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On Turning One Down, with the Plough, in April, 1786

First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.

Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow’r, small

Thou’s met me in an evil hour;

For I maun crush amang the stoure must, among, dust

Thy slender stem:

5 To spare thee now is past my pow’r,

Thou bonie gem. pretty

Alas! it’s no thy neebor sweet, not, neighbour

The bonie Lark, companion meet! handsome

Bending thee ’mang the dewy weet! wet

10 Wi’ spreckl’d breast,

When upward-springing, blythe, to greet

The purpling East.

Cauld blew the bitter-biting North cold

Upon thy early, humble birth;

15 Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth

Amid the storm,

Scarce rear’d above the Parent-earth

Thy tender form.

The flaunting flow’rs our Gardens yield,

20 High shelt’ring woods and wa’s maun shield; walls shall

But thou, beneath the random bield shelter

O’ clod or stane, turf, stone

Adorns the histie stibble-field, dry, stubble

Unseen, alane. alone

25 There, in thy scanty mantle clad,

Thy snawie bosom sun-ward spread, snow white

Thou lifts thy unassuming head

In humble guise;

But now the share uptears thy bed, ploughshare/blade

30 And low thou lies!

Such is the fate of artless Maid,

Sweet flow’ret of the rural shade!

By love’s simplicity betray’d,

And guileless trust;

35 Till she, like thee, all soil’d, is laid

Low i’ the dust.

Such is the fate of simple Bard,

On Life’s rough ocean luckless starr’d!

Unskilful he to note the card chart

40 Of prudent Lore, wisdom

Till billows rage, and gales blow hard,

And whelm him o’er!

Such fate to suffering Worth is giv’n,

Who long with wants and woes has striv’n,

45 By human pride or cunning driv’n

To Mis’ry’s brink;

Till, wrench’d of ev’ry stay but HEAV’N,

He, ruin’d, sink!

Ev’n thou who mourn’st the Daisy’s fate,

50 That fate is thine — no distant date;

Stern Ruin’s plough-share drives elate,

Full on thy bloom,

Till crush’d beneath the furrow’s weight

Shall be thy doom!

Henry Mackenzie, a frequent kiss of death for twentieth-century critical taste, waxed as eloquently about this poem as ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’:

I have seldom met with an image more truly pastoral than that of the lark in the second stanza. Such strokes as these mark the pencil of the poet, which delineates Nature with the precision, yet with the delicate colouring of beauty and taste. (Low, Critical Heritage, p. 69).

Burns’s own account of the poem in a letter to John Kennedy in April 1786 seems to suggest that he had produced a mawkish poem compatible with Mackenzie’s cloying response:

I have here … inclosed a small piece, the very latest of my productions. I am a good deal pleased with some sentiments in it myself, as they are just the native querulous feelings of a heart which, as the elegantly melting Gray says, “Melancholy has marked for her own” (Letter 27).

Certainly this is what Daiches (pp. 154–6) believes and he is also correct in saying that the inherent danger of sentimentality in animal poetry is even more extreme when dealing with plant life. Burns (Letter 56) could certainly descend to terrible bathos in this branch of his endeavours as he not infrequently set out his sentimentally-baited traps for socially superior women: ‘Even the hoary Hawthorn twig that shot across the way, what heart at such a time, must have been interested in its welfare, and wished it to be preserved from the rudely browsing cattle, or the withering eastern Blast?’

This poem, however, is not self-promotingly narcissistic. Nor is it a mere piece of lyric natural description as Mackenzie, probably deliberately, certainly imperceptively, remarked. It is as political as its ‘Mouse’ and ‘Louse’ companion pieces. Like the mass of men, the daisy has to eke out its dangerously exposed existence outwith the walled security of the aristocratic garden flowers. The specific analogies of the daisy with the human world are all recurrent archetypes of suffering in Burns’s imagination: the sexually violated woman; the imprudently overwhelmed poet; the Job-like, ruined but honest farmer. The poem has a dark, even apocalyptic tone partly derived from Young’s Night Thoughts, IX, ll. 167–8: ‘Stars rush; and final ruin fiercely drives/her ploughshare o’er creation!’ which Burns amends to ‘Stern Ruin’s plough share drives elate’. It is definably sentimental but in the honourable sense that the sentimental poetry of the late eighteenth century, at its best, embodies a tragically irreconcilable sense that the great Enlightenment impulse towards the recognition of all human worth will not lead to a just, fearless democratic society. In 1802, his radicalism diminished, Wordsworth wrote his To the Daisy. It is, not least in metrical form, significantly influenced by Burns’s version:

Methinks that there abides in thee

Some concord with humanity,

Given to no other flower I see

The forest through.