (final weight)

Poor Mailie’s dead!

It’s no the loss of warl’s gear, worldly goods

That could sae bitter draw the tear, so

Or mak our Bardie, dowie, wear drooping/gloomy

10 The mourning weed:

He’s lost a friend an’ neebor dear neighbour

In Mailie dead.

Thro’ a’ the toun she trotted by him; town

A lang half-mile she could descry him; long

15 Wi’ kindly bleat, when she did spy him,

She ran wi’ speed:

A friend mair faithfu’ ne’er cam nigh him, more, came near

Than Mailie dead.

I wat she was a sheep o’ sense, wot

20 An’ could behave hersel wi’ mense: tact/grace

I’ll say’t, she never brak a fence, broke

Thro’ thievish greed.

Our Bardie, lanely, keeps the spence parlour

Sin’ Mailie’s dead.

25 Or, if he wanders up the howe, glen

Her livin image in her yowe ewe

Comes bleatin till him, owre the knowe, over the hill edge

For bits o’ bread;

An’ down the briny pearls rowe roll

30 For Mailie dead.

She was nae get o’ moorlan tips, not born from

Wi’ tawted ket, an’ hairy hips; matted fleece

For her forbears were brought in ships,

Frae ’yont the TWEED: from beyond

35 A bonier fleesh ne’er cross’d the clips fleece, sheep shears

Than Mailie dead.

Wae worth the man wha first did shape woe befall

That vile, wanchancie thing — a raep! dangerous, rope

It maks guid fellows girn an’ gape, makes good, facial contortion

40 Wi’ chokin dread;

An’ Robin’s bonnet wave wi’ crape mourning

For Mailie dead.

O a’ ye Bards on bonie DOON!

An’ wha on AIRE your chanters tune! who, Ayr, bagpipes

45 Come, join the melancholious croon

O’ Robin’s reed!

His heart will never get aboon! above/over

His Mailie’s dead!

This was probably written in 1785–6 as a companion piece for publication with the preceding Mailie monologue. Again the tone of the poem is mixed. Burns employs the six-line Standard Habbie used in vernacular eighteenth-century elegy while partly parodying the content of these poems. His most specified source is probably Fergusson’s Elegy on the Death of Mr David Gregory with its repetitive end-line ‘Sin Gregory’s dead’. He is also partly sending up his own emotions. This is emphasised by the recent discovery from a London saleroom catalogue for May 1962 of an hitherto unknown last stanza:

She was nae get o’ runted rams,

Wi’ woo’ like goat’s an’ legs like trams;

She was the flower o’ Fairlee lambs,

A famous breed:

Now Robin, greetin’, chows the hams

O’ Mailie dead.

This peasant practicality would have been too much for his genteel audience. On the other hand, there is real affection for its pedigree beauty. This was the man who was still surrounding himself with pet sheep at Ellisland. Further, as in his mouse poem, the lives of men and beasts are both brutally intruded upon not only by lethal elemental forces but by human-inspired, cruel economic and political forces. The accidentally throttled beast has its more sinister legally garrotted human counterpart:

Wae worth the man wha first did shape

That vile chancie thing – a rape!

It maks guid fellows girn an’ gape,

Wi’ chokin dread …