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The primary and conditioning factor of Burns’s life was his experience of the often harshly brutal and almost always near impoverished nature of late-eighteenth century farm labour. We should first contemplate the physical conditions under which he had to write as a prelude to understanding the psychological and political consequences for his poetry. This has been obscured from us by the mass of sentimental, mainly nineteenth-century writing on Burns which sees him as the spokesman for a pietistic, hence politically quiescent, peasant culture.

In his quite wonderful opening stanzas to The Vision Burns describes himself ‘half-mad, half-fed, half-sarket’, portraying the fierce restrictions of work, domestic squalor and poverty in which he mainly lived. Or as he wrote from Mauchline in 1788 to Robert Cleghorn:

I am so harassed [sic] with Care and Anxiety about this farming project of mine, that my Muse has degenerated into the veriest prose-wrench that ever picked cinders or followed a Tinker. — When I am fairly got into the routine of business, I shall trouble you with a longer epistle; perhaps with some queries respecting farming: at present the world sits such a load on my mind that it has effaced almost every trace of the image of God in me.

Routine, initiated by the harsh demands of the marginal farm, so prematurely imposed on his childhood, Burns loathed.1 He described his early life as having ‘the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil of a galley slave’. Or, as in this letter to Mrs Dunlop of 1788 where, so characteristic of his letters, wit and despair blend:

… the heart of the man, and the fancy of the poet, are the two grand considerations for which I live: if miry ridges and dirty dunghills are to engross the best part of the functions of my soul immortal, I had better been a rook or a magpie all at once & then I would not have been plagued with any ideas superior to breaking of clods & picking up grubs: not to mention Barn-door Cocks or Mallards, creatures with which I could almost exchange lives at any time.

Some sort of acute nervous disorder was the result of his attempt to become disciplined to the mechanistic demands of becoming a flax worker in Irvine, 1784. After moving to Ellisland farm near Dumfries most of his new found wealth from the Edinburgh edition went to save the family farm at Mossgiel. The dwelling at Ellisland is described by the young lawyer, Robert Ainslie, as ‘ill contrived – and pretty Dirty’. Mrs Jean Burns is ‘Vulgar & Common-place in a high degree – and pretty round & fat … a kind Body in her own way, and the husband Tolerably Attentive to her.’ The poet’s local associates are ‘a Vulgar looking Tavern keeper from Dumfries; and his wife, more Vulgar — Mr Millar of Dalswinton’s Gardiner and his Wife — and said Wife’s sister — and a little fellow from Dumfries, [probably John Drummond] who had been a Clerk.’2 Hence, the poverty and hardship of his early years, described so eloquently and bluntly to Dr John Moore, ‘the clouterly appearance of my ploughboy carcase, the two extremes of which were often exposed to all the inclements of all the seasons’, was still with Burns after his temporary fame and even more temporary riches beyond his Edinburgh edition of 1787.

Nor, leaving aside the problem of his vowed fidelity to a Pittite regime he loathed, were his Excise duties any escape from devouring physical drudgery: ‘I am jaded to death with fatigue. For these two months or three months, on an average, I have not ridden less than two hundred miles per week.’ The paper work of the Excise also ate into not only his time but his spirit:3

Sunday closes the period of our cursed revenue business, & may probably keep me employed with my pen until noon. —Fine employment for a poet’s pen! There is a species of the Human genius that I call, the Ginhorse Class: what enviable dogs they are! —round, & round, & round they go— Mundell’s ox that drives his cotton mill, their exact prototype— without an idea or wish beyond their circle; fat sleek, stupid, patient, quiet & contented:— while here I sit, altogether Novemberish, a damned melange of Fretfulness & melancholy; not enough of the one to rouse me to passion; nor of the other to repose me in torpor; my soul flouncing & fluttering round her tenement, like a wild Finch caught amid the horrors of winter & newly thrust into a cage.

Burns’s case as medical study, symptomatically discernible in the letters and, indeed, in much of the poetry, is a grim one. If he was atypical in the extreme mood swings that seem integral to his creativity (it was specifically with Burns in mind that Wordsworth wrote in Resolution and Independence: ‘We poets in our youth begin in gladness:/ But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.’), he was wholly typical of the age, its life expectancy and its exposure to poverty related illness.

His life, as read in his letters, is a catalogue of fractures and worsening fevers: in temporary lodgings while the farmhouse at Ellisland by Dumfries was under construction, he complained

… but for some nights preceding I had slept in an apartment where the force of the wind and the rains was only mitigated by being sifted thro’ numberless apertures in the windows, walls, &c. In consequence I was on Sunday, Monday, & part of Tuesday unable to stir out of bed with all the miserable effects of a violent cold.

Since medicine had so little ability to intervene, ‘suffering’, as Roy Porter has pertinently remarked, ‘was everyone’s lot sooner or later, low or high born’. Yet it was worse for the poor. As so often in Burns’s poetry, Death and Dr Hornbook is a comic caricature with a savage edge to it: cholera in the clachan is not an oxymoron and crude, often lethal abortion is part of the women’s lot. Further, as Porter has again remarked, the physical discrepancy between the rich and poor had deep political implications:

The wealthier were healthier and lived longer; sexually they probably matured earlier; being taller, they literally looked down on the poor. Their lives were lived by a different clock —for example, the poor rose, ate and slept early (lighting was costly), the rich late. The show of superiority and deference was emphasised by the encrusted rituals of bowing and scraping, head-baring, standing, curtseying, and knuckling foreheads.4

In Burns’s poetry, then, the repressed resentment of the common people towards their propertied masters becomes articulate. His letters are also obsessively, often more overtly, preoccupied with the multiple slights he feels inflicted on his assertively independent spirit as a consequence of the social gulf between rich and poor.

This is made deeply ambivalent by the fact that as a poet it was the people of property who formed his audience and to whom he not infrequently looked for creative support. His letters, consequently, are saturated with a sort of baffled rage. This over-wrought letter to Robert Graham, Commissioner of the Scottish Board of Excise, to whom Burns’s looked in vain to be a replacement patron for the deceased Earl of Glencairn, is typical of the agonies he endured concerning the imposed, impoverished inferiority of his rank:

As I had an eye to getting on in the examiners list, if attainable by me, I was going to ask you if it would be of any service to try the service of some Great, and some very Great folks to whom I have the honour to be known; I mean in the way of a Treasury Warrant. —But much as early impressions have [impression (deleted)] given me the honour of Spectres, &c. still, I would [rather (deleted)] face the Arch-fiend, in Miltonic pomp, at the head of all his legions; and hear that infernal shout which blind John says: ‘Tore hell’s concave;’ rather than crawl in, a dust-licking petitioner, before the presence of a Mighty Man, & bear [the (deleted)], amid all the mortifying pangs of Self-annihilation, the swelling consequence of his d-mn’d State, & the cold monosyllables of his hollow heart!

Worse, if he was to be the spokesman for the common people he had, certainly after his Ayrshire days, diminished faith that they had any sympathetic understandings of what he was writing. As he wrote in Epistle to Hugh Parker:

In this strange land, this uncouth clime,

A land unknown to prose or rhyme:

Where words ne’er cros’t the Muse’s heckles,

Nor limpit in poetic shackles:

A land that Prose did never view it,

Except when drunk he stacher’t thro’ it:

Here, ambushed by the chimla cheek,

Hid in an atmosphere of reek,

I hear a wheel thrum i’ the neuk,

I hear it— for in vain I leuk:

The red peat gleams, a fiery kernel

Enhusked by a fog infernal.

Here, for my wonted rhyming raptures,

I sit and count my sins by chapters;

For life and spunk like other Christians,

I’m dwindled down to mere existence:

Wi’ nae converse but Gallowa’ bodies,

Wi’ nae kind face but Jenny Geddes.

Such absence of stimulation and response increasingly led to severe depression. Little wonder that Coleridge was so sensitive to this dark side of Burns. This Burns letter of 1789 to David Blair could be confused with the prose of the English poet:

Know you of anything worse than Gallery Bondage, a slavery where the soul with all her powers is laden with weary fetters of ever increasing weight: a Slavery which involves the mind in dreary darkness and almost total eclipse of every ray of God’s image: and all this the work, the baneful doings of the arch-fiend known among worlds by the name of Indolence.

His initial childhood experience had led him to hope for better; like his English Romantic peers, Burns, anti-Calvinistically, profoundly believed that the child entered the world as uncorrupted spirit. His own childhood anticipations of an unrestricted, public social life were, however, soon to be disabused. The Romantic poets, of course, long pre-date Freud in grounding the nature of the adult self on childhood experience. Burns’s self-analysis, while hardly Wordsworthian in its outcome, is extraordinarily keen in its awareness of the forces that shaped him as man and poet:

My vicinity to Ayr was of great advantage to me.—My social disposition, when not checked by some modification of spited pride, like our catechism definition of Infinitude, was ‘without bounds or limits’. —I formed many connections with other Youngkers who possessed superiour advantages; the youngling actors who were busy with the rehearsal of PARTS in which they were shortly to appear on that STAGE where, Alas! I was destined to drudge behind the SCENES.—It is not commonly at these green years that the young Noblesse and Gentry have a just sense of the immense distance between them and their ragged Play fellows. —It takes a few dashes into the world to give the young Great man that proper, decent, unnoticing disregard for the poor, insignificant, stupid devils, the mechanics and the peasantry around him; who were perhaps born in the same village. —My young superiours never insulted the clouterly appearance of my ploughboy carcase, the two extremes of which were often exposed to all the inclemencies of all the seasons.— They would give me stray volumes of books; among them, even then, I could pick up some observations; and ONE, whose heart I am sure not even the MUNNY BE-GUM’S scenes have tainted, helped me to a little French. — Parting with these, my young friend and benefactors, as they dropped off for the east or the West Indies, was often to me a sore affliction; but I was soon called to more serious evils.— My father’s generous master died; the farm proved a ruinous bargain; and, to clench the curse, we fell into the hands of a Factor who sat for the picture I have drawn of one in my tale of two dogs.—My father was advanced in life when he married; I was the eldest of seven children; and he, worn out by early hardship, was unfit for labour.—My father’s spirit was soon irritated, but not easily broken.— There was a freedom in his lease in two years more, and to weather these two years we retrenched expenses.— We lived very poorly; I was a dextrous ploughman for my years; and the next eldest to me was a brother, who could drive the plough very well and help me to thrash.— A Novel-Writer might perhaps have viewed these scenes with some satisfaction, but so did not I: my indignation yet boils at the recollection of the scoundrel tyrants insolent, threatening epistles, which used to set us all in tears.

This notion of it being an essential part of democracy that one be, so to speak, ‘on stage’, that all men have a right to be visible in the public domain of history, a visibility the schoolboy Burns believed he had, is a concept to which we will return. If there was no economic base for this, such freedom was impossible. Burns’s experience was one of the intensification of power of the land-holding class fired by the energies and methods of agrarian capitalism which were making life for many economically worse. That, in fact, the Enlightenment pressures towards democratic reform expressed through the new Freemasonry and, for him, present in the American Revolution were being undermined by a re-energised, even more avaricious propertied class. The childhood threat of being thrown off their farm stayed with Burns. Always, for diverse reasons, a keen Bible reader no book was more pertinent to him than that of the Book of Job where he clearly discerned both his father’s ill-fate and his own in that nothing they turned their hands to would prosper. His father’s death saved him from debtor’s prison. The trauma stayed with the son:

I am curst with a melancholy prescience, which makes me the veriest coward, in life. There is not any exertion which I would not attempt, rather than be in a horrid situation —to be ready to call on the mountains to fall on me, & the hills to cover me from the presence of a haughty Landlord, or his still more haughty underling, to whom I owed —what I could not pay.

The creative compensation was that this fear and rage drove some of his best poetry whether, as in the cunning irony of The Twa Dogs or the biting, black anger of his demonic monologue about the initial stages of the Highland Clearances, The Address of Beelzebub. Though Burns himself was never ejected, the fear of dispossession either through debt or due to his radical beliefs, haunted him to the end. As he wrote in that marvellously reworked late song of ancestral suffering, the primal agony of not being able to feed one’s children, O That I Had Ne’er Been Married:

Waefu’ Want and Hunger fley me

Glowerin by the hallan en’

Sair I fecht them at th’ door

But ay I’m eerie they come ben.

And come ben they did. The physical agony of his death bed, as terrible as that of his great admirer Keats, was horrendously intensified by his sense that all he would leave his wife and children were the terrible consequences of his debts. Further, that the spectre of famine, as a consequence of the war with France, was loose in the Dumfries streets:

Many days my family, & hundreds of other families, are absolutely without one grain of meal; as money cannot purchase it. —How long the Swinish Multitude will be quiet, I cannot tell: they threaten daily.

That Burns should so allude to Burke’s remark of the pig-sty quality of the cultural life of the French common people, a remark unforgivably burnt into the consciousness of all the British radicals of that age, implies he did not die purged of his revolutionary aspirations.

Indeed, none of his contemporaries thought he had. Ironically, it was that singular English Romantic Tory, Thomas De Quincey, who most penetratingly and passionately revealed the social vision at the heart of so much of Burns’s poetry. De Quincey had no doubt that Burns was a compendium of the radical vices of the Jacobin type, the quintessence of the revolutionary personality.5 He feared and disliked, given his disposition to traditional order, Burns’s ‘peculiarly wild and almost ferocious spirit of independence’. As much as his friend Charles Lamb adored the poetry, De Quincey loathed the letters which he found self-declamatory, irascible, resentful, provocative manifestations of personal and public unrest. Yet of all the English Romantics, it was De Quincey, who had himself for a time lived among the dispossessed and, indeed, had come to Scotland to take ecclesiastical refuge from his creditors, who best defined, probably because of the very contradiction between his personal experience and his political ideology, Burns’s social vision:

Jacobinism —although the seminal principle of all political evil in all ages alike of advanced civilisation— is natural to the heart of man, and, in a qualified sense, may be meritorious. A good man, a high minded man, in certain circumstances, must be a Jacobin in a certain sense. The aspect under which Burns’s Jacobinism appears is striking; there is a thought which an observing reader will find often recurring, which expresses its particular bitterness. It is this: the necessity which in old countries exists for the labourer humbly to beg permission that he may labour. To eat in the sweat of a man’s brow, —that is bad; and that is a curse, and pronounced such by God. But when that is all, the labourer is by comparison happy. The second curse makes that a jest: he must sue, he must sneak, he must fawn like an oriental slave, in order to win his fellow man, in Burns’s indignant words ‘to give him leave to toil’. That was the scorpion thought that was forever shooting its sting into Burns’s meditations, whether forward looking or backward looking; and, that considered, there arises a world of allowance for that vulgar bluster of independence which Lord Jeffrey, with so much apparent reason, charges upon his prose writings.6

If De Quincey finds Burns’s political position paradoxical, his own is no less so. Burns’s compassion, according to De Quincey, touches the nerve of the greatest evil, not work but its denial from which stems starvation and dispossession. De Quincey supports an established order which not only turns its face from such suffering but also economically promotes it. Little wonder that King Lear haunted the writers of the 1790s for when the hierarchical King is made destitute, he finds a form of being hitherto unimaginable to him. Thus Burns, in that early bi-lingual cry of rage against social oppression and exploitation, A Winter’s Night, invokes Shakespeare’s earlier cry of outrage:

Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,

That bide the pelting and the pityless storm!

How shall your houseless heads, and unfed sides,

Your looped and window’d raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these.

As we have seen, Burns as a farmer led a near subsistence existence which his subsequent Excise work did not financially transform. Nor did the business of poetry ease his fear of debt and the abyss into which he might fall. Only the Edinburgh edition sold in great numbers. Even here, he significantly under-earned due to the contractual conditions then prevailing between book publisher and author, which was added by William Creech’s, at best, dilatory behaviour. Even then, the bulk of his earnings from the Edinburgh edition went to save the family farmat Mauchline, propping up Gilbert Burns with money he never returned. Subsequent editions made money for Creech who purchased the copyright of the Edinburgh poems and laid claim to everything Burns wrote thereafter with a merciless callousness, which saw the poet receive only a few presentation copies of the 1793 edition. The later songs he wrote for the nation and not the cash. The covert political poetry was sent to newspapers to support the radical cause and not for personal gain. He was, in any case, characteristically both reckless and generous with money.

Burns’s constant stress on his own personal, political and enforced fiscal independence found everywhere in his writings, partly stems from his constant sense of rejection by his social superiors. Hence, for example, his witty, wry, characteristic account of having to make it on his own:

’Twas noble, Sir;’ twas like yoursel,

To grant your high protection;

A great man’s smile ye ken fu’well

Is ay a blest infection.—

Tho’ by his banes wha in a tub

Match’d Macedonian Sandy!

On my ain legs thro’ dirt and dub,

I independent stand ay.—

And when those legs to gude, warm kail

Wi’ welcome canna bear me;

A lee dyke-syde, a sybow tail,

And barley-scone shall chear me.—

This brilliant comic reduction of the world of Diogenes and Alexander the Great to his own terminal fate in the Scottish countryside ironises the desperation of his own financial situation. Great men smiled seldom; one can also smile and be a villain and, thus, spread infection. When he did occasionally think that he had encountered a relationship not polluted by social condescension, as with Lord Daer or Dugald Stewart, such men shone for him in an idealised glow. He craves that such a figure should enter his life so that, ironically, the democratic poet should return to a traditional, even feudal, situation where the patron provides both imaginative and financial succour. Hence, this account of the Earl of Glencairn, whose premature death struck him to the very core of his being:

The noble Earl of Glencairn took me by the hand today, and interested himself in my concerns, with a goodness like the benevolent BEING whose image he so richly bears.— ‘Oubliez moi, grand Dieu, si jamais je l’oublie!’ He is a stronger proof of the immortality of the Soul than any that Philosophy has ever produced.— A mind like his can never die.— Let the Squire Hugh Logan, or Mass James Mckindlay, go into their primitive nothing.— At best they are but ill-digested lumps of Chaos, only one of them strongly tinged with bituminous particles, and sulphureous effluvia.— But my noble Patron, eternal as the heroic swell of Magnanimity and the generous throb of Benevolence shall look on with princely eye —

‘Unhurt amid the war of elements,

The wrecks of matter, and the crush of Worlds.’

Glencairn being so defined in terms of that key Real Whig text, Addison’s Cato is, as we shall see, politically important. For De Quincey, however, even the notion that Glencairn was the true patron who tested the rule of Scottish aristocratic indifference to Burns was nonsense. He saw nothing in Glencairn’s activities beyond the gestural:

Lord Glencairn is the ‘patron’ to whom Burns appears to have felt the most sincere respect. Yet even he —did he give him more than a seat at his dinner table? Lord Buchan again, whose liberalities are by this time pretty well appreciated in Scotland, exhorts Burns, in a tone of one preaching upon a primary duty of life, to exemplary gratitude towards a person who has given him absolutely nothing at all. The man has not yet lived to whose happiness it was more essential that he should live unencumbered by the sense of obligation; and on the other hand, the man has not lived upon whose independence as professing benefactors so many people practised, or who found so many others ready to give value to their pretences.7

Though Burns often reached similar depths of despairing self-prognosis about his life and career, he did make extensive and misguided attempts to replace Glencairn in his life with Robert Graham of Fintry, a Commissioner of the Scottish Board of Excise. How misguided these attempts were we have recently discovered; Graham was not only looking with increased scepticism on reports of Burns’s Dumfries activities but was himself on the payroll of that vast network of paid informers reporting back to Robert Dundas about the activities of radical dissidents. The only thing Fintry is to be thanked for was that he inspired two major English language poems, To Robt. Graham of Fintry, Esq., with a request for an Excise Division and To Robert Graham of Fintry, Esq. which are masterful, creative reworking of themes initially found in Swift’s perhaps greatest poem, On Poetry: A Rhapsody. The latter Burns poem was of such quality, in fact, that only now has it become known that for years, a fragment of it, slightly bowdlerised, has been attributed to Coleridge. As well as learning from Swift, Burns’s thinking on poetry and patronage was influenced by Dr Johnson. As he wrote:

It is often a reverie of mine, when I am disposed to be melancholy, the characters & fates of the Rhyming tribe — there is not among all the Martyrologies that ever were penned, so rueful a narrative as Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.— In the comparative view of the Wretches, the criterion is not what they are doomed to suffer, but how they are formed to bear.

Nor does Burns’s analysis of the desperate life of the late-eighteenth century poet, an age replete in prematurely terminated and self-destructive careers, yield, especially in the two Fintry poems, to the quality of Johnson’s psychological and sociological grasp of what was taking place. His rhetorical style may not be ours but there is actually little self-indulgence in what he sees as his own fate and that of his immediate predecessors. This is particularly so with regard to his beloved Edinburgh predecessor, Robert Fergusson, as mentioned in To William Simson:

(O Fergusson! thy glorious parts

Ill suited law’s dry, musty arts!

My curse upon your whunstane hearts,

Ye Enbrugh Gentry!

The tythe o’ what ye waste at cartes

Wad stow’d his pantry!)

He was not to know that not only was he to share Fergusson’s pains in his life but, like Fergusson he was also to be pursued beyond the grave by the vilification of genteel Edinburgh and by its master spirit, Henry Mackenzie, who never forgave Fergusson’s fine parody of The Man of Feeling in his poem, The Sow of Feeling. Underneath Mackenzie’s simpering mask was a malice easily provoked by slights to his vanity or, in Burns’s case, if he felt the reactionary power base, which propped up his doubtful talent and his monstrous ego, endangered.