routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

Melancholy, madness and nature
205
English writing to the vigour of Scots. Auld Reekie, his celebration of the
city of Edinburgh, is still quoted. The Muse, he says, has left the city too
long. With its classical references and local description, Auld Reekie is
still a familiar Scottish name for the city of Edinburgh, deriving from the
smoke – ‘reek’ – as seen from across the River Forth, in Fife.
Auld Reekie, wale o’ ilka town
That Scotland kens beneath the moon;
Whare couthy chiels at e’ening meet
Their bizzing craigs and mou’s to weet;
And blythly gar auld care gae bye
Wi’ blinkit and wi’ bleering eye:
O’er lang frae thee the Muse has been
Sae frisky . . .
The language is not a nostalgic return to tradition, but an assured
affirmation of a living language which the Union of the Kingdom in 1707
had threatened but not submerged. Fergusson, like several other poets of
the time, died mad, and tragically young, but not before he had satirised
both Dr Johnson and Mackenzie’s bestseller, two of the great literary
eminences of the day. His influence was great, especially on Robert Burns,
but he deserves to be considered as a major Scots poet in his own right.
The use of Scots permitted Fergusson – and later Burns – to explore the
kind of low life or risqué subject matter which English gentility forbade.
With Smollett’s sustained satire against the utopia of the Union in Humphry
Clinker, and Fergusson’s attacks on English literary dominance, they are
effectively maintaining a tradition of popular expression, lively, humorous
and linguistically inventive, which the writings of Ossian and Scott would
romanticise, and almost submerge, until MacDiarmid recovered the Scots
language for poetry in the twentieth century.
Robert Burns is the most lyrical of the rural poets, and perhaps the
most universal. A ploughman himself, he was the closest to nature of
his contemporaries. When he turns up a fieldmouse’s nest with his
plough, he realises that he has destroyed a complete world, wrecked
the hopes and plans of a ‘sleeket, cowran’, tim’rous beastie’.
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain: